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Ensconced

Many old castles have become invisible, although they were never destroyed. It is because they became a part of new buildings, until they took some final shape that we know, in which the initial castle lost its distinctness. I have visited several old buildings, wondering where the oldest layer had gone, just to find out that it is still there, incorporated in the new whole. One can ignore our time’s ease of consuming and destroying, but it seems that the whole process leaves more waste than we can currently handle. In the world of arts, it does not tend to result in consequences that bring mankind in serious peril; nonetheless, the parallels are apparent. It seems that today’s creators often introduce new ideas (which are sometimes new only in the PR release) to get the attention of the consumers of their art, only to soon abandon the idea and come up with something else the next time around – again something apparently unheard of. Dealing with ideas and technique...
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Revel

As a composer, and a guitarist performing mostly own works and arrangements, I have always had to deal with a very specific situation. I have often released recordings of works just finished. Oftentimes, there were no opportunities of performing these for a while, and then releasing. Surely, I would have preferred such routine, but in the less than a perfect world, I have developed a strategy which involves multiple steps, in order to polish and promote these same works. One of the discoveries every young composer will make, is that it will take some time for the audiences to get acquainted with new compositions, before the decisions regarding the work’s future are made (publish, popularize, reach smaller niche audiences, forget about etc.). Hence, in 2008 I decided to digitally release all of my guitar works to date. It was more of a composer’s than performer’s edition. The feedback has enabled me to better understand how these compositions fare within certain segments of musi...
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Fanciful Strumming, The Flamenco Way

Music is fun to write about, provided that precision of terms is evaded. It is normal that art based on non-verbal sounds doesn’t easily lend itself to verbal descriptions, hence too much precision can get in the way. A famous example is the term “atonal” for describing the music without tonal center. Its actual meaning is “toneless”, and many attempts have failed to replace the term “atonal” with something more defining . Furthermore, musicians seem to favor catchiness, and today, as another new term is about to become accepted, I believe it would stick as “irrational meters”, instead of “time signatures with denominators that are not powers of two”. G uitar can be played in many different ways, likely in more distinct ways than any other instrument. One can be foolish and argue the supremacy of one way of playing over an other, as has happened many times before . However, every style of guitar playing has a reason to exist In some unique dimension that takes true master y...
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Name: William Shakespeare/ Profession: uncertain

In the Bronze Age of the Internet – some ten years ago – blogging started to flourish, and I was tempted to start blogging about my music. However, I was always hesitant when it came to explaining music in words. As I feel that music should speak for itself in its own language, I only accompanied my releases with bare-bones comments. Not many years later, but in an era in which blogging as a form had lost all of its novelty, I added some more elaborate texts to my blog and saw it take off. Initially, I thought I would be writing only about music. In my latest post, however, I mentioned Shakespeare, and some readers then had a few questions regarding my stance on a popular subject—the authorship of his work. So, here we are now: not only am I blogging, but also, I do so about a subject that is out of the musical domain. It seems that almost every great artist must have some weak point in the public consciousness, something that can taint their reputation, or even potentially t...
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