Simon Hewitt Jones - The Violin Blog

Oct

29

Real Moods

Filed Under Mysterious Music | 

I’m practicing the second movement of Imo’s Duo, which must be the fiddliest double-stopped thing I’ve played (concertos aside) since Prokofiev’s First Violin Sonata, when the cleaner from the adjoining rooms pops his head round the door, laughing.

“I was expecting Dracula to appear!! What is the music?”

I had been so focused on getting the damn thing tuned (”so, how much ‘expressive intonation’ can I use in this passage?!”), that I hadn’t been thinking about the finer subtleties of the musical mood (my mental post-it note for that passage had ‘murky’ written on it :) )

But suddenly a new conception clicks into place. I play through again, and with the cleaner’s Dracula in my mind, the whole piece seems to take on a slightly more sinister edge.

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