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• Simon Hewitt Jones, Violinist

  English concert violinist. Asking essential questions about what's happening to music and the arts, and the role of the violin in contemporary world culture.

• Contact Me: T: +44 (0) 20 7060 0607 E: shj [at] courtlanemusic [dot] com W: www.courtlanemusic.com Instant: Message My iPhone

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My brother recently returned from a fascinating month-long trip to Los Angeles, where he assisted composer David Buckley on post-production of the forthcoming Jackie Chan film, The Forbidden Kingdom.
Whilst there, he also contributed to Town Creek, a horror film that’s set to appear sometime between now and Halloween.
There was a little leftover bit of the […]

Some Thoughts
The old guard is competitive.
The new order is collaborative.
Sure, it’s a vast generalization, but it is often true.
The fusty old professorcrank passes on his trade secrets to his favoured students. His folly? Scarcity = value. Back then, maybe. Not now. The real truth about his ’secret method’ of creating extra resonance for the staccato […]

Tommy was working on Imo next door during a Virtuoso Violin rehearsal, and 30 minutes later what do you know, but he’s written a full ‘News Theme’ jingle for us to play!
[audio:http://www.simonhewittjones.com/mp3s/VV-news.MP3]
Anyone want to licence it out for your Radio or TV station? Get a bit of VV on your airwaves!

The tradition of ‘church music’ continues to this day in many of London’s beautiful little churches, with performances of masses and Epistle Sonatas by composers such as Mozart.

It’s very easy to confuse Massenet’s Meditation from Thais with Massenet’s MEDICATION from Thais…

I’ve a new role: Artistic Director of Music And The City. It starts on 17 April in London, and you’re invited!
MATC is a musical evening for amateur and professional musicians, inspired by the salon culture of 1920s Vienna. Think of it as a musical meeting point; an opportunity to explore, discuss and play music with […]

A nice thought from Neil:
We only alter the frame when it presents the picture in a better light. Otherwise it’s just a distraction.

Forget this violin-playing malarkey, this has to be the proudest moment of my life to date:
I have created a completely original viola joke!
Q: Why don’t violists make good policemen (or women)?
A: They can’t stay on the beat!

I should have done this ages ago.
The schedule is finally updated for the Spring … do take a look here to see all the new concert listings.

I’ve just realised that the deadline for this was Monday and I never posted it on the blog before now. Oh well. I hope you knew about it already if you wanted to enter
But don’t worry, if you’ve missed this opportunity but would still like to write something for ‘Two Screeching Violins’ (as […]

However routine and normal and environmentally damaging air travel becomes, it will never lose its magic for two reasons. Firstly, for every second of the journey, your life is in someone else’s hands. But secondly, you cannot help but realize how small and meaningless you are. It’s so deeply humbling to see massive […]

It’s often argued that our multimedia world is a recipe for mass Attention Deficit Disorder, and this is frequently depicted as a bad thing.
But in fact there is a valid place for multiple streams of information, beside those that provide an opportunity to focus on one single thing for an extended period of time.
A Symphony […]

I’d be surprised if you’d not already come across this, seeing how many views it has had on YouTube…

Extreme he may be, but the new mainstreams often start life on the fringe of what’s normal, and work their way in. If you think closely about what Gilles Apap does, you come to realize that […]

I mentioned, before my last blogbreak, that I would try and catch some of the Barenboim Beethoven Cycle in London. Sadly for me, it was sold out so quickly that I just couldn’t get in. I did manage to get to most of the talks that Barenboim gave, however.
(If the American guy who kindly offered […]

Bach’s face has apparently been reconstructed digitally by experts with access to his bones. The result was nothing like the well-known portraits of old:

How does that affect your preconception of Bach? So famous are the painted images of the composer, that many of us think of an austere man in a wig just as soon […]

This is astonishing.

So, if a Robot could create an emotional response in a listener, regardless of whether it is experiencing emotion itself (which it isn’t, because it’s a robot), would that make it a musician?

Hello again