Subscribe to my RSS Feed

Join my mailing list:

New CD! - Imogen Holst: String Chamber Music Order Now >>

• 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

• Archives

  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • March 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007

• Categories

  • Anecdotes (4)
  • Arts 2.0 (3)
  • Composers (3)
  • Education (9)
  • Future of Music (21)
  • Misc. (13)
  • MP3/Video/CD (12)
  • Music Industry (6)
  • Musical Heros (1)
  • Musical Works (4)
  • Mysterious Music (16)
  • News (13)
  • Travelblog (50)
  • Viola Jokes (2)
  • Violin Tips (1)
  • Violinists (4)
  • Website Info (28)
  • World Culture (22)

Said it before, say it again.
You can’t actively destroy something that’s totally entrenched, even if it doesn’t work.
You have to render it superfluous by building something greater and more effective.
Happy New Year, wherever you are!

All relationships end, so the best ending we can hope for is death. More premature endings happen all the time, whether by abrupt explosion or as the offtailing of an unfinished symphony, drifting apart, never quite remembering to call back…
And so with our music; some we take in phases, some we are friendly with for […]

I haven’t been blogging my current trip to Palestine*, where the Al Kamandjati Camerata has been touring a Baroque programme throughout the country, but my experiences on this winter’s journey have been just as fascinating, hopeful, hopeless and colourful as ever.
As well as a full selection of music for strings and solo instruments by […]

How do you win an auction?
The answer is to work out exactly how much the item is worth to you, bid that, and then forget about it. Either way you’ve won. Think about it.
I find that day to day life in an Arabic environment is often like an ongoing auction. When I travel in […]

My new commute takes me along Friedrichstrasse, from the south end of the street right the way past Checkpoint Charlie and into the centre of Berlin, following the line of the U-Bahn.
This was one of the lines with ‘Ghost Stations ‘, the mothballed underground stations in Eastern territory where West-Berlin trains didn’t stop, but […]

It’s funny what globalization does to your mind.
For the last couple of months I’ve been working in only two different places, but with interactions that are spread across a gamut of time zones. It completely does your head in.
Yesterday, for example, I was - as I am most of the time now - in […]

A little while ago, I mentioned that I was working on a manifesto-like set of ideas about the future of classical music, but they haven’t quite reared their head. I have reams and reams of ideas on paper, filed nicely, but they are just too indomitable for me to really tackle in any meaningful way […]