Join The Email List!

Further Information: - Concert Bookings - Digital Press Kit - Personal Violin Tuition

• 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

  • 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)
  • Composers (3)
  • Education (7)
  • Future of Music (18)
  • Misc. (13)
  • MP3/Video/CD (11)
  • Music Industry (6)
  • Musical Heros (1)
  • Musical Works (4)
  • Mysterious Music (14)
  • News (13)
  • Travelblog (48)
  • Viola Jokes (2)
  • Violin Tips (1)
  • Violinists (4)
  • Website Info (23)
  • World Culture (18)

In case you’re wondering where I’ve got to, I’ll be back before March, but until then my blog will snooze. I’m working on a large number of projects (Court Lane Music has finally moved out of three years of development and there’s loads of new repertoire and groundwork to prepare). Concerts start again in March/April […]

I saw this on someone’s Facebook profile and realized that it is also The Indulgence Of The Adequate.
I remember well in the past, getting bogged down thinking about how I could go about interpreting a piece, to the point that I never actually did it.
It’s a similar mistake to the idea that if your company […]

It is impossible for us to know, sometimes, how our actions affect others. Sometimes it is those we don’t know so well who can really see what we are trying to do.
The last few weeks have been very difficult; having to try and refinance the CD after the burglary, balance all the demands of a […]

A reader quite reasonably asks why the stolen recordings were not fully backed up, and I feel compelled to reply…
Quite simply, they were! But the robbers took some of the backup drives as well.
What they didn’t take were the spare drives that stored the original source files of the Imo recording session (thank goodness!). That […]

Anita Hewitt-Jones, Composer and Teacher, and wife of Tony Hewitt-Jones, died peacefully at Cheltenham Hospital yesterday morning after a very short illness.
*****
Known to hundreds of music students as ‘Granny’ for her tireless work as a teacher of cello (particularly at the Beauchamp Music Courses that ran for many years in Gloucestershire), she was a prolific […]

.
[ev type=”youtube” data=”9CEuz9C944s”][/ev]

RSS Users: If you cannot see the video, click here to view it on the website.

I wasn’t going to post about this:
Pearls Before Breakfast
But every music blogger and newspaper opinion person having had their $0.10, may I just ask if I am the only person not to be the slightest bit surprised by this? Interestingly, the only writers I read who really understood what was going on here are professional […]

I don’t think I ever fully introduced to you the Choir of London and the Palestine Mozart Festival, the websites of which can be found here and here respectively. I’m simply a guest of these amazing organizations (giving chamber music performances in the first week; leading the COL Orchestra in the […]

I didn’t correctly credit Sami Hammad’s article ‘Nablus Culture’ - this was originally published in ‘This Week In Palestine’ magazine, which can be found here.

How do you address an audience you cannot know? Can you please everyone? (Of course not). When is it right to trivialize tragedy or disaster as a coping mechanism? What if it’s someone else’s tragedy?
What place does an outsider have to interact, engage, question, joke, empathize, become involved, stay detached? Can you laugh in the […]

This is the second of two guest blog posts by my grandmother, Anita Hewitt Jones, about my late Grandfather Tony Hewitt Jones (Composer, 1926 - 1989). Anita (Tony’s wife) was a cello teacher at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and is herself a composer of educational chamber music (widely available through Edition Peters).
Tony Hewitt Jones was born […]

Talking of EMI (and yes, their share price did zoom right up today), my cousin’s band Grace is finally about to break out into the big wide world, and there are flyposters all over London for their new album, Wonderful (and judging by the state EMI is in let’s hope Grace manages to sell plenty […]

A cryptic note from an acquaintance buried deep in the music industry appears on a social networking site. Might we be seeing another merger/takeover come Monday morning? *cough* EMI *cough*