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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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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.

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 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 […]

“What are they?” I ask my students again and again.
“Rhythm, Notes, Sound!”, they chime back!
But a mantra is one thing; awareness is another.
I come back to the Loure, a dance movement and the second section of the third Bach Partita, for the first time in a couple of years. If only I practiced what […]

One of the things that’s fascinating to me as a direct parallel between artistic and free market environments is the use of Creative Tension.

Take Banking. The banks trade off one another, forever heightening the peak of their work in order to stay competitive in a fast-developing arena. They bounce back and forth against […]

I found this scribbled in an old notebook. I don’t remember what inspired it, but I quite like it.
“Individual emotive response and quality of music do not necessarily have any correlation.
Commodity capitalism inevitably places a value on each ‘unit’ of recorded music. Perhaps by losing this through digitalization we will recognise the intangibility of value […]

If you didn’t get my reference to ‘expressive intonation’ yesterday, it’s the art of playing out of tune deliberately in order to create an effect.
For instance, in a particularly wistful passage on the G string, I might emphasize the painfulness of the music and highlight the high point of a phrase by fractionally flattening it […]

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 […]

Imogen Holst
Photo: Kurt Hutton

It’s funny; the more I get to know about Imogen Holst, the more of an impact she seems to have on my life. Some very weird coincidences have come about.
Firstly, there was the letter to my Grandmother.
After she died, we were clearing out some of […]

When you next come across a violinist with an ego fit to burst, try this one on him:
"How is a string quartet like a bottle of wine?"
"The cello is the bottle, the violist and 2nd violinst are the wine, and the first violinist is the label!"
This old joke came to me whilst I was listening […]

I was invited to a lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine entitled ‘Music and Medicine’. Half of the lecture was of particular interest: a seminar by Paul Robertson, ex-leader of the Medici Quartet, on the subject of how music can be practically applied in a clinical setting, how musical expression can remain intact even […]

I just found an old Question & Answer session I did for a Live Music Now (LMN) newsletter a few months ago. So here’s a quick insight into what I do outside of the concert hall for LMN. As is the way with these things, these are more the journalist’s words than mine, but you’ll […]

It’s one of those things which I guess a lot of us intuitively know, but is really hard to define:
What’s musicality?
I came across a great explanation of the process by which we hear things we do and don’t like.
“Each second, there are thousands of waves arriving at our ears from wherever the source of the […]