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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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Most people don’t seem to know how to use New York properly. Almost everyone I meet here seems to fall into one of two categories: either they’re engaged in that cliched daily material-struggle, desperately trying to live up to what they think the city demands them to be. Or, they’re way over-engaged, hoovering up […]

Did you ever read any of my old blog posts? See the first few paragraphs of this one: http://www.simonhewittjones.com/blog/2007/11/15/creative-tension-in-free-markets-long-post/
OK some of it is perhaps pretentious waffle. But have you seen the stock market indices of the last few weeks… are they not the most perfectly thrilling structures, full of uncontrolled adrenaline, like a 1st […]

Writing this from the library of the Juilliard School, who seem to have their own Conservatory Penguin. Nice.
I’m in New York briefly, to lay down the groundwork for some future projects, and then I’m relocating straight away to Berlin. I’ve been very fortunate to gain the support of the Leverhulme Trust, and so I’ll […]

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 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 […]

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?

Time always flies on these trips, and it’s impossible to get done everything you’d like to do. One of the themes I wanted to explore was the difference between Western and Arabic music, particularly from the point of view that Arabic music tends to be written in a more emotional style than the Western Classical […]

Time always flies on these trips, and it’s impossible to get done everything you’d like to do. One of the themes I wanted to explore was the difference between Western and Arabic music, particularly from the point of view that Arabic music tends to be written in a more emotional style than the Western Classical […]

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 […]

There was a lot of attention in England recently to the sensational Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.
(A video from their BBC Proms performance is here.)
A wonderful editorial in The Week magazine points out that the energy, pride, teamwork, long-worked-for skill and sense of belonging, though profound, is perhaps not the only reason for […]

The Youtube generation is currently being turned into a vast network of internet-bound vegetables. I know of people who shut themselves away at 8 in the evening, and watch Youtube videos for five or six hours until they fall asleep, exhausted. The addiction to infinite media has taken hold, but where it is constrained by […]

The impression I’d got before I arrived here was that the, shall we say, highly enclosed territories, were extremely starved of culture. Though this is very much the case in Nablus - purportedly a city that has lacked even a movie theatre for over eight years - there are, at least where resources are available, […]

This is a reprint of a recent article in This Week In Palestine by Sami Hammad, director of Nablus The Culture, Nablus’ new cultural centre, and our host in Nablus today.

Manshieh and Public Library

Legendary late Arab singer Oum Kulthoum

Nablus the Culture Center

Harpsicord to cross the C.P.

Manko Center and Library

Children’s Cultural Center

In the Spotlight: Nablus Culture
[…]

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The Wailing Wall & Dome Of The Rock, earlier this afternoon

I’ve just arrived in East Jerusalem with the Choir of London, where we’re based for the next two weeks during the Palestine Mozart Festivals. We’re going to be giving loads of chamber music (and then orchestral) concerts, firstly in Jerusalem, but also in […]

Why? Well, it’s all about the relationship of creativity and post-industrialism.
Throughout the globe, there’s a hierarchy in education. At the top, Maths and Languages (and sometimes Sciences). After that, Humanities. And at the bottom of the scale of priority, the Arts.
Over here in the UK, there’s been a lot of intelligent comment about the death […]

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 […]