Category Archives: Society

The History of the Guitar in Brazil with Fabio Zanon

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Pioneers, Creators and Performers
For three years from 2006, Radio Cultura FM broadcast a weekly program with Fabio Zanon .
After 13 initial episodes dedicated to the series The Spanish Guitar in the Twentieth Century, Fabio focuses on the history of the guitar in Brazil.
This series of 148 programs covers the rich universe of Brazilian guitar. The guitar’s main characters are the protagonists in these programs illustrated with rare recordings and exclusive interviews.
The starting point for this series is the article by Fabio, The guitar in Brazil after Villa-Lobos.

Unfortunately, you might have to work to get the downloads, but if you succeed, this is a treasure trove of the history of ther guitar in Brazil, featuring most, if not all, the important Brazilian guitarists after Villa Lobos.
Knowing how to understand Brazilian is definitely a help!
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The Brazilian programmes

Fabio’s series on the Spanish Guitar in the XXth Century

The Art of the Guitar

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Yet more Bach

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Glenn Gould this time.
Bach, says Gould, was not so much ahead of his time as outside it. “For Bach, you see, was music’s greatest non-conformist, and one of the supreme examples of that independence of the artistic conscience that stands quite outside the collective historical process.” and
“Bach was the greatest architect of sound of all time”

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Julian Bream: ‘I’m a better musician now than when I was 70’

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Two years ago Julian Bream was walking with his retriever, Django, in the fields around his Dorset home, when a neighbour’s dog knocked him to the ground, breaking both hips and injuring his left hand. For several years, Britain’s greatest virtuoso of guitar and lute had played through the pain of arthritis, but these new injuries compelled him to renounce making music seriously. He had retired in 2002 after 55 years of professional performing, but still liked to give the occasional recital at churches or halls near his home.


Thus ended his longest affair, one that started when nine-year-old Julian put on one of his dad’s Quintette du Hot Club de France LPs and was seduced by what he calls the “burning anguish” of Django Reinhardt’s playing.

Read more – interview in the Guardian with Stuart Jeffries

Segovia and Flamenco

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Segovia on Flamenco Guitar, Song and Dance – from Guitar Review, 1977

Segovia’s stated credo was that he, like the Blues Brothers, was on a mission from God — well, maybe not God, but a sort of holy mission — to rescue the guitar from the taverns and the associated lowlife folks in whose hands it was then found. Obviously, he could have problems with flamenco.
Well, not quite, as it turns out.

Flamencos and Segovia

Manolo Cano, Andrés Segovia, Sabicas and Rafael Gómez Montero at the CONCURSO NACIONAL DE CANTE JONDO GRANADA 1922

Thanks to Brook Zern of the Flamenco Experience for this fascinating article.

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Japan Airlines offers free guitar boxes to ease travelling musicians’ worries | RocketNews24

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This is more like it. Makes me want to fly to Japan more! Contrast previous posts here and here

Recommendations and more stories here.

“For outgoing instrument service, we offer small and large instrument cases to support our customers on trips with important instruments. Now in response to customer feedback we have dispatched guitar sized cases (137cm x 44cm x 21cm) to all airports offering domestic flights. Until now, in such a case you would have to check it as fragile baggage, but from now you can ask for our guitar-exclusive case. JAL will continue to provide you with the best possible service in the future.” image

Japan Airlines offers free guitar boxes to ease travelling musicians’ worries | RocketNews24.

One in a billion – Xue Fei’s Sojourn

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By paving the way and becoming an international star, Fei has become a role model in her native China. “Lots of young people [in China] see me having a good career, and I hope that I can make them realise that the guitar is a beautiful instrument.” Her passion for what she does is contagious. She speaks about the classical guitar and its music with the knowledge and experience of a veteran, yet with the enthusiasm and vigour of one who has just begun playing. “Personally, I always believed that the guitar the most well-rounded and self-entertaining instrument. It is so personal and intimate, as you have to hold a guitar with your body and to your heart.”

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Bach visualised

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How often do we suspect that there is more going on in Bach’s music than meets the ear?
Well, a mathematical image-maker Jos Leys has managed to show visually how the first canon from Bach’s Musical Offering looks as it crawls its way first forward, then in reverse, then in both directions at once! Luckily we only have the odd fugue to contend with in the guitar/lute repertoire of Bach and we can play more than two strings simultaneously, unlike viola da gamba players.

Many thanks to Nigel Warburton for passing this on.

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Frankenstein’s guitar, Shelley to van Halen

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With news that scientists have succeeded in growing a mini brain in a Petri dish, Mary Shelley’s “creature” might well be on the way to being created in a lab.
Mary Shelley was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
For our purposes, she was also married to the man who wrote a rather soppy poem about the guitar to Jane Williams with whom he was infatuated when his marriage was on the rocks.He was particularly taken by her musical gifts and skill as a housewife. Gadzooks! What a piece of male chauvinist lumber!
He was even too cheap to buy her what she really wanted, which was a harp from his friend Horace Smith in Paris, and when this proved too expensive gave her a guitar made in Pisa by Ferdinando Bottari around 1815. ‘I have contrived to get my musical coals at Newcastle itself’, he told Smith.
Shelley's guitar

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