There is nought else I feel like doing this evening, so I thought I’d write a brief post about a very brief song. The Side Show is a mere thirty-seconds long and is one of Charles Ives’s especially jokey pieces. Ives discovered that a popular comic song and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 share a common melodic theme and…

Often when programme note writers, broadcasters, players etc. introduce ‘unknown’ or ‘rediscovered’ music to an audience they go through great pains to say how it is the product of neglected genius etc. This almost always leads to disappointment. Similar lines are sometimes used when introducing premieres by contemporary composers. I like to listen to this…

About a decade ago I made a number of heavy metal recordings under the name of Caligula (in retrospect I am curious why so many of us felt and feel compelled to make an intentionally and overtly evil kind of music). I released two of them, Rust I and II, as an EP in 2015,…

Fernando Sor’s fantasias are among his best works. Even when they are less successful they are still among his most interesting. Like many other nineneeth-century fantasias, they often use a theme-and-variation form wherein there is an extended introduction, followed by variations that eventually break from the structure of the theme, and finally a novel, and…

In his Memos, Charles Ives recounts instances where musician-acquaintances would criticise his more radical works. ‘I’d have periods of being good and nice … until I got so tired of it that I decided I’d either have to stop music or stop this.’ His sensitivity to criticism and almost neurotic self-doubt (contrary, or perhaps in addition,…

During his lifetime Reginald Smith Brindle was a prominent British composer. Many of his works were broadcast on BBC radio and performed in major British concert venues. For example, his twenty-minute Creation Epic for orchestra was performed in the 1964 BBC Proms. He was equally well-known known as a teacher and critic, and headed the…

While researching Emilio Pujol I seem to have accumulated a lot of photos of the great guitarist, so I thought I’d make a gallery. I’ll add to this as I find more.

A great interest of mine is the guitarist Emilio Pujol, who was a student of Tarrega and became one of the leading performers, pedagogues, scholars and editors of the 20th century. One of my current projects is researching the works either dedicated to or premiered by Pujol. Nearly all the works are of a high…