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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Cruel to be Kine

Cruel to be Kine

by | 60 Comments

This post is in: 

This post was overtaken by fast moving Mueller events earlier today so I’m reposting it now.

Don’t ever let some snooty keyboard player tell you that they invented the Theme and Variations. It was us, the fretboard players! I have a theory why we did so; the particular technical demands of the instrument require lots of practice to get a piece of music under one’s fingers. Guitarists can be trained to sight-read fluently, but in general we don’t. We hole up in our bedrooms or studios or dining room tables and hammer away at something for weeks or months or even years. So, the stuff we learn carves a deep groove. Plus we want to get value for our effort, so we come up with ways to spin stuff out another sixteen bars or times through the verse. Variation comes naturally to us. Even intermediate players feel the call to improvise and compose. Learning guitar music is quite a solitary pursuit, too. There’s no conductor beating time and telling us we’re done with our part, no other musicians to yield to. We can just go on and on if the fancy takes us.  That’s my theory, anyway.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I am working up a set of stuff suitable for background music for happy hours and the like. I’ve decided that it will take the shape of a walk through music history. Partially for aesthetic purposes and also for practical ones. My repertoire is spread pretty evenly from the Renaissance up to the 20th century. I tell you this to illustrate how a a swell idea blossoms into an arduous task, an untenable ordeal, and finally a high-minded failure. But it keeps me off the pavement.

The vihuelaist (the vihuela is a cousin of the guitar) Luis de Narvaez  set of “differencias” or variations was the first ever published. This is his Guardame las Vacas which is in a slightly different in character. It is a set of variations based not on a theme but a ground. That is, a set of chords that repeats over and over. If you listen closely you can hear the harmony I play repeats while what goes over the top becomes increasingly more elaborate. Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” is a bit like that, for reference. If you listen to his guitar part you will find rather than strumming some set pattern he varies it with almost every iteration. Did he know he was partaking of a centuries old guitar tradition? Very likely, I think!

Still a little rough (I just started it in earnest a few weeks ago), but coming around nicely. I’m like the only classical player I know who doesn’t know this one already. Shameful. Just one of those odd lacunas in one’s education.

I think both Luis de Narvaez and Jimi Hendrix would recognize a tip jar when they see it. And this is mine. It is the fund that’s split between all eventual
Democratic nominees in House districts currently held by Republicans.

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Reader Interactions

60Comments

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I commented earlier, before you pulled it, that this thread title is AWESOME!

    The cow-kine pair is highly unusual in that the singular and plural forms share no letters. To the best of my knowledge, there are only two other singular-plural pairs (ETA: in English) with no letters in common.

  8. 8.

    Davebo

    Nice!

    As a player myself I’m not sure I’d put something like this out there! A brave and accomplished playa!

  9. 9.

    The Dangerman

    I hear “fretboard” and “background music”, I instantly think Chapman Stick (maybe as I’d love to be able to play one, but I have more than my fair share of thumbs):

    Example

    ETA: Friday night, + ???

  11. 11.

    bystander

    I was hoping it was thread about Three’s Company second banana Richard Kine.

    Since I can’t revel in that, may I remind everyone we haven’t heard anything about Wretched Gretchen forever?

  13. 13.

    efgoldman

    Don’t ever let some snooty keyboard player tell you that they invented the Theme and Variations. It was us, the fretboard players!

    Woa! You’re way older than I thought. You were extant in the 15th century?

  14. 14.

    debbie

    I’m not a musician, but I’ve had roommates who were, and many years ago, one of them taught me “Axis Bold as Love.” Hendrix had very, very large hands.

  22. 22.

    DanR2

    If you want to see the happier side of the internet, look up some guitar tutorials and song covers on youtube. You can actually read the comments and feel good about humanity.

  27. 27.

    Jewish Steel

    @Amir Khalid: I know some real boneheads who play guitar. You got this, Amir. It just takes patient, persistent pressure.

    @SiubhanDuinne: It’s such a brutal pun I fully expect to be brought up before the blogger ethics panel. But don’t leave us hangin’! What are they?

    @DougJ: Married Carlene Carter, the sly limey!

  29. 29.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Jewish Steel:

    Jerzy Russian got them both @23: I/we and me/us.

    So easy to assume that it’s limited to nouns but that’s what makes it a bit challenging.

  31. 31.

    Another Scott

    TheHill:

    [ Image – “Text WAKANDA to 91990 to Register to Vote” ]

    An activist group has launched a voter registration effort aimed at black voters at screenings of the “Black Panther” movie nationwide.

    Members of the Electoral Justice Project, an offshoot of the Movement for Black Lives, are seeking to “mobilize the black electorate” and increase political engagement with the #WakandaTheVote campaign, the website Blavity reported.

    Wakanda is the fictional African nation featured in the long-anticipated Marvel film “Black Panther.”

    Kayla Reed, Jessica Byrd and Rukia Lumumba founded the Electoral Justice Project last year, and told Blavity that the movement has been effective “because we meet our communities where they are, whether that’s in the streets, at the city council meeting, or in the movie theater.”

    […]

    Excellent.

    More of things like this, please.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  35. 35.

    Major Major Major Major

    @SiubhanDuinne: Ah, it was personal pronouns!

    One of my favorite lexical forms is the causative verb, which is a form of [transitive verb x] that means “to cause [object] to [x1]”. Older Germanic languages show the tense and voice of many verbs by inflecting the vowel; in English these have stuck around for things like run/ran, sing/sang/sung. There used to be a causative inflection, which means that you could make a verb into a causative verb by changing the core sound in a certain way. This survives in modern English as ‘fell’, or ‘to cause [object] to fall’. I believe that’s the only example, though I seem to remember a second being taught to me at some point.

  36. 36.

    Jewish Steel

    @Frank Wilhoit: Wow! Very interesting. I’ve bookmarked this to give it some real attention.

    @efgoldman: Clean livin’, my friend. Clean livin’.

    @debbie: From some of the films I’ve seen it looks like his middle phalanx is as wide as the fretboard. Big hands aren’t necessarily an advantage, but his seemed to do him no harm.

  40. 40.

    Jewish Steel

    @Mike J: And if I read this correctly it sure looks like Mueller squeezing Manafort’s balls in the barber chair a la Gene Hackman in Mississippi Burning. Satisfying.

  43. 43.

    JWR

    Nice playing, Jewish Steel! As for me, a Rock centric guitarist, back in my late teens, early 20’s, I learned the first and probably only “classical” piece I remember being drawn to, which was Steve Howe’s “Mood For A Day”. It was a fun little piece to play, and not really Classical, but sadly, I’ve never been into classical guitar, either in playing or even listening to it. (Gimme my Page; my Hendrix; my Blackmore, my Beck, my Iommi, and on and on Ad nauseam.) And so good for you for being a “real” guitarist. ;-)

  44. 44.

    mike in dc

    Another common guitar trick is to strum the chord, then play the individual notes of the chord as a melodic lead over the rhythm, taking advantage of the fact that the chords will resonate for a few moments after being played.

  46. 46.

    Jerzy Russian

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I know what you mean. I had a student once who seemed full of these sorts of puzzles, like “name all of the countries that start with the letter I”, or “what English word changes its pronunciation when it is capitalized?” Great way to pass the night when you are at the telescope observing.

  47. 47.

    JWR

    @Jewish Steel:

    @Amir Khalid: I know some real boneheads who play guitar. You got this, Amir. It just takes patient, persistent pressure.

    Not to mention that this patient persistence comes much more easily when one is 9-10 years old. But you’re right about @Amir Khalid being on the right track.

  49. 49.

    JWR

    @JWR: Just extending my comment… What I wrote about learning to play geetar being easier the younger one is also has to do with a balls-out, stubborn belief that one day I’d really be able to play this or that riff or song. At least that’s how it was for me, and I never let that feeling go.

    ETA: “Never give up!” is my motto.

  50. 50.

    Jewish Steel

    @JWR: My best students always came from the sticks. The tiny little towns out in the cornfields around my city. Nothin’ to do out there but practice!

  51. 51.

    Jewish Steel

    @JWR: Yeah, as a young musician I had a lot of older players tell me that they were definitely not the best player in their cohort. Just the most persistent. I took that to heart for sure.

  52. 52.

    JWR

    @Jewish Steel:

    I had a lot of older players tell me that they were definitely not the best player in their cohort. Just the most persistent.

    Unfortunately for me, the only older player I regularly saw was one of those “snooty” jazz guitarists who looked down at little people like me and my ilk. His name was Kenton Youngstrom, who I think is still around, playing and teaching professionally.

    PS. Yep, here he is. Good for him. Really!

  53. 53.

    Matt

    My favorite theme and variations was Ponce’s on Folia d’Espagna. Variation IX makes a very nice encore. I first heard that one with the credits on an old Segovia video. My only solo concert, way back when, had Berkeley’s Theme and Variations in it. Unfortunately even though it went better than anything else, there’s no recording of it on the net. Instead there are OT things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crs18iFjoo0&t=63s

  54. 54.

    HeartlandLiberal

    What a pleasure to hear you play. Beautiful.

    At retirement six years ago my wife bought me a new guitar, to replace the one I had from teen years my mother gave me (it is now enshrined for that reason, of course), so I could try and relearn the few chords I knew as a stripling so many decades ago (half a century sounds about right). I have worked at it, along with learning picking patterns, in order to accompany myself singing my favorite songs, mostly Gordon Lightfoot, Ian Tyson, traditional ballads, some country stuff like Johnny Cash, an occasional heavily covered and reworked rock song. How could anyone not dream of playing like Neil Young? Or was it the guitar that played him. Never quite sure.

    What is funny, though, is how the arthritis that seems to come with age makes it hard as hell. But I persist anyway, because there is just so much satisfaction and joy.

    to complicate this tale a little more, my wife’s hearing has gotten so bad that even with her new hearing aids set on music program, it is hard for her to listen and “hear” the music anymore. At least the new hearing aids are letting her listen to music again and derive some enjoyment. It had become impossible with the first hearing aids which were four years old.

    My advice to everyone as I loom on 72nd birthday Monday (looking at you, John Cole), get in shape early and keep in shape, because old age is NOT for the unprepared and out of shape.

  55. 55.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    Thread probably dead, but I just wanted to say if you ever get bored with the guitar, check out the harp guitar:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz7MAQzgiSs

    We have the CD this guy, John Doan, made of this music, and it gets played A LOT. A friend of ours, an accomplished classical guitarist, just bought himself a harp-guitar a year ago and taught himself one of these tracks.

  56. 56.

    cmorenc

    @Jewish Steel:

    Guitarists can be trained to sight-read fluently, but in general we don’t. We hole up in our bedrooms or studios or dining room tables and hammer away at something for weeks or months or even years. So, the stuff we learn carves a deep groove. Plus we want to get value for our effort, so we come up with ways to spin stuff out another sixteen bars or times through the verse.

    A splendid example of this is the seemingly simple Carter Family classic that is most often, the first tune folks undertaking to learn flatpicking a guitar bluegrass or country-folk style undertake. As one fellow student put it: “it’s a very simple song to learn to play, a very hard song to learn to play well”. Although the song’s got a very simple chord structure (I-IV-V with a brief seventh chord passage early in the B section) and the essential melody notes are easy for even a novice to figure out by ear – nevertheless the heart of the tune involves playing a cascading quick sequence of hammer-ons, pull-offs, and string jumps that require extensive solo practice to pull off smoothly and in time. After mastering a basic version, there are more challenging versions filled with crosspicking passages and improvisational licks – which also typically require long practice alone e.g. in a bedroom repeating a challenging passage over and over initially at such slow speed the tune is almost unrecognizable, incrementally over time increasing speed toward normal song tempo.

  59. 59.

    Jewish Steel

    @Matt: I sneaked a fragment of Mauro Guiliani’s Folias Variations into a version of St James Infirmary I used to play with an old band. True story!

    @HeartlandLiberal: I had more than a few retirees for students over my career. And quite a few people battling arthritis. Keep playing! It’s supposed to help keep the joints oiled up, so to speak.

    @cmorenc: Yes! part of my teaching repertoire.

  60. 60.

    Jewish Steel

    @laura: FTW

    @Steeplejack: Worried Man Blues, very likely. That’s the one I used. I can get you playing it in 15 minutes even if you’ve never touched a guitar in your life.

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