Skip navigation

Tag Archives: music

Poppy Smallwood

It’s always a pleasure to hear what one’s instruments are doing and I recently caught up with this small steel-string guitar that I made nearly 5 years ago for Poppy Smallwood. Based on a Martin OO model with 12 frets to neck, it’s made of English walnut and has a sitka spruce soundboard.

 

 

 

(More photographs here, if you want to know about its construction.)

 

Poppy has been playing the guitar in all sorts of places, making a reputation for herself as a singer and songwriter. Here she is performing one of her own songs for BalconyTV against the background of St Petersburg.

 

 

 

You can hear several more of her songs on Soundcloud.

 

19th century guitars

Lars Hedelius-Strikkertsen is a Danish guitarist, who plays a 19th century guitar and specialises in the music of that time. Here he is playing a piece by Fernando Sor.

 

 

If you go to his website, you’ll see that he sometimes takes the trouble to dress the part when he gives concerts. Not surprisingly, in view of this attention to authentic period detail, he didn’t like the idea of using an anachronistic metal contraption as a capo d’astro and asked me to make him a cejilla.

 

DSC_1861

DSC_1856

 

I’ve written about these devices before so I won’t repeat myself. But the commission reminded me of what delightful instruments these early romantic guitars are. Anyone interested in finding out more about them might like to take a a look at this excellent online gallery.

A few years ago, I made one of these guitars, which is now owned by the artist, Gill Robinson. The instrument that I copied was made by Louis Panormo around 1840, and it’s now in the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments.

 

DSC_0002

 

There’s a photograph of my guitar above, and a video of Rob MacKillop playing the original instrument below.

 

Tartini Adagio

A few weeks ago, I dropped in on the Tartini ensemble during a rehearsal in St Mary’s  church, Penzance. They were preparing for a concert of music by Dietrich Buxtehude and Jan Adam Reincken. And a very interesting and exciting concert it turned out to be:  music by two composers whose work is heard less often than it deserves to be, with brilliant performances on period instruments by the ensemble.

Here’s a photograph taken during the rehearsal.

It was also the first outing for the baroque violin that I wrote about a couple of posts ago.  After the rehearsal, Pamela Rosenfeld played this adagio by Tartini on it, accompanied by Nigel Wicken on a chamber organ.

Tartini adagio

Patrick Gale’s cello

Patrick Gale, who commissioned the baroque cello that I completed earlier this year, spoke  about why music was important to him in a recent broadcast on  BBC Radio 3.  If you missed his  brief and amusing  talk,  you can listen to it  here for the next few days.

How does it sound?

So far in this blog, I’ve been writing about how instruments are made and showing photographs of what they look like. But what matters most, certainly to players and listeners but to makers too, is what they sound like. The trouble is that it’s not easy to make recordings that do justice either to player or instrument. Having made that excuse, I’m going to try. So here, as a first step, are three short pieces played by Fiona Harrison on this cedar top guitar that I’ve written about before. Click on the labels to hear them.

Piece 1

Piece 2

Piece 3