Author Archives: violadodio

This year’s men’s football world cup reminds me I wrote an article about football and music not so long ago, although then it was prompted by the death of a football star in year when a number of musical heroes … Continue reading →

Exam season is the ideal time to reflect and shudder at what we put people through at school. Here’s a glimpse of a better world that I knocked up a while ago for Classical Music magazine.  

Ok, ok, I promise to use vibrato more if you promise to stop describing (and hearing) music without vibrato as “dead”.

Practice is an addiction in that we are motivated by a certain belief that solving one more, one final technical problem will mean the world cannot fail to take notice at last.

I finally had the opportunity to hear Morton Feldman’s second string quartet (the one that lasts five hours), at a festival in Monaco called Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo, and I wrote about the experience for the Strad magazine. It … Continue reading →

I’ll let you into a secret: not playing music is torture. You can fend off the torment by doing some practice and there’s a little bit more to it but really: a day not performing music with people is sheer … Continue reading →

While doing some background reading as preparation for my first experience playing Peter Grimes, I discovered an unpublished poem by George Crabbe that would surely have resulted in a somewhat different opera had Britten come across it.   There once … Continue reading →

Orchestras are sometimes presented as a model for businesses to emulate: the conductor as managing director, different instrumental sections as different corporate departments and so on, all working harmoniously to some common purpose. But if your business is making cars and … Continue reading →

Music is organised sound: unmistakeably the words of a composer (Varèse). A musician would prefer: music is expressive sound.

Did you know that, before modern-day industrial techniques made mass production of rosin possible, local authorities were the only providers of the stuff? They would hang great municipal cakes of it in public places and local fiddlers would prep up their bows en route … Continue reading →