Musical Chairs

I'm currently trying to decide whether to include music-related posts in this blog. Caution tells me that the potential for confusion is quite high, but on the other hand this is a personal weblog, and not a theme-oriented website. I don't want this blog to have too exclusive an emphasis on politics and war, and am hoping to open up other avenues of reflection and discussion (not necessarily always completely unrelated to the political issues), in other fields I'm interested in.

So I think that I probably will include music here - particularly material related to improvised music, and to the instruments I play, violin and viola. I want to reflect the sometimes haphazard, sporadic but always lively goings-on at the IAJEStrings List, and also maintain a connection with the web site of my friend and colleague the poet, critic, publisher and musicologist Anthony Barnett. String improvisation is beginning to gain a wider audience in the U.K., and it's all helped along by the fact that this summer the Canadian jazz violist Tanya Kalmanovitch will be in London for several months, and Regina Carter will be playing at Ronnie Scott's Club, Soho, in the week from 28th June to 3rd July.

In January this year I attended the IAJE Conference in New York as a member, and had a great time - the concerts, workshops and seminars were of a very high quality, and with more than 7,000 people taking part, there was a terrific atmosphere of energy and creative response. The only sad part, for me, was in reflecting on the subdued atmosphere of New York outside the conference buildings, compared with the last time I visited the city some years ago. For a while, I thought the subdued quality was largely due to the weather - it was extremely cold. But then it came through to me that September 11 had left its mark in more ways than one, and its aftermath could still be felt in the general feeling, in the look of expressions on faces, in the sadness. All this made the conference even more valuable - a real outfacing of negativity and destruction with an assertion of life and energy and art.