Okay, I know I live under a rock. (Hey! It’s a very nice rock!)
–And sometimes I discover things a little behind the curve. Here is something I found today on YouTube, following a casual click of curiosity following Mungo Jerry:
It is a music video
Blew me away, I think they are very cool!
I enjoyed it, thanks.
I also noticed there is never any love for the viola (LOL!).
When my son took up the violin, I remember thinking “Oh, man, he’s gonna get his ass kicked all the time now.”
Fortunately, I was wrong.
As soon as he began to learn to play, he stated picking out the theme songs to all the video games he loved. He would run out of school and get under one of the scrawny trees out front, open his case and start picking out the tunes while waiting for me to pick him up from school, mainly because he just couldn’t wait to start playing.
Soon, other kids would gather around to listen because they recognized the tunes. As he got better, sometimes the kids would throw a little bit of their left over lunch money into his case (which usually got stolen by some other kid almost immediately, but my son didn’t really care).
Later, my son got to play with The Mark Wood Experience. Mark Wood is a rock and roll looking musician that plays an electric violin with the Transiberian Orchestra and also has a traveling school program that teaches kids that they do not need to be constrained by their instrument- that playing an orchestra instrument does not mean you have to wear a tux and sit in a chair playing only classical music. The first time my son played with this group was in a big in-school program for all the kids and then later on, he was one of the lucky kids invited by Mark Wood to play a big fundraiser that raised a lot of money for our town’s symphony.
Now my son is a pretty accomplished player recognized in his high school program for his beautiful playing. He still gets his butt kicked for stuff, but violin is not one of them.
Aye, just because you’re playing a “high-class” instrument doesn’t mean you can’t totally fucking rock!
Zoe Keating plays cello:
Jean-Luc Ponty plays violin (Ruth Underwood plays xylophone, the Fowler brothers play brass, Sal Marquez plays trumpet, etc.)
Tim Charles plays violin (and sings!) in a progressive death metal band from Australia called Ne Obliviscaris (btw, this was the best album I bought last year, out of hundreds; please listen, I promise it isn’t what you think it will be):
Hope y’all enjoy!
Ca3799 : I love the Transiberian Orchestra! Your son sounds like a very cool cat.
You know, there are whole bands who specialize in video game music.
Snowboarder Bo: Wow, Ne Obliviscaris was great! The violin fits in there perfectly.
It’s my opinion that violin, because it’s so expressive emotionally, can be used to good effect anywhere.
There used to be a goth band in Berkeley in the 1980s called Angel of Thorns. Their guitarist played a cello sideways, like a guitar.
But my favorite all-time use of a violin in not-classical music is definitely Time Jesum Transuentum et Non Revertentum, by Nick Cave and the Dirty Three. It was a hidden track on an album of songs from the X-Files.
The first time I heard that song, my friend Brian Dragon played it for me. About 3/4 of the way through the song, I started to weep uncontrollably, and I wasn’t sure why. My friend said that it was because the song is about the desolation of the soul. I never forgot that. Anyway, it’s one of the most emotional performances I’ve ever heard.
Album added to library. Thanks! There’s a girl at work who listens to death metal, I’m curious to find out if she would like this.
Glad you liked them, but let us know what she thinks, eh; now I’m curious too.
Thank you for sharing! Both Madame Pepperwinkle and I enjoyed that very much.