Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

That was a first.

Yesterday I played a classical guitar recital online. They liked it, I got paid for it. I was a bit apprehensive at first, thinking of all the obstacles (tech and otherwise) that I've encountered in the course of teaching guitar online in the last five months but none of them arose.

That made me think -there might be a market for that sort of thing and I always live so precariously on the edge so I could do with a few gigs like that. But I'm hopeless at the 'selling the product' side of things. I can do the playing but not the selling it. Oh well....

But it was good to do that and to see it come out very well. Hope (a bit against hope( that there'll be more.

This is an old video doodle I must have done around 2006. Brought it up because of the music, which is my own doodle, done around that time in Garageband and Logic with software instruments and plug-ins, most notably Crystal which seems to no longer exist. Wish I could find the original files and work on this a little more. The video is a montage of photographs from a trip to Caracas round that time. The setting on video I must have done on an early version of iMovie or Final Cut (I only have rather sketchy..er, ghostly memories of this -sorry.. :D ).

Preparing my only gig of the summer, working on the pieces I want to play then. Some of it is of an extremely high level of technical difficulty or intricacy. Then yesterday whilst practising in Hampstead Heath (it was a lovely afternoon and it felt like a waste of a day to spend it practising indoors) I got the most horrid cramp in my left hand, something that had never happened to me. It took a couple of minutes before I could use my hand at all, it had sort of coiled in and had pain from the forearm.

Barring mroe occurrences of this sort of thing (and perhaps I should ask for medical advice) I'm looking forward to that first minute on stage when I ask myself why oh why I put myself in that situation....

Flavio (that's me) playing J S Bach's Prelude from the Lute Suite 1006a, during a presentation at the programme 'Nachy Presenta' at the Venezuelan Cultural TV Channel TVN5 in 1985 or so. Interesting that I chose such a difficult way of playing that piece, so many things I would do differently but it still is a record of my playing at the time.

Pisador's 'Pavana muy llana', 'very easy Pavane' https://youtu.be/hcn9gwNVnJ4 via @YouTube -I may play this at this event on the 30th: https://www.facebook.com/events/1341626609281999/ come along if you can #guitar #classicalguitar #kentishtown #northlondon #camden #kentishtowncityfarm

Played a little local summer garden concert last night, something that was becoming a bit of a local tradition for me and the people concerned here in Kentish Town/Tufnell Park but I hadn't done last year because of the accident. Interesting that a lot of people who were coming and looking forward to it, etc, didn't. Luckily other people did. I think it went reasonably well, although playing in the open on a day like yesterday -with gusts of wind, temperature dropping, etc- was a bit of a chore at times, with frozen sticky fingers...

One thing that I used to do at some point but I never quite know how to 'sell' is the idea of the house recital: sit fifteen or twenty people in a living room (sounds like a lot but a normal living room can hold twenty people ok without them being too cosy, on folding chairs or similar), give them a guitar concert with a glass of wine in the interval, charge them twenty quid and give half of that to a local charity. It is a lovely idea and something that works very well with classical guitar.. everybody comes out happy, I get a little bit of money (which for a freelance musician/music teacher ..) and a local charity gets a little bit of support. But I'm hopeless at actually persuading people that it is a good idea to host one of these...

Prelude No 7 in A by M M Ponce - @flaviomatani, guitar. A quick take at home of this, one of the 24 Ponce wrote for Segovia #guitar

Another one of the short Preludes that Manuel Ponce wrote for Segovia.

A somewhat unfinished doodle.