After various folks mumbling-not-articulating about this over the past couple of weeks, finally I have a link:

Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.

(Thank you, Steven and Lieber.)

I had such a crush on Joshua Bell when I was in college, it’s so not funny. The cool thing is, he’s about 6 years older than me, I think… which means that he’ll probably be around for as long as I will be. The cooler thing is, musicians like that guy just keep on playing and playing. Kind of like Irish traditional guys.

Oh, geez… see, now an incomplete memory is starting to creep in and it’s gonna drive me nuts. Around 1991 or so I read something somewhere about a hot shit violinist who was totally messing with the classical music establishment by showing up for gigs in things like, say, vampire outfits. When they whined, he’d say, “Look, I didn’t spend my entire life mastering this instrument for you people to bitch and moan about a cape and little fake blood.” Or something. Dang, that was charming.

Was it Bell? Dang, I am an old lady with this memory. Though, in fairness, I haven’t thought about that in years.

Oh my goodness…. no, it was Nigel Kennedy, another hot shit violinist I had a crush on. He’s a little more bad boy, that one. Leather jackets and motorcycles and all that. Which reminds me of the hot shit bad boy violinist (first chair, Nashville Symphony or whatever, kid’s 18 years old) who was going to Trinity College with me at the time, my year, who also wore leather and rode a bike and looked like Elvis, swear to God. Elvis with five o’clock shadow and a perpetual cigarette dangling. I don’t understand those folks who can make with the dangling and play at the same time.

He was always sweet to me, that guy. Would come by the practice room and smile the Elvis grin/sneer and ask me how it went. And I’d always tell him it was going fine, meanwhile thinking, “it’d be even better if you’d put that cigarette out and come over here.”

I haven’t played my own violin in well over a year either, by the way. This sometimes happens. I always worry that my fingers are going to stop working, but they never do, thank God. Leland often asks me to get the girl out of the case and play him something (gently, of course), “but I know you’re avoiding it ’cause the fiddle’s going to attack you.” No, actually, I’ve just been preoccupied, with my writing and quitting my job and all the rest. When I get the violin out of the case, then she’ll attack me.

S’alright. We bite, then we move on. It’s like this thing between us.

Child ballad sighting: Garrison Keillor’s got #200 on today’s Writer’s Almanac.

It’s anonymous ’cause it’s really folk music.

In other news, I was thrilled to hear my fiddle teacher, Patrick, on the voicemail today. We haven’t seen each other in a while.

I’ve fallen behind on my reading over at the Sur La Lune discussion boards, which means that I missed this:

Instrument of the Devil

by Todd E. Sullivan

This correlation between musical instruments and moral states appealed to early Christians. Medieval society invoked music to rationalize the constant intrusions of warfare, plague, and death. In literature and folk lore, the sound of pipes frequently accompanied Death on his gruesome rounds. During the Middle Ages, string instruments enjoyed quite different affiliations. Ecclesiastical artists commonly selected the soft-toned vielle, rebec, or lira for symbolic representations of goodness and the divine. Saintly figures, angels, and cherubim often held these mellow-sounding instruments in hand. Thus, the ancient Apollonian stereotype was retained for centuries in Western Europe.