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  1. Last minute reminder: VAKA is in Akureyri from this Wednesday! Join us for four days of Northern European folk music, dancing, workshops and crafts.

  10. A short recording of Gregory Jolivet’s beautiful 5-time waltz “Main Dans La Main” played in C on my Vio gurdy, after a post-travel maintenance session and string change:

    I’m now using a steel core, stainless steel wound low G chanter. It has a slightly harsher sound than the synthetic+silver strings I was using before, and is prone to attacks with lots of high partials, but is much more durable.

  12. Based on what I learned from the coup de catre, I will not claim to be able to play the coup de six until I can freely stress or miss any of the buzzes, start the coup from any location, and use it to play in 7 and 5 time. Step one: balancing exercises! Slowly beginning to be able to start the coup de six from any of the six buzzes.

  14. Buying viola strings at justmusic.de in Berlin is a weird process. You choose the strings at the desk on the top floor, who give you a piece of paper and tell you to go to the ground floor. By the time you’ve got there, the strings have arrived in a little vacuum tube thing, and you pay for them.

    I’m not entirely sure how this works for the pianos and do not intend on buying one to find out, unless they have a vacuum-tube to Iceland as well.

  15. that “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” was appropriated by Pete Seeger (and then further sanitized by George Weiss) from a song written by Solomon Linda, who died in poverty. His family only received royalties for the song’s widespread Disney use after a lawsuit in 2006 — 44 years later.

    There’s an archive of the in-depth three part write-up of the whole thing from Rolling Stone by Rian Malan here.

  16. My 2hr Norwegian airlines connection from LGW to CPH showed a bunch of short films instead of a long movie. Amongst them was the single best piece of animation I’ve ever seen: Rabbit and Deer:

    Everything about this is perfectly executed — the story, the animation, the art styles. It almost makes me want to start animating again, except that it’d take years to make something half as good.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t hear the soundtrack on the plane because the armrest headphone jack didn’t work. At the time I was listening to “The Blackleg Miner” by Appletwig Songbook (here’s a different version), which created this bizzare mental association between an old miners song and this piece of animation.

  17. Thoroughly enjoyed playing at Portið this Sunday and met a bunch of awesome people! Turns out that (probably for the first time in history) it was one of two concerts in Reykjavík on the same day.

  18. Anyone know the name/origin/lyrics of a probably English xmas-themed folk song with this chorus:

    Bring in the green bring in the green
    for it is our desire
    to celebrate the holiday
    with food and drink and fire

    Various google searchings reveal nothing, and I never got a copy of the lyrics.