• The Deep Roots Yuletide Baedeker 2024
    David McGee, November 15, 2024
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The Brass Heard ’round the World

Serbia’s Boban i Marko Markovic Orkestar Brings Its Dancefloor-Packing Best on Golden Horns Boban Markovic and his son, prized protégé Marko, have managed the nigh-impossible: Leaping from a deeply rooted Roma (Gypsy) s...
by David McGee
 

 
 

Gerald Scott’s ‘Edgy Sunday Morning’ Testimony in Song

A month before his senior class graduated from high school, Gerald Scott penned a song for the choir to sing at the commencement ceremony. “It was 2003, I was eighteen years old, and I wrote a song called ‘Destiny’ for th...
by David McGee
 

 

 

Of Lute Duets and East Meets West, From Elizabethan England to Modern Japan

‘…an air of warmth and accessibility…’ Casual pronouncements are made every so often that the lute songs of Elizabethan England were the pop music of their day. The lutenist is said to be the 16th-century version of...
by David McGee
 

 
 

On Saving Mortal Souls

“Having not played in this style in the past is a huge disadvantage, but I am willing to stretch and fight to get it under control. Those pesky chords! Those finger positions, those slides, those finger-thumb rolls, those cou...
by David McGee
 

 

 

Charles Dickens & Music

The latest installment of James T. Lightwood’s 1912 study, Charles Dickens And Music with Chapter VI: Songs and Some Singers. Continuing our year-long bicentennial salute to the great author.
by David McGee
 

 
 

Here Comes the Sun

“As fast as we roll, we’re always catching up/as much as we have, it’ll never be enough/as hard/as hard as we work, we just work our fingers to the bone/what do we have to show?” Listening to this catchy chorus of the f...
by David McGee