Guitar Trick

When I went in for flamenco guitar lessons last week I noticed that with certain chords my guitar had a weird resonance. It sounded like one of the metal pegs was loose...now that I think about it I wish I would have recorded that sound. The instructor, Javier, knew what it could be and asked to borrow my guitar instead of me taking into the shop. He said, "no te asustes," before he began to reassure me that he knew what he was doing. He began to move the strings to one side of the fretboard, off of the nut. He continued until all the strings were set aside and the nut came right off. I had didn't know that it wasn't glued on. I was used to a violin, which takes more effort to raise the strings off the fretboard. He then placed a thin piece of wood underneath to raise the nut and then replaced the strings. This solved the problem! and without having to unwind all the strings.

Montjuic

Montjuic is a public park at the top of a hill where there's also a museum of history, gardens, a greek theater and a castle. On one wall of the castle there is an outdoor theater where films are screened Monday, Wednesday and Fridays in July. I've seen Memento and this past Monday I saw Contra la Pared. The sweet deal for me is that before each movie there is a band that plays on a stage to the left of the screen. This past Monday it was a German folk band. The only downside was that it was windy and the noise was heard in the speakers.
And the movie had intermissions where a Turkish band played and sort of narrated the next phase in the movie. What I enjoyed is that towards the end of the movie, only the music was herd in the intermissions, which I thought was to set the mood and let the audience interpret the ending instead of giving lyrics to set the ending.

¡Viva Colombia!

Colombian independence day is July 20, so on Sunday July 22 there was a huge festival at the Forum Park in Barcelona. Apparently there's about 50,000 Colombians living in Barcelona. It was surreal for me to see them celebrating their independence from Spain while living in Spain. For example, one of the songs talks about a married slave couple where the wife was being mistreated by the Spaniard.

One cool thing about this festival is that I was about to just hang out by the stage watching the sound crew and the performers setup for their gig. The sucursalsa band has 10 people and took a really long time to sound check. So long in fact that the audience was getting restless and loud "ya pongan musica para bailar." The congas were checked first, then the brass section, then the strings. For each section each instrument (mic) was checked independently and then the whole group. Throughout the whole show the biggest problem was with the monitors. It is very noticeable, at least for me now that I've been interested in mixing shows, when a performer is trying to get the attention of the sound engineer to change the monitors. And a lot of the time the sound guy isn't paying attention or is hard to get. Also, the power to the bass amp went out a few times during their performance.

There was a carnival game where you threw bean bags into a clay pit and tried to make them stick. The distance was pretty far so it wasn't easy. I didn't try the game because I ran out of money after getting food. I had arepas for the first time.
I would never have thought there would be this much variety in music festivals, but I'm excited because it fits my varied taste in music.

Fiesta Major de Poble Sec

My second Fiesta Major was last weekend in the barrio of Poble Sec. The way I found out about this festival was walking back from visiting Montjuic and seeing the fliers on the walls. On Saturday July 21, Rachel Hall has asked me if I wanted to meet up for dinner. When we met up I told her about the festival and so we trekked over to Poble Sec. The first stage we arrived at (each street had a stage with 5 or 6 stages total) was a dance group composed of elderly women and dancing a southern style. After the dancing came an elderly man singing a few songs and then began the bingo. Needless to say that this was the retirement stage.

Barcelona is an international city and so every little barrio has their own mixture of immigrants. In Poble Sec there is a large group of Dominicanos and so one of the stages was a group that right away I recognized sounded like Aventura. Then later on they played some covers by that group.

Now it was about 10pm and time to eat dinner. We went into a small dinner and to our surprise began a show like the Buena Vista Social Club. The first act was a man singing Cuban songs and afterwards came out the owner of the restaurant. She was a woman that was definitely past 40, but also very well kept because she came out in a Las Vegas showgirl outfit!!! Thus, this was one of the most interesting dinners I've had and the food was new also. I forgot the name of what I ordered, but it was white meat on top of a huge piece of bread.

Univesity of Barcelona

Last week I went to two shows at the University of Barcelona (UB). Behind the old two story stone building of UB is a garden where bands played Tuesdays and Thursdays in July. One night the music was a colorful gypsy folk band and the other night there was an English soft rock band. Most of the students of UB in the audience were foreigners. I heard some very different and interesting accents in Spanish.
My floormate, David Visvanathan, is from Denmark and is studying this next term at UB. I got lucky that he's into music so that we inform each other about what concerts are coming up.

It's a Small World After All

The group from the workshop was invited to visit the Music Technology Group (MTG) at University of Pompeu Fabra. There was some downtime before the presentation so the professors attending asked me why I had joined the workshop. After I explained my fellowship (which I'm getting better at explaining after so many times) Dr. Rachel Hall told me that she too is a Watson Fellow! What's even better is that her project was studying traditional dance in Ireland.
I'm inspired now. After her fellowship she got her PhD. in math and was able to continue her musical interests by playing a band and doing research in musical similarity.

MTG is doing some really sweet research, for example with Yamaha to improve karaoke, in the areas of music synthesis and transformation and feature extraction. The freesound project is also their creation and is now getting support from Google. I could definitely see myself doing graduate work in this group.

International Workshop on Computation Music

On Monday I went to visit L'Auditori de Musica and Found that there was a school of music ESMuC (Escuela Superior de Musica de Catalunya) in the same building. As I was reading the announcements on the bulletin boards (which is difficult because things are written in Catalan...more on that later) I saw one showing that there was the 4th International Workshop on Computational Music Theory to be held this week (http://www.esmuc.net/sonologia/iwcmt07/index.html#program). In addition, the group hosting the workshop is from the Music Technology Group of University of Pompeu Fabra which I was planning to visit anyway because of their cool research into music synthesis (http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?media).

I was indeed lucky because their topic of music similarities would be using Flamenco music as their style for observation. Two professors from the University of Sevilla came to give an introduction to Flamenco. This workshop has given me great contacts and references for my study of the flamenco guitar.

The main point that I learned is that Flamenco has an oral history which means that the styles have been categorized more by regions and culture than by the musical aspects of each style.

What the group of professors was trying to achieve was a computational method to measure similarities in the melodies of Flamenco singers.

Today was the last day of the workshop, afterwhich we went to the Museu de la Musica where I was able to take notes on the history of the different stringed instruments on display.

Jazz at the Cituadella

Two blocks from my apartment building is the Cituadella Park. It includes the zoo and some historic buildings. There is also a gazebo where the city is hosting Jazz concerts Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in July and August.

The first one I attended was a trio with smooth guitar parts and kicking drums. I'm not a Jazz fanatic so I didn't recognize any of the songs, but the music was excellent.

Last night I went to another one with a quartet that played Jazz by Catalonyan composers.

Flamenco Fusion

At the Plaza del Rei (King of Aragon back in the day) I went to a Sara Flores flamenco concert. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there was a jazz drum set in addition to the Cajón (box) which is the traditional percussion instrument for the flamenco. The drummer went back and forth between the two depending on the song. There was also a piano and dulcimer which added harmonies and melodies that sounded like a transposition of the guitar part. The flute part was different and had a very Latin style to its part. The dancing was spectacular. Before seeing the dancing in person, it had always been described to me as "stomping on cocaroaches" and the clapping was "making tortillas."

For the encore, Sara Flores brought out a toddler girl to dance the final song.

Mi Guitarra

So...Tuesday I went around Barcelona visiting guitar stores and found one with a variety of flamenco guitars. It is called Casa Luthier. Albert attended to my needs and helped me choose a guitar. The top two included one from the manufacturer Alhambra, which had great presence, but the tone was not flamenco style. The reason being that flamenco guitars are brighter and this one had more depth like the classical guitars. To me the Alhambra guitar sounded more like an accompaniment guitar. Thus I got the Quiles guitar.

On the Street

On Monday morning (same day as the Jaume Torrent concert) I took the metro to Lesseps to pay my housing. On the way back I saw someone on the street playing the guitar with a bag out for change. This was not new because people play on the street all over the place, but it was different because this was a guy that was definitely over 60 years old. I gave him a euro and knelt down to listen. He said he had a "secret" to playing the guitar. He then asked me what song I wanted to hear and since I didn't know any Spanish singers I just asked for a flamenco song and told him I was from Mexico. Surprisingly, he begin to play a song that my grandparents used to sing.
"Aya en el rancho grande, aya donde vivía. Había una rancherita, que siempre me decía...."
I sang the rest of the song with him and then found out his "secret." He didn't play any chords, but just the melody notes of the song, haha! That was pretty poor playing, but to me it was almost more musical than the concert that I would see that night because he reached out to me and played something that stirred my emotions.

Guitar Concerts

I was lucky enough to find out about two guitar concerts right away. One was because people were handing out pamphlets.
Manuel González & Barcelona Dúo Guitarra
Basílica del Pi
20:30h
15 euros

This concert was excellent. The duo came out first and opened with the Carmen Suite by G. Bizet (1838-1875) with the following movements
Danza Argonesa
Habanera
Toreador
Seguidilla
Danza Gitana
The first three has themes that I recognized. Hearing this piece made me want to pick up a guitar and start playing alongside them. The group then played Pablo Sarasate Aires Gitanos and Zapateado.

The duet played with different techniques that as of now I can only describe because I don't know their names. Instead of pressing down the fret they press lightly to activate the other harmonics. Also, the accompanying guitar hit the lower strings with his thumb instead of strumming to give a percussive sound at some point. They also varied the position of their right hand plucking the strings.

Next came Manuel González. The sound reinforcement was changed from a mic that looked like an R44 to a Shure condenser microphone. The sound personnel messed up because they hadn't turned the speakers back on before he began to play. Fortunately for me it gave me a chance to compare the acoustics inside the church with and without sound reinforcement. With definitely sounded better because his notes filled the entire church without drowning out the melody with the reverberation. González played pieces by Albéniz and Tárrega which were fantastic. At one point he used a style where he bended together the three steel strings and strummed them while playing the melody on the higher pitched nylon strings. To me this sounded like a snare drum accompaniment.

Earlier that day I had passed by the Palau de Musica Catalonya to take the architectural tour (8euros) and I saw the billboard with upcoming concerts and it just so happened that there was going to be a classical guitar concert the next day. Therefore on Monday I showed up at the ticketoffice when it opened and bought my ticket. I got a seat front and center in the second row.

The concert was for the 20th anniversary of the death of Frederic Mompou. The program is in Catalá so it is hard for me to correctly translate the details of the pieces and performer, Jaume Torrent. What I can say is that he played very old classical pieces (16-17th century) so that his techniques of playing the guitar were not as varied as those of the previous concert. They were, however, very technically challenging for the left hand to the point where there were a few notes and chords that did not come out clearly and made me shrug. The pieces on the concert program took only 20 minutes so everyone was just hanging around waiting for an encore. 15 minutes later Torrent came back out to give a series of encores that lasted almost 45 minutes.

Arrival in Spain

Belated happy 4th of July. I spent the day traveling. Jaja, it took me 2 hours to get through security at LAX because of my one way ticket.

I made it! My room for the next two months is:
1 Canvis Vells
Barcelona, Spain

I was awed when I reached Placa España on the bus ride. When I got off at my bus stop in Placa Catalunya, I was prepared to carry all my luggage to the hostel which was supposed to be a 20 min walk. One hour lated I arrived at the hostel. I had passed the street four times because all the street signs are on the buildings and not on the street lights. Also, I confused plaza names for street names.

Once I got to Alberg Hostel i got only a little worried because there were no empty beds. Good thing I didn't carry my luggage up the stairs. I found a bed somewhere else and got settled in around 9pm. I went for a walk to the pier and then called it a night. Or so I thought, because then came in 5 loud UK girls. Then the air broke and it because a humid 90 degrees with one guy snoring in the 8 bed room. Well that was fun!

Yesterday I got my room, a cell phone number:
34 693269548
While doing so I learned how to use the metro to get to the student housing office which hooked me up with my room. I share a four bedroom apartment three blocks from the beach and half a km from Universitat Pompeu Fabra which I plan to visit this week to check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-RhyopUmc

Then at night I went out for Tapas and a Flamenco show.

I'm still amazed at the architecture of all the 5 story buildings that create quaint alleys and shops at every corner.

This morning I had breakfast on the beach. I had York Ham which is just a baguette with a slice of ham and some tomato sauce.

Without a doubt I'm loving it here! although it would be nice to have someone to share the experience with. This independence, however, is what the Watson is about. I'm amazed at how much I accomplished with just two days in a country I've never visited.