Spain: birth-place of Andrés Segovia, Paco de Lucia,  Antonio de Torres, Santos Hernández, Francisco Tárrega, Fernando Sor, y el flamenco. If any country should have a national museum of the guitar, Spain is it.  True, there are a number of private collections but the only decent public collection of guitars is in the Museu de la Musica de Barcelona along with musical instruments and documents of all descriptions. The Antonio de Torres museum in Almeria doesn’t have many instruments of its own and so depends on loans from private collectors. I don’t think they have a single Torres. La Casa de la Guitarra en Sevilla is a private “museum” which has flamenco shows and a shop which buys and sells guitars.  Ronda Guitar House has a collection of many different kinds of instruments and offers courses and concerts.  The Romanillos collection is at: Centro de la Vihuela de Mano y La Guitarra Española “José Luis Romanillos”  in Sigüenza. Under the present government the Museum is open every day; in the morning 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. & in the afternoon from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

It is beginning to look as though no one in government is going to put up the money to fund a full-fledged guitar museum in this country so we have to look at other alternatives.  The MIMMA (Museo Interactivo de la Música) in Málaga is a model we might look to for a guitar museum.  The MIMMA is an interactive museum of music, musical instruments and experiments so it is much more hands-on and child-friendly but the model of how it came about is useful.

The collection is private but the beautiful, recently refurbished building has been provided by the town council of Málaga. In one newspaper article the projected cost of the purchase and renovation of the building was 3 million Euros. Couldn’t Madrid or Granada as centres of guitar-making, Córdoba as the location of the most important guitar festival in world or the central government create a museum?  Marcelino López Nieto has famously said that he will donate his collection (one of the best in Spain) to a museum in Madrid on the condition that it stays in Madrid.  What are you waiting for, Madrid?  Another of the great collections in Spain was sold off piecemeal between 1990 and 2000 mostly to Japanese collectors.  Is Spain’s cultural heritage only important to those outside Spain?  A sad state of affairs indeed.

Japan has a guitar museum, El Palacio de la Guitarra, with a great collection of instruments, many of which belonged to the Granada guitarrist and teacher Manuel Cano. What about Spain?

The traditional mosaic tile rosette uses end grain and can be elegant, precise, tasteful or even blocky and simple.  What it can never be is bright with shiny white (or other light colours).  The open grain of the wood makes the whites darker.  End grain is used so that you can make up long “logs” and slice many tiles off.  It is also easier and cleaner to plane, scrape and cut the wood or veneer along the grain as you prepare the mosaic logs.  So if you want a bright white what can you do?  Obviously the answer is to change the orientation and use side grain.  This rosette is not a traditional mosaic but uses a combination of side and end grain to beautiful result.  The side grain retains the colour of the wood and the end grain is darker (here largely due to the glue but later due to the varnish).

DCIM101GOPRO

I don’t usually post about things that aren’t guitar-related but today I just can’t help myself. I do like to talk about the wonders of Granada and try to get guitarists to visit so I will try to justify this post that way: one more reason to visit Granada. On the weekend we did a river descent. Basically you start at one point on a river and travel down it IN THE RIVER walking, sliding, jumping or rappelling according to the terrain and the suggestions of the guide. I have never been much for sport and especially not water sports but this was a blast! First, you don’t feel the cold water because you are completely enveloped in a wetsuit. It is not dangerous because there is someone looking out for you who has done this specific river a hundred times before with people even more hopeless than you are. They tell you how and where to jump and rappel and make sure that you are doing everything right with all the proper precautions. Sliding down a natural rock slide into a pool of water and rappelling down a waterfall are both quite the thrill but that is nothing compared to 10m jumps into water with rocks all around you.

video

It looks very dangerous from up top and it is not easy to convince yourself to jump. However, as I said, we were told where and how to jump, hold the rope and even how to recognize which rocks were slippery.

Iñaki and his team are fantastic, safety-conscious, friendly and obliging. There are other companies that offer these services but I would highly reccommend SaltaRios.

The video below is not from our descent but rather a promotional video for the tour company of the river we did.

I continue to visit the friends I made in Málaga when I studied with luthier José Ángel Chacón.  This weekend he gave a talk at the conservatory there and presented a small exhibition of instruments made by himself and his students.  The morning was rounded out with a concert by students of the conservatory on instruments made by the lutherie students and teachers.  That was a real treat for me.  One of the pieces was this milonga by Cardoso.
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