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Showing posts from December, 2006

N.C. guitar maker: Madagascar Rosewood

GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Calling Bob Rigaud a "luthier" sounds badly out of tune. The word is just too high-strung, even if it really defines Rigaud. It means "guitar maker." Forget those comic caricatures. He's not an aging hippie music fanatic with shaggy hair, beard, tattoo or two, who punctuates sentences with "cool" and calls people "dude." Rigaud is clean-shaven. His graying hair is neatly cut. His clothes resemble those worn by men of his age, 58, around house and yard. He doesn't use slang, although he can wow visitors with the jargon of guitar making. He discusses frets, necks, inlays, bridges and other guitar parts. He works in a three-room shop behind the 1930s craftsman-style house he shares with his wife and helper, Ruth Ann Rigaud. Orville, a chubby cat named for pioneer guitar maker Orville Gibson, keeps him company at work. Rigaud views his creations as music makers and works of art. Using the finest woods and techniques learne...

Sheet music of all Mozart's works online for his 250th anniversary

VIENNA (AFP) - Sheet music of all of Mozart's works is now available online for free, following an initiative by Salzburg's International Foundation Mozarteum in honour of the 250th anniversary of his birth. ADVERTISEMENT "With over 400,000 hits on the website in the first 12 hours, one can say demand surpassed our expectations," Mirjam Nellman, spokeswoman for the foundation, based in Mozart's birthplace of Salzburg, told AFP Tuesday. "The server is a little slow at the moment because of strong demand, but we are working on it," she added. The unique initiative, entitled NMA Online -- for "Neue Mozart Ausgabe," or new Mozart edition -- was launched with the help of the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California. "The purpose of this web site is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use," the Mozar...