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  How To Play Violin

  HowExpert, Somer Taylor

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  This guide seeks to take the reader on a journey. Starting with the history of the violin, it moves on to offer various lessons and techniques to help those new to the violin learn to play the instrument. It also seeks to teach something new to those already seasoned in violin playing. 
  The violin is an instrument with a very long history. The first known string instrument using a bow was called the ravanastron and was created in India thousands of years ago. More recently, the violin was an instrument born of the fiddle, rebab and the lira da braccio. Once considered a lowly instrument, the violin started to gain status when, among other things, it was used in operas by famous Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. The violin is certainly one of the more well-known instruments used in “Classical” music. It has a familiar shape, like that of the cello and viola, except it is smaller. Its flat, pear-shaped wooden body is minimally decorated with purfling and perforated with F-holes. Great skill and dedication went into perfecting the instrument. Some of the greatest violin makers included Antonio Stradivarius as well as members of the Guarneri family, especially del Gesu. It was during the time in which these and other luthiers were creating violins in Italy that violin-making reached its zenith. In fact, today, many luthiers still use the patterns created by some of these craftsmen to make their instruments. 
  Skill and dedication is required to not only create violins but also to play the instrument. Starting with beginning lessons using simple songs from the Müller-Rusch violin method book, “How to Play Violin” progresses to the more challenging exercises like the Rode Caprices. The book has not only musical exercises and examples, but also pieces and excerpts by Bach, Schubert, and Beethoven, among others. 
  HowExpert publishes quick 'how to' guides on all topics from A to Z by everyday experts.

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  Escape: The Country of the Blind

  Les Crutchfield, John Dunkel

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  A mountain guide finds a hidden valley where no-one has eyes. However, the blind think that he is deformed. Zebarra is a mining engineer in Ecuador near the towering Andes. Up until a year ago his chief sport was mountaineering. His last climb was an attempt to climb the remote and forbidding peak of Parascotopetl, the 20,000-foot crag unconquered by man. It is unconquered still. 3,000 feet from the icy summit his party turned back and fled for their lives all escaping except for one, a guide named Nunez who slipped and fell over the precipice disappearing in to the vast chasm which yearned 10,000-feet beneath them. The horror of him falling has haunted Zebarra’s dreams for years and because of it he has forsaken climbing for the rest of his life, even though today he has seen Nunez.

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  Prehistoric Warfare: The History...

  Charles River Editors

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  Most scientists believe the evolution of humans has a history nearly as long as life itself. Anatomically modern humans and all other life that has existed on the planet first came about from the single-celled microorganisms that emerged approximately 4 billion years ago. Through the processes of mutation and natural selection, all forms of life developed, and this continuous lineage of life makes it difficult to say precisely when one species completely separates from another. In other words, scientists still debate when a human became a human rather than the ancestor species that came before.  
  	Among paleontologists, the question of human propensity for warfare in prehistoric eons has persisted. Primitive conflict that in time grew into a modern military phenomenon has become an increasing avenue of study. Scientists seek to ascertain whether the distant ancestral line of humans is genetically disposed toward the act of war, or whether social and geographical development have created a circumstantial environment for large-scale societal collisions.  
  	Depictions of humans pierced with arrows began to appear in the Aurignacian-Périgordian eras (30,000 years ago), and in the early Magdalenian era (17,000 years ago). A work of Mesolithic art (20,000 to 10,000 years ago) shows an explicit battle between groups of archers, and in Valencia, a group of three archers are seen surrounded by four of the similarly armed enemy in the Cova del Roure la Vella in Castellón. In the Ares del Maestrat in Alcañiz of Aragon, another work depicts warriors fleeing a group of eight archers, while a similar work at Val del Charco del Agua in Aragon shows seven archers with plumed headgear. Other examples show warriors in lines and columns with a “distinctly garbed leader at the front.” In a sense, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that the earliest people were violent and engaged in warfare the same way people did throughout more recent eras. 

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  Fresh at Twenty - The Oral...

  Kaitlin Fontana

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  A tribute to an independent record label and the people who helped build it, this story encapsulates the zeitgeist in popular music that washed through Vancouver in the 1990s and 2000s. As a label, Mint Records helped launch the careers of the New Pornographers, Neko Case, the Evaporators, the Smugglers, the Sadies, the Pack A. D., and countless other acts and in doing so, not only shaped the sound of Vancouver at the end of the 20th century, but helped usher in a golden age of Canadian popular music that still thrives today. Filled with rare and never-before-seen memorabilia from Mint bands and their tours, including photographs that cover the last 20 years,this chronicle embodies Vancouver pop music followers and hears Mint Records insiders speak for the first time about the label they love — and that truly loves them back.

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  Art & Visual Culture 1850-2010:...

  Steve Edwards, Paul Woods

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  An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists. The third of three text books, published by Tate in association with the Open University, which insight for students of Art History, Art Theory and Humanities. Introduction: stories of modern art Part 1: Art and modernity 1:Avant-garde and modern world: some aspects of art in Paris and beyond c.1850-1914 2: Victorian Britain: from images of modernity to the modernity of images 3: Cubism and Abstract Art revisited 4: Modernism in architecture and design: function and aesthetic Part 2: From modernism to globalisation 5: Modernism and figuration 6: From Abstract Expressionism to Conceptual Art: a survey of New York art c.1940-1970 7: Border crossings: installations, locations and travelling artists 8: Global dissensus: art and contemporary capitalism

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  Constable

  Victoria Charles

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  John Constable was the first English landscape painter to take no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. Constable’s originality does not lie in his choice of subjects, which frequently repeated themes beloved by Gainsborough. Nevertheless, Constable seems to belong to a new century; he ushered in a new era. The difference in his approach results both from technique and feeling. Excepting the French, Constable was the first landscape painter to consider as a primary and essential task the sketch made direct from nature at a single sitting; an idea which contains in essence the destinies of modern landscape, and perhaps of most modern painting. It is this momentary impression of all things which will be the soul of the future work. Working at leisure upon the large canvas, an artist’s aim is to enrich and complete the sketch while retaining its pristine freshness. These are the two processes to which Constable devoted himself, while discovering the exuberant abundance of life in the simplest of country places. He had the palette of a creative colourist and a technique of vivid hatchings heralding that of the French impressionists. He audaciously and frankly introduced green into painting, the green of lush meadows, the green of summer foliage, all the greens which, until then, painters had refused to see except through bluish, yellow, or more often brown spectacles. Of the great landscape painters who occupied so important a place in nineteenth-century art, Corot was probably the only one to escape the influence of Constable. All the others are more or less direct descendants of the master of East Bergholt.

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