de Visee

I've been playing guitar for almost a couple decades now. I've always taken lessons, and always with the same teacher, though I'm not sure how much longer this is going to last. I mean, I'm mid 40s now, and he's near retirement, having had some very serious health probelms in the last couple of years. But here we are, almost two decades after I started in the fall of 2007. He's the only teacher I've ever had on guitar. Will ever have.

Most of what I worked on earlier this year was my own compositions, and while I'm sure I'll get back to that, I'm starting the year off by working on de Visee's suite in D minor. de Visee was a composer and lutenist in service of Louis XV of France. He's a noted composer for the lute, perhaps overshadowed in the limited public imagination for the instrument by giants such as Dowland and Weiss. He wrote around a dozen suites for the instrument and is still played today, three hundred years after his death in 1725.

The worst I can say about his music is it hews close to its era, the mid- to late baroque. But it has its own charm, and feels closer to Bach than Weiss (a little more counterpoint, a little less playfulness). But it's fun, and it's something I used to listen to often when I was starting on guitar, playing a Bream CD I had over and over and over, then playing it over and over on my iPod as well. That era feels like a long time ago. Poor de Visee, composer at the court of Louis the Beloved. The French revolution three quarters of a century away, the industrial revolution following to transform the world, never mind the two world wars, the space age, the internet - this world would be unrecognizable to him.