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The Song of the Golden Dragon
AI Notes
Steve's own ukulele arrangement of the piece is up on YouTube: Song of the Golden Dragon (uke). More on the music page.
Steve had been a guitarist for thirty-six years when he wrote this and had never before been moved to write an essay about a piece of music. The piece that finally did it is Estas Tonne's The Song of the Golden Dragon — a ten-minute nylon-string solo recorded on a German side street, fifty-eight million YouTube views and counting. Steve had just turned fifty, had seen Tonne live at Benaroya Hall, and was six months deep in a private obsession with the piece. The essay traces his listening history — heavy metal in 1984, the Malmsteen-to-Paganini pipeline that funneled a generation of teenage guitarists into classical, his own move to nylon strings in the early 90s — and turns sharply on the world he ended up in. Andres Segovia, he writes, set the template for a kind of gatekeeping on joy itself; Tonne's piece, by contrast, is "bold, fresh, sloppy as hell, almost insanely ambitious, and just plain fun."
Steve walks the piece timestamp by timestamp — the C major release at 1:41, the B7 at 2:45 where "the dragon takes flight" — and lands on a criterion: a song's importance is partly measured by whether normal guitarists can play it.
Related listings
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2020
Saying Goodbye to the Best Gig I Ever Had
The other post in this neighbourhood where Steve is mostly not writing about software. The Grab farewell mentions the YouTube channel and the music recording he wants to do; this essay is what that side of his life looks like up close. The recording promised at the end — his own arrangement of Tonne's piece — eventually landed in April 2020, linked from the top of the post.
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2016
The Monkey and the Apple
The other personal essay from the same stretch of Steve's writing — also opens with an anecdote, also turns out to be about a craft he has been quietly working at for decades. Wyvern in 2016 and classical guitar in 2019 are the same kind of disclosure: things Steve has cared about longer than the readers thought.
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2017
Why Kotlin Is Better Than Whatever Dumb Language You're Using
The taste argument in another key. The Kotlin post is Steve enthusing about a piece of engineering craft the way this essay enthuses about a piece of music — same writer, same temperament, same willingness to praise something specific in detail when most people are content to fight at the genre level.