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The Song of the Golden Dragon
Author’s note
Well, seven years later, the video has doubled to 117M views. I'm gratified that so many other people also think it's awesome. I saw Estas Tonne live in concert and honestly this piece is almost like a genre unto itself. He can improvise within it for hours.
I wound up recording a Ukulele version, but never recorded my steel-string rendition, which was sounding pretty good for a while. Fun piece!
AI Notes
A fan letter from a skeptic. Steve admits the video's mystic-street-busker packaging nearly kept him from clicking at all (the beat-to-hell guitar, the stick of incense burning in the bridge), and that only the absurd view count made him look anyway. Six months later he was still playing the piece "day and night." Before he gets anywhere near Tonne, though, there is a long detour on how music welds itself to whatever you were doing when it caught you — Van Halen's Fair Warning is permanently the soundtrack of the Dune novels for him, and Grieg's Piano Concerto still puts him back in the LP MUDs of his college years. The essay is openly trying to arrange that same fusion between you and this recording: Steve suggests putting the video on in the background as you read, which is the right way in, since his timestamps are cues to a performance, not descriptions of one.
As criticism it makes no pretense of distance, and its swing at seventy years of classical-guitar conservatism is more drive-by than indictment: Segovia is dismissed as "as big an asshole as ever graced the scene" and the case rests there. The detail that actually lands is quieter — Steve's own years of classical lessons, which he says "made me hate my own playing." Readers who stay for the deconstruction get the private movie he built for the piece, a golden serpentine dragon winding up the slopes toward Machu Picchu to a spaghetti-Western score, plus a practical tip: a second, far-less-viewed recording of the same piece that Steve argues eventually surpasses the famous one.
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.