It's been fun to get back into the Seattle concert scene. Being a guitarist I like to catch guitar recitals and I'm particularly fond of recitals where artists perform mainly contemporary work. Not that I don't like to hear guitarist play the classical warhorses (or, ahem, what Matanya Ophee would sometimes call "lollipops") but it's a treat to hear living composers played by living guitarists. I had a blast with Stephanie Jones' recital last year and Benjamin Verdery's recital tonight featured contemporary music composed by Thomas Flippin and by Verdery himself. I haven't found online samples of those pieces but he was excited to be back in Seattle and for his encore performed this arrangement he did of Jimi Hendrix' famous song.
I was thinking a bit about Ethan Iverson's writing on the problem of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and how, maybe, this is a problem for pianists. Guitarists ... there are plenty of guitarists who want only the classics but tonight Verdery played Carulli and a Jimi Hendrix arrangement and works for guitar duet that he wrote inspired by, for instance, Leo Kottke. You can hear a performance over here of "Milwauki, WI".
Here's "Mobile, AL" performed by Verdery and Jack Vees playing a National guitar.
I've you listened with me so far I don't have too much to explain. Contemporary guitarist composers who don't insist on limiting themselves to whatever is officially "classical" can and do compose music drawing on the kinds of extended techniques you'd hear in a work for guitar by, say, Maurice Ohana but then turn around and draw upon country, blues, rock and ragtime influences.
The Cuban guitarist composer Leo Brouwer once said that we guitarists have the benefit of not having formed a culture of education in which the boundaries between "pop" and "classical" have been as rigidly fixed as they have been in other music educational contexts. I forget exactly where he said that but I am also reminded of Matanya Ophee's quip that guitarists who play the concert repertoire written and published by European composers feel obliged to say they play "classical" guitar music when violinists and fiddlers have felt no such compunction.
A playful yet polemical way to put things is to say that we guitarists have not necessarily had what Ethan Iverson called the problem that was created by Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Guitarists have had a somewhat different problem that Matanya Ophee articulated in "Repertoire Issues", classical guitarists tend to not be taken seriously by other classical musicians. His proposed solution was to play more chamber music, a lot more chamber music. In one of his more acid moments he said there are guitarists who needed to learn to play more with other than with themselves. If you read his comment at the time he made it that was totally on purpose.
But another path that can be, and has been, explored by guitarist composers is playing with how permeable the boundaries are between genres, forms and styles. We guitarists may have opportunities to do this kind of exploring that is in some sense less practical for pianists and musicians in "the great tradition" because of the baggage of expectations. It's another way in which I found myself sympathetic to much that Philip Ewell had to say in his book. So many brilliant African American and Brazilian and Cuban and Mexican and Argentinian guitarists have played the guitar (and we can't forget fairly literally the rest of the world) we guitarists are sitting on a treasure trove of music that has been exploring the permeability of musical boundaries that, at the risk of being a bit sticky and quippy, pianists can't get past in a lot of ways. The greatest pianist in the world can't replicate the sound and feel of a single slide guitar riff ... and more classical players should start feeling comfortable with the idea that bottleneck technique can and should be part of what you do, but that's just my thoughts for the weekend. Your mileage and convictions can certainly vary.
Verdery put on a very fun recital tonight. Was glad to get back into the Seattle music scene.
