Review | Analyzing a Convention: the 2014 Guitar Foundation of America Convention at California State University, Fullerton

Analyzing a Convention: the 2014 Guitar Foundation of America Convention at California State University, Fullerton

Reviewed by Albert R. Diaz / University of California, Los Angeles

In this review I examine a selection of performances at the GFA Convention at California State University, Fullerton. Conceived as a case study this approach asks: what did the 2014 GFA convention demonstrate about state of the classical guitar field?

The convention provides an opportunity to address issues that might prove problematic should we not reflect on them critically. Specifically, values associated with performer and listener cultures, as well as repertoire and technique. This is why I de-emphasize the mode of journalistic criticism, which makes judging the quality of individual performances its sole objective, and instead choose to read non-traditional aspects of a performance as a source or “text” for instance, repertoires and programming or even an artist statement.

The concert performances I have chosen to write about each reveal something in answer to my initial question. I think about each of these individual performances as symptomatic of this particular historical moment and associated with manifestations of larger trends in the classical guitar field.[1]

Friday, 20 June 2014 – Day 1

Ana Vidovic Concert, 8:00 PM

As a scholar of popular and classical music I often draw comparisons between what might be perceived as a chasm between seemingly disparate musics, in order to see what such a thought experiment might yield. How might such a comparison be provocative and or useful? Precisely by revealing unforeseen yet meaningful rapprochements. Repertoire selections of Ana Vidovic’s performance is recreated below:

Introduction and Variations on a Theme by Mozart, Op. 9, Fernando Sor

Sonatina, Federico Moreno Torroba  

Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios, Augustín Barrios Mangoré

Granada and Asturias, Isaac Albéniz

Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro, BWV 998, J. S. Bach

Sonatina in D Major, Op. 77, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

El Marabino: Vals Venezolano Nos. 2 and 3, Antonio Lauro

The theme of Segovia repertoire emerges as an organizing principle. A program such as this functions to posit Vidovic within Segovia’s lineage fashion a program that might be titled “Ana Vidovic Plays the Hits of Segovia.” The latter I think is much more interesting and suggests an intersection between Vidovic’s program and spaces of popular music performance. Vidovic’s concert program is akin to the set list of a Beatles cover band. Audience members know the repertoire so well that they could sing or hum along with ease. This fosters a listening culture directed toward moments when the performer makes a mistake. I consider there to be very little, if anything, enjoyable about an experience in which the final conclusion maintains that “perfection” is possible.

Another takeaway is that audience members at the GFA convention are often guitar players themselves. As a community of amateurs, they perhaps idealize a supposed expert or master. I’m not saying we should stop attending concerts because it cultivates a listening culture that values perfection and venerates individuals to a godly status. However, what I am saying is that the path to a healthier personal expressive relationship to your instrument might reside in choices of repertoire.

Vidovic’s repertoire selections were certainly appropriate as an opening welcome to the GFA convention. But, I wonder if one of the most astute audiences of classical guitar might benefit from listening in new ways. While I certainly don’t feel that music needs to be difficult to listen to, I think that the listening practices of the audience at a space as specialized as a classical guitar convention could be directed toward something more challenging than nostalgia for a repertoire or historical figure.

The concert ended with Vidovic returning to the stage for two encores. Vidovic asked, “Are there any pieces you’d like to hear?” Of the many responses by the audience, the loudest were “Recuerdos” and “Yesterday.” Vidovic played both: “Yesterday” in Brouwer’s arrangement, and “Recuerdos” with her trademark p-i-m-i tremolo. I, on the other hand, if prompted with the choices “Yesterday” or “Recuerdos,” would have requested a third option. Silence, even, would have been preferred to “Yesterday” (the most covered song of all time), as well as “Recuerdos” (the “Stairway to Heaven” of the classical guitar world).

The highlight of the performance was the Andante from Torroba’s Sonatina. It was a moment that stood out from the rest of the pieces she performed that evening. Vidovic’s interpretation was introspective and explored the most intimate sounds of her instrument. It showed Vidovic’s capacity to draw in the audience with something other than technical facility and flawless execution. The ears of audience members where calibrated to hear the most delicate, subtle shifts of color, pacing, and dynamic. It was a deeply personal moment for both the performer and the audience.

Saturday, 21 June 2014 – Day 2

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Concert, 8:00 PM

“I miss the LAGQ of the late 90s,” said a close friend sitting next to me before the performance. I knew exactly what he meant. He was not devaluing the ensemble’s work in recent years. He was expressing a desire for the repertoire that was so hugely influential to both of us in our early classical guitar studies. It is a body of repertoire that defined the LAGQ and showcased the many achievements and skills of the ensemble as well as the strengths of its individual members. How appropriate, then, that the program that evening signaled a slight return which aligned with a significant piece of LAGQ biography: It was at CSUF twenty-nine years earlier that the LAGQ made their GFA debut. This was a kind of nostos, or homecoming, for the LAGQ. The program that evening was as follows:

Dances from “Terpsichore”, Michael Praetorius, arr. J. Dearman

Pulcinella Suite, Igor Stravinsky, arr. William Kanengiser

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Franz Liszt, arr. Kanengiser

Music in Four Sharps (On Dowland’s “Frog Galliard”), Ian Krouse

World Tour (an LAGQ assembled suite with pieces by Kanengiser, Gerald Garcia, Horacio Salinas, Baden Powell, Simon Jeffes, and Scott Tennant)

Encore: Pachelbel’s Loose Canon, arr. LAGQ (Dearman, Kanengiser, Tennant, York, with additions by Greif)

The program functioned as a time capsule that gave audience members a taste of the LAGQ hits that defined the ensemble at various stages in their career. It was a joyous performance with too many highlights to note in the space of this article. Ian Krouse’s Music in Four Sharps (On Dowland’s “Frog Galliard”) is an exciting new work written for the LAGQ. It began with Paul O’Dette sneaking on stage with his lute to play Dowland’s theme before the LAGQ began Krouse’s variation set. It is my hope that the LAGQ continues to tour with this piece, not just because it is well written and well performed, but because for listeners like my friend and myself who were inspired by Krouse’s earlier quartets, this work affords a meaningful connection between both our own and the LAGQ’s past.

Sunday, 22 June 2014 – Day 3

Matt Palmer Concert, 11:40 AM

Matt Palmer’s performance led me first to an observation and then to a question: “Here is an individual who can execute just about anything on the guitar,” and yet, “to what end?” I found myself wondering what, beyond his technical facility, will sustain this performer’s career. Palmer’s major flaw, and it is one most tangible at a convention which has a solo artist competition, is that among the many players suited for competitions, Palmer is a bit too much like the rest. Palmer is immensely talented, takes his career and the guitar seriously, and has worked hard. But hard work isn’t a thing to be valued in and of itself. Both the performance and the programming seemed to be organized around this value:

Un tiempo fue Itálica famosa, Joaquín Rodrigo

Collectici íntim, Vicente Asencio

The Heaven’s Hundred (World Premiere), Olga Amelkina-Vera

Sonata Mongoliana, Stepan Rak

Palmer played four very difficult works, which constantly reminded the audience of their difficulty and the performer’s efforts to realize them. In this way, the program alienated the audience who was unable to relate to the difficulty of the repertoire. Contemplating the seriousness of the musical work is a value that is, in my eyes, no longer productive and serves only to invoke authority of the composer.

The highlight of Palmer’s program was the world premiere by Amelkina-Vera. I commend Palmer’s inclusion of a work which has an overt political agenda of bringing visibility to the Heaven’s Hundred, the individuals who died in the Ukraine in the fall and winter of 2013 and 2014. Here, Palmer seemed more in touch with the musical meaning of the work, and capable of expressing the history and tragedy it condensed. There were both somber and violent moments, both of which Palmer underscored with a wide dynamic range, explosive scales, and rasqueados.

Mobius Trio Concert, 4:00 PM

This ensemble addresses issues of repertoire and concert programming directly, by including a manifesto in their biography:

[The] Mobius Trio has made it its mission to fully integrate the classical guitar into the twenty-first century’s nascent musical lexicon. The Trio typically performs music that they have commissioned; they seek to expand the guitar ensemble’s repertoire to encompass all of the myriad currents passing through contemporary music. Working with composers is not just a facet of the Trio’s work, it is the focus. The Mobius Trio seeks to expose the divide between “guitar ensemble music,” and “new music,” and inhabit it. They seek collaboration with composers, performers, and artists of all stripes—nothing is out of bounds.[2]

The repertoire on their program that day certainly fulfilled some of these objectives:

Witch Wagon (2012), Kevin Villalta

Last Light (2011), Dan Becker

making good choices (2011), Brendon Randall-Myers

String Quartet in F Major (1902): II. Assez vif, très rhythmé, Maurice Ravel

Kindergarten (World Premiere), Sérgio Assad

With the exception of the Ravel (a commissioned arrangement for the Mobius Trio), all of the pieces on the program are indeed contemporary works for classical guitar ensemble. I would urge the young ensemble to parse their words a bit more carefully, however, as describing the state of contemporary classical music as a “nascent lexicon” is unproductive and without historical foundation. Lexicon is here misused to refer to a set of original musical compositions or musical texts (as opposed to a vocabulary proper to a branch of knowledge). “Nascent” simply feels redundant, as if we needed any reminder that the twenty-first century is hardly underway. Most problematic is the implication that there are not extant composers writing for the guitar or guitar ensemble.

Most confusing, to myself at least, was the question of the space which the Trio seeks to “inhabit:” a space between “guitar ensemble music” and “contemporary music.” Inhabiting this space suggests that these domains will remain separate and distinct, which would mean that the Trio would be upholding this division, not necessarily somehow reconciling or synthesizing the two. If there is some kind of illness involving guitar ensemble music and contemporary music that the Mobius Trio seeks to cure, I suggest that they take better care in communicating this goal to their audience. A well-crafted artist statement with the tone of a manifesto can be a powerful and inspirational tool. But, it must be understood by the audience and serve the branding and marketing of the ensemble. Why not just make “commissioning new works for guitar trio,” a historically underrepresented ensemble, the goal of their artistic efforts? And, the group should reconsider how they define “new” or “contemporary” music, and interrogate whether they are simply having pieces written for them or whether they are indeed part of an avant-garde.

For a young ensemble, these three communicate and listen well with each other. They are well coordinated, comfortable on stage, and have mastered the art of the simultaneous pluck. Despite my critique of how the ensemble writes about its repertoire, I found their programming to be exceptional. The pieces felt fresh and exciting, and the Trio has done an immense amount of work to lay down what the first interpretation of these works is. Certainly most entertaining was the work Kindergarten by Assad, which closed the program. It begins with two members of the ensemble in a verbal disagreement, only to be interrupted by the third who begins playing his guitar. These dynamics play out in interesting ways throughout the piece, and the ensemble did a good job at selling what could have otherwise been written off as shtick. Assad’s piece is reminiscent of Brouwer’s piece, Per Suonare a Due, which begins in a similar fashion.

While the Assad piece was initially humorous, it did register some irony as I reflected on the performance as a whole. At times the trio actually had issues with ensemble that stemmed from not communicating effectively with each other. I’d like to see the Mobius Trio work at passing around the leadership role a bit more in live performance to ensure the lines of communication remain open. The moments when individual members seemed to slip back into a more solipsistic music-making position (one that plagues the classical guitar tradition), focusing more on their individual parts rather than the coherence of the group, discharged the energy from what was an otherwise exciting performance.

Monday, 23 June 2014 – Day 4

Tilman Hoppstock Concert, 8:00 PM

The opportunity to see Tilman Hoppstock perform is a rare one, with his last appearance in Southern California occurring in 2006. When he confirmed his appearance for the 2014 GFA convention I knew that his would be the performance to see. Far exceeding my initial expectations, Hoppstock’s performance left me awestruck. His playing has a level of contrapuntal clarity the likes of which I’d never encountered. Not to mention the liveness that his improvised ornaments added to the pieces. I found his program that evening to be masterfully crafted.

Passacaglia, Ludovico Roncalli, transcr. Hoppstock

Suite for Violoncello, No. 1, BWV 1007, J. S. Bach, transcr. Hoppstock

Iberia: “El Polo,” Isaac Albéniz, transcr. Hoppstock

Selections from 12 Miniature Preludes for Guitar (1932), Allan Willcocks

Selections from Suite Española, Francisco Tárrega

Elogio de la Danza: Lento and Obstinato (1964), Leo Brouwer

Taranta, Paco de Lucia

La Espiral Eterna (1971), Leo Brouwer

The Roncalli Passacaglia began with a fantasia, appropriate to the piece but also to the performance that evening, invoking the tastar da corde as an establishing number. In case you doubted the ornaments executed on his recordings, in this live performance, Hoppstock proved his remarkable ability to decorate musical lines tastefully, occasionally with complexity, and always with unshakeable ease. After beginning his program with this transcription from the Italian Baroque guitar literature, Hoppstock continued the theme of Baroque transcription by moving to Germany, a historically significant center of the guitar tradition.

Hoppstock’s performance of the Bach singlehandedly dismissed any arguments that favor playing Bach’s pieces with a notion of fidelity to the score. Such a thing, even when we have Bach’s autograph, does not exist. Performers always embellish, and the composer need not be the de facto authority in any music-making community. In this instance Hoppstock added his own bass realization to the work, critiquing the notion of a fixed or stable musical work. The result was something new, exciting, fresh, and necessarily radical.

The theme of transcription continued with Spanish music from the early twentieth century by Albéniz. The selections from Albéniz’s piano cycle became guitar pieces in their own right thanks to Hoppstock’s transcription and performance. Hoppstock brought to life the dense secondal harmony through emphatic rhythm and accents.

Moving away from transcriptions, Hoppstock’s program was now engineered around works written specifically for classical guitar. In full disclosure, Hoppstock revealed that the next works on the program by Allan Willcocks were in fact compositions by himself (Willcocks being his nom de plum). These works, imagined to have been composed in 1932, demonstrated another one of Hoppstock’s abilities, the ability to compose in a historically distant musical style. Further, the use of the miniature as the basic structure of these pieces continued the program’s movement through guitar history as much of the repertoire for modern classical guitar is, in fact, in the form of the miniature.

Next, with selections from Tárrega Hoppstock created his own suite, Suite Española. This gesture created something new but with historical precedent. While some of the Tárrega repertoire might be regarded as overwrought, Hoppstock overcame this designation by placing Tárrega’s pieces in conversation with each other.

At this point in the program, the emphasis shifts toward works for guitar from the mid-twentieth century. The selections from Elogio, from Brouwer’s middle period, continued to demonstrate Hoppstock’s breadth as a performer. Prefacing this work with a touch of history, Hoppstock explained that Brouwer wrote the work to be performed with dance accompaniment on a television program. This pushed the audience members to imagine the type of movements of the human body that would accompany the definitively fragmented music.

Moving from Brouwer temporarily, Hoppstock played Paco de Lucia’s Taranta. This signaled a slight return to the dance music earlier in the program (Bach), as well as to other cyclical forms conceived with improvisatory musical practice (Roncalli). It felt appropriate to include a bit of flamenco in this program, and it bridged the two Brouwer selections nicely. Knowing too of de Lucia’s passing earlier in 2014, Hoppstock’s impressive flamenco playing served as an appropriate tribute to such a major figure.

The final piece on Hoppstock’s program was Brouwer’s The Eternal Spiral, a work that approximates electronically synthesized sounds. Brouwer, so the story goes, wanted to create electronic music but did not have access to the technology. The Eternal Spiral practically begins with silence, and explores the limit of sound and sonic spaces achieved by extended technique on the instrument. It is a piece that is no doubt in Hoppstock’s wheelhouse. A work that is immensely difficult to pull off, for Hoppstock, it served as a springboard for the most exciting performance of the GFA convention. Three encores followed, selections by Manuel de Falla, Brouwer, and Bach.

Tuesday, 24 June 2014 – Day 5

Jorge Caballero Concert, 8:00 PM

I was disappointed by Jorge Caballero’s performance at the 2014 GFA Convention. As best as I can tell, it was because the transcriptions he played that evening were too ambitious. The first selection on the program the Prelude and Fugue No. 4 in C# Minor from J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book I had too many voices missing. The original fugue is in five voices; the classical guitar simply cannot sustain five contrapuntal voices simultaneously, and Caballero was forced to leave out more than just a few notes. Some of the entrances of fugue subjects were rhythmically displaced by an eighth note in order to make them playable, but this created awkward syncopations, and the result was not justified musically in Caballero’s performance.

The highlight of Caballero’s program was selections from Albéniz’s Iberia. The craft of the arrangement was evident (much more successful than the Bach), though, on a number of occasions Caballero seemed a bit off of his game. He occasionally lost his focus, noticing and drawing attention to his own mistakes.

The final selection on Caballero’s program was Yamashita’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. This was impressive, though not exactly pleasurable. This is another work, like the Bach, that rarely if ever works in performance. Gone are the dramatic key relationships between movements, as too is the rich orchestration of the symphony. Perhaps Yamashita can pull it off; however, that night, Caballero failed to deliver. Programming this work felt a bit self-gratifying, and left me wondering how else I might have spent my evening. Caballero is a technical powerhouse as well as a skilled arranger. I remember, quite vividly, his performance at the 2010 GFA Convention in Austin of his own transcription of Berg’s Piano Sonata No. 1. Then, as I remember now, I took with me the conclusion that a transcription can often add to a work. My sense is, however, that too much is lost when Caballero endeavors to perform symphonic transcriptions or five-voice contrapuntal textures on his instrument. Still, the audience requested two encores: one being Jorge Morel’s Brasileira and the other a mazurka by Manuel M. Ponce.

While I think there are some problems with the classical guitar field, and the classical guitar community, which I emphasized some of these in my review, they are in no way conclusive reports on “the state of the classical guitar field.” Such a conclusion would be shortsighted, reductive, and capable of enacting very little, if any, change in classical guitar culture.

The guiding question of this piece was “what did the 2014 GFA convention demonstrate about state of the classical guitar field?” What I attempted to demonstrate in this review is that asking such a question forces a critical engagement through reflection on a set of experiences. At issue here is how to move forward more so than it reveals how things are. This, which I am hesitant to call progress as the word invokes and evolutionary narrative in the cultural domain, is more about progress marked by actuating a dialectical mechanism. If we are to contribute to the music making communities in which we are a part, we can do so through work born out of critical reflection. The dialectical confrontation that comes with asking “what is the state of the field?” and subsequently doing something about it is a means of critical reflection necessary in order to bring about new cultural formations and practices.