On July 6, Americas Society presented a concert by faculty members of the 10^th New York Guitar Seminar at Mannes. The Guitar Seminar is an annual event that brings together leading performers of and composers for the guitar in a multi-day festival that includes numerous performances, masterclasses, and workshops. Four performing groups from the seminar played at Americas Society: guitarist Jorge Caballero, the Newman and Oltman Guitar Duo (Laura Oltman and Michael Newman), pianist and composer Clarice Assad on piano and voice, and Duo46 (Beth Ilana Schneider on violin and Matt Gould on guitar).

 

The performers at the concert played a wide range of music, from the modernist American composer Elliott Carter to the work of Brazilian composer-performer Clarice Assad, and included the U.S. premiere of Argentinean composer’s Jorge Liderman’s Aires de Sefarad, a set of arrangements of traditional Sephardic melodies for violin and guitar. The wide range of music presented in the concert is particularly interesting when it comes to guitar, an instrument with a long history and an unclear genesis. Some accounts of the lineage of the contemporary guitar cite its origins in the Moorish musical tradition while others find echoes in Roman instruments. With such a diverse background, it makes sense that guitar would be able to serve the many different functions within some of the different musical traditions demonstrated at the concert.

The guitar has been an important instrument in the history of Western music, but one that was associated with the domestic sphere rather than with public performances (though Berlioz was a guitarist, he didn't perform publicly). Nowhere was it more popular than in Spain and its American colonies. The ascendance of the piano as the leading voice in both concert halls and homes during the early nineteenth century pushed the guitar aside, until technical developments expanded the range and possibilities of the guitar later in the century. Since then, it has steadily found an audience, composers to write for it, and a return to prominence aided by a renewed interest in musical traditions, including those that exist outside of the traditional “classical music” concert hall.

 

An interesting survey of the history of the guitar can be found here, and media from the concert is below.

Ad Lib by Clarice Assad

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Music: Son (from Sonata Op. 13, Las Campanas) by Ernesto García de León
performed by Jorge Caballero