The 21st Century Guitar Conference

It’s been several weeks since I left the 21st Century Guitar Conference and I am still digesting everything that happened. Amy Brandon pulled off an event of herculean scale. It was an experience that could best be described as drinking from the firehose. So much music, information, and pontification was packed into the short four days of the festival that it would have been impossible for anyone to take in everything, so I give my thoughts and experiences of the weekend herein as we all piece together the astounding happenings in the Canadian Capital last month.

I spent much of the first day of the conference rehearsing. Upon receiving my invitation to the festival I was offered the opportunity to participate in a guitar orchestra. I thought, “Sure why not? It will probably just be a few short pieces that will be easy enough to sight-read, right?” Little did I know, a baker’s dozen of brand new works for mixed (acoustic and electric) guitar ensemble had been commissioned for the event, and some of them required some serious rehearsal. So many experimental approaches to writing for guitar ensemble had been tried out and many of the pieces were expertly written to be put together in a short amount of time by a melange of professional and amateur guitarists. Thursday night was dominated by the epic marathon concert of Canadian guitar music. With music happening concurrently on two different stages, this concert began at 6pm and concluded sometime around 1:30 Friday morning, anyone who stayed to the end deserves a medal! Since I was performing music by Nicole Lizée, Jason Doell, and Eugene Astapov, I kept my head focused on performing for much of Thursday and saw little music that evening. I did get to see a wonderful set by London, ON based electric guitarist and composer, Andrew Noseworthy, including vocoder equipped electric guitar, copious electronics, and a plethora of extended techniques. I also had the surreal experience of watching the clock at the back of the hall strike midnight during my performance of Astapov’s Lenten Music.

On Friday during the day I delivered my lecture detailing experimental approaches to the electric guitar in the 21st century, focusing on works that transcend the cultural associations of the electric guitar with popular music. It was a very stimulating discussion covering integration of electronics, notation, and alternative technical approaches to the instrument. After my lecture, we were treated to a concert of original music performed by Milton and Bridget Mermikides from the United Kingdom. A number of approaches to the integration of interactive electronics were employed by the couple that resulted in works that ranged from charming to touching.

The thirteen orchestra pieces were programmed across two separate concerts on Friday and Saturday night. The concert going experience was enhanced by the stunning architecture of the Dominion-Chalmers church and awe-inspiring light projections by Laurenz Theinert. Friday’s concert opened with Jordan Nobels’ Infinity Mirror was an innovative installation piece that was synchronized with stopwatches and contained a kitchen sink’s worth of material that guitarists chose to play freely during 10 second intervals that walked through a series of harmonic fields. Christopher Mayo wrote a visceral piece titled Walk the Darkness Down that had five guitarists playing two retuned electric guitars in the balcony of the Dominion Chalmers Church while a beautiful solo part was performed by Halifax-based jazz guitarist Sam Wilson. Jason Nobel’s Fantasy Harmonique was a stunning work that retuned nearly every guitar onstage and resulted in a hocketing harmonics. John Oliver’s The Commons rounded out the guitar orchestra concert on Friday night with a zany genre gumbo of guitar styles melded together ranging from classical to metal.

The other half of Friday’s epic concert was presented by Steve Cowan and Adam Cicchilitti performing solo and duo pieces written for them by the New York based composer collective, Iceberg New Music. Every one of these nine pieces was performed with unrivaled professionalism and commitment from these two. Perhaps the most memorable work was the program’s concluding work by Harry Stafylakis that mixed heavy metal references with quotes from the slow movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.

Before the Saturday evening concert, the day was full of lectures, roundtables, rehearsing, and a wonderful mid-day concert by jazz guitarist Miles Okazaki who commanded the stage by himself for over an hour. I had the privilege of facilitating an inspiring roundtable discussion that morning with an all-star panel made up of Steve Goss, Tim Brady, An Laurence Higgins, Steve Cowan, Andrew Noseworthy, and Camilio Mendez. The discussion covered composer/performer collaboration, the death of sole authorship in composition, the death of the masterpiece, and more. While the death of many concepts was discussed, we nonetheless concluded that now is an exciting time to be alive and playing guitar.

I managed to catch a few lectures on Saturday as well. Giovanni Albini and Mathilde Oppizzi discussed an intriguing way of using computer analysis of guitar music to develop a compendium of idiomatic chord voicings to be used in new compositions. Albini composed a new work using the output of a computer analysis of Brouwer’s Fuga No 1. The resulting piece sounded both Brouwer-esque and original at the same time. I also managed to catch Will Ayers discuss Easley Blackwood’s 15-tone equal temperament music for guitar. This tuning system managed to preserve major/minor tonalities while still sounding alarmingly unconventional.

Saturday evening’s concert consisted of tons more music. Milton Mermikides’ Hivemind used flowchart notation for the guitarists to navigate through gestures during a fixed timespan. Amelia Kaplan’s Grates and Grills used quarter tone modifications and tricky ensemble interplay. Julian Bertino’s Cloctogons was a cacophony of weaving, glissing, textures with an accompanying track full of clock sounds among other things. Elizabeth Knudson’s Three Fates used haunting chant melodies in a slow moving, droning, modal atmosphere. Ben Wylie’s ripples, lilies used the performers breathing to govern the rhythmic structure of his austere landscape of swelling harmonics. Blake Degraw’s The Ersatz was a sound collage that was assembled from the guitarists reactions to sounds played on tracks they listened to on headphones. The program was rounded out by Anselm Macdonald’s visceral Esau’s Hunger, Tim Brady’s live composed Signs and Signals, and Amy Brandon’s Boxcutter that featured Okazaki as a featured soloist.

When Sunday morning came, I was sufficiently exhausted and had to make the long drive back home for Monday responsibilities. Sunday’s program promised to be full of more wonderful activities and I was disappointed to have to jet out early. And yet, I left feeling like I had experienced a full week of music and ideas. Hats off to Amy Brandon who accomplished multitudes with this event and the word on the street is that this event will have its second run in Lisbon, Portugal in 2020. Onwards and upwards!