Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type.
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
|
Session Overview |
Session | ||
Strings as Tribute: Epochal Changes through Guitar Music
Session Topics: Performances
| ||
Session Abstract | ||
The organological changes of the guitar between the seventeenth and twentieth century witness the disruption of social and technological developments felt across the Western world. From an instrument whose strumming fueled the fancy of singers and dancers in the baroque era to one that never matched the demands for ever-louder instruments in the late nineteenth century (until the advent of amplification), the history of the guitar reveals the anxieties of progress and the obstinacy of audiences and musicians who are still persuaded by too soft and too harmonically limited an instrument within the classical music discourse.
Musical progress demanded physical sacrifices from the guitar, resulting in the loss of strings. Thus, the baroque guitar traded its double courses for single strings tuned from high to low, and gut bass strings were slowly replaced by metal-wound strings. These and other technical developments reflect the effort of builders and musicians to bring the guitar along the epochal changes between these eras and to position it in the popular music of the time, securing its existence. Little did they know how the guitar would become, arguably, the most popular instrument in the world. Just not that kind of guitar.
This concert seeks to explore themes of change and development with music spanning the early eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century played on historical instruments. The program features three compositions of the Afro-colonial fandango genre written in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century respectively, played on historical guitars. Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739) notated a fandango for the baroque guitar with reentrant tuning, allowing complex melodic passages to be played over multiple strings (campanela). In the nineteenth century, Dionisio Aguado (1784-1849) composed a set of fandango variations (Op. 16) for a relatively new instrument: the single string guitar. Aguado punctuates the genre’s cyclical Phrygian cadence with a French-style introduction, a lyrical middle section, and a dazzling coda in D major. As the fandango simultaneously became one of the most popular flamenco genres, twentieth-century composer Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999) penned down his version in 1954. Highly impressionistic, Rodrigo’s Fandango obscures the harmonic progression further by bookending the genre’s traditional harmonic tension between minor and major modes with two sections in major while maintaining its polyrhythmic complexity. Between each iteration of the fandangos, this program will feature representative pieces of each period: a set of baroque dances, theme and variations over a Mozart theme from the Magic Flute, and Manuel de Falla’s single guitar composition “Homenaje sur le tombeau de Claude Debussy”.
Three centuries of guitar making are represented in this concert. The baroque guitar used here was built in Veracruz, Mexico, a highly significant presence given the genre’s origin. The nineteenth-century or Romantic guitar is a René François Lacôte replica, one of the most sought after builders of the period. Finally, the modern guitar is an Antonio de Torres 1888 replica, built after one of the first models that spurred contemporary guitar making.
|
Contact and Legal Notice · Contact Address: Conference: AMS 2024 Annual Meeting |
Conference Software: ConfTool Pro 2.6.152+TC © 2001–2025 by Dr. H. Weinreich, Hamburg, Germany |