In the Key of K

After I graduated from high school in a small town in Missouri in 1995 I enrolled in a community college briefly in Texas. I didn’t finish the whole term. I traveled around playing music in bands and living with various family and friends.

I didn’t go back to school until 1999. I enrolled at the University of Missouri and started taking some core classes and one or two music classes.

I auditioned for drum/percussion performance but generally felt like my time drumming wasn’t fulfilling me like I wanted. I wanted to study guitar.

At this point, I had been playing guitar for about four years and had self published two albums, wrote most of a third album, and was overflowing with new ideas.

The problem was this: in the 90s the University of Missouri had no guitar program–no classical or jazz guitar lessons or curriculum. So, after a year, I transferred to St Louis University (SLU).

My partner at the time had enrolled there and we were doing a longish distance thing (two hour drive). We would meet half way and study at a waffle house. Anyway, SLU had a guitar program! In the year 2000 we got an apartment near campus and I began rigorously studying music.

To graduate with a degree you had to perform Junior and Senior recitals, meet the core curriculum, and pass a piano proficiency exam. The pictures here are for the flyer and program for my Junior recital.

I arranged the program mostly in chronological order except for the Leo Brouwer pieces. My performance was, as is typical for me, mediocre. Not terrible but not stellar. All the pieces had to be memorized.

I had memorized two Scarlatti Sonatas but only played one here. Before digging up this program I would have sworn I performed both of them but the memory is more faulty than the physical objects that remain.

The Romance in e minor was the very first solo guitar piece I ever played in public–there were always music school recitals once or twice per semester where students could get used to performing in an academic environment. It was one of the most nerve wracking things imaginable, at least for me. I BOMBED the first time I performed this piece. Probably the worst performance of my life. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking and I kept forgetting how to play the piece (again, no sheet music allowed–always memorized). Anyway, for the Junior recital, I did okay–way better than the first time. After the Junior Recital my academic anxiety was pretty much gone. I would still get nervous but not debilitatingly so.

The Carcassi Study No. 1 is a fun piece. I also performed it at a group recital before this performance. This piece is really useful to help students learn how move from one chord to another with economy. –What fingers can stay in place or on this string as I more to a new chord? Fun to play but really sounds like a study because it is.

The Tárrega pieces are lovely. Every first year classical guitar student plays Lagrima and his other easy piece, Adelita. Rosita is a super fun polka-ish piece in drop D. It’s a great show-off piece that is really short–shred like it’s the late 19th century!

The Leo Brouwer Preludes are some of favorites. The first one I learned was the sixth. It was another piece, like the Carcassi Study No. 1, that teaches economy of movement from chord to chord–something my teacher was really big on. The right hand pattern stays the same for the whole piece. All of them are all super short never really more than a minute or two. At least that is the case with these six–I think there are at least 20 but maybe there are more. I went through and played them all years ago for sight reading practice but 1, 2, and 6 are still probably my favorites. I still play number 2 from time to time.

I have played all the Villa-Lobos guitar solos and studies. Most classical guitar academic students probably do. These are definitely three of my favorites along with Prelude No. 3. Most of the Villa-Lobos stuff is great performance repertoire. They are interesting and varied.

I love Jazz too. I played in the jazz band in high school and my whole time at SLU (I was also in the classical guitar ensemble at SLU). I’m not sure when I first heard the Paul Desmond/Dave Brubeck piece, Take Five, but it is still a favorite today along with Blue Rondo a la Turk and a piece I can’t remember the title of but will insert here later. I arranged this piece for solo guitar. It’s hard to play but if you keep it under your fingers it’s doable. Still a great arrangement.

Windy and Warm is a fingerstyle country-ish piece, similar to Chet Atkins’s style. My guitar teacher in college, Peter Clemens, made this arrangement. The lead part functions as a solo piece and the second part really beefs things up. I still play the lead part from time to time though I always forget how to play the relative major section and usually leave it out unless the score is handy. Peter was a weird guy, highly flawed but he was a friend. He had some trouble with the law and committed suicide a few years after I graduated. I knew he had some unusual tendencies but was unaware of his illegal activities until after he died. I choose to remember the good things.

As I said before, the performance was mediocre at best. I recorded it on a TASCAM four track recorder with two live mics. The first tape cut off during the Brouwer Preludes number five abruptly ends and number 6 is lost to time. I took the best of this performances and self published it as Live in Concert 2003. Scarlatti and Carcassi didn’t make the cut and I rearranged the order. Probably several hundred CD copies were made and given to family and friends as well as used for promotional purposes and sold at performances.