In Part 1 of this extensive two-part interview Andrew York speaks of his early musical roots, the influence of his family on his career, his formal musical education and his 16-year run with the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. He speaks of his recent obsession with painting and the parallels that exist between art, music, and the writing of software code! Andrew also addresses the harder questions of why he decided to leave the LAGQ to pursue his own muse and a unique solo career.

Stephen Rekas
Guitar Sessions Editor

Who or what events inspired you to play the guitar? Was music or the classic guitar a part of your household when growing up?
The simple answer to that is that my father was a guitar player and my uncle too. It was just a very musical household in general. My mother even sang professionally for awhile. There was always a lot of music around. Family events always revolved around singing folk music- Old English, some Irish, a lot of Early American Folk music, so it was always there. Beyond that, you can be born with a musical nature and I was always fascinated with sounds. Some of my earliest memories are actually aural ones, listening to things and being amazed by the quality of sounds they produced. It was inevitable that I would take that early experience and turn it into a love of music. I always knew I would be involved with music from the time I was a very small child. I started playing around five or six years old.

So you were playing the guitar by the age of five or six?
I think my first concert was when I was around seven. We're not sure but I actually did some stuff with my sister- she was singing and I transcribed some music and accompanied her while she sang and I did a few solos. I even wrote some stuff for that concert and I can see on the program a composition by me- I have no idea what it was. I can remember the event but have no clue as to exactly when it was, but it had to be when I was seven or eight.

A lot of kids now don't have that exposure to folk music.
It's true. It's becoming kind of a lost art.

Who did you study with early on and what's the extent of your formal music training?
My dad was my first teacher and he taught me everything he knew and I absorbed it pretty quickly. He has a real deep love of music and we listened to a lot of classical music at home as well. As a matter of fact, he cut some 78s early on with his folk combo when he was a young man.

What's your dad's name?
Dwayne York. These [records] weren't commercially available. You could go into the studio at that time and cut directly to 78s. It was around 1950 or so. We just found some the other day when I was at my folks' house and we couldn't believe it. Some were unplayable; they had warped or cracked and but others worked and it was really cool.

So he taught me everything that he could do on the guitar and then they found me a teacher in Richmond Virginia where we were living- Greta Dollitz, a wonderful woman from Germany who was a student of Aaron Shearer's. I studied with her for a number of years. She was my first real teacher; she taught me theory and classical technique, and she was just a great, great teacher to have.

You were very fortunate to find a qualified teacher. Did you end up getting an academic degree in music?
What I did was go to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia- Shenandoah Valley, a great place to go. There was so much talent there! A lot of my friends that I went to school with are doing rather well. One plays keyboard with Clint Black, several are playing in a band with Dave Matthews- several of the guys I played with play with him, a lot of people are doing really well. I went on of course to play with a guitar quartet and do my solo thing, so a lot of musicians from that period and place went on to do extremely well with their careers. Others like the guy I roomed with- he played bass when I played guitar in an electric band with, is now the chair of the Music Department at Elmhurst.

So more than a fine arts program your degree was performance oriented.
It was undergraduate performance degree in classical guitar, however, my first major was flute. I actually studied flute for a year as they had no guitar program at the time, and that's another story. I showed up believing they did- very strange. Studying the flute was a great experience, but consequently I did my entire Bachelor's classic guitar performance degree in three years. I switched to the classic guitar the next year when due to my urging, they got a guitar teacher. Then I moved to LA after a few more years. I was doing some work and stayed in town and had a jingle company with one of my friends and did a lot of studio work and playing a lot of jazz- it was fun.

What were some of the jingles you did?
They were all local, nothing national. They were for local radio and TV for the businesses in the Shenandoah Valley area. It was fantastic. We would write them, record them, play along against ourselves, and hire our friends. They sounded super-professional because we had such a great pool of ability [to draw from].

And then I moved to LA and got a Master's in Studio Guitar.

Where was that?
At USC.

And who were your principal teachers there?
There I studied classical with Jim Smith. I was also playing lute with Scott Tennant in an early music ensemble. I was really into lute, and that's how I met Scott. I studied jazz with Joe Diorio. Duke Miller was sort of my mentor; he was the head of the department at the time, kind of oversaw everything- and he was really good to me. He was the one who brought me out to USC and kind of let me follow my own instincts there- which they weren't letting everybody do. They were kind of restrictive as a matter of fact but they let me kind of free-range. That's one reason I was doing a variety of things. It was a pretty good experience. I was there for a couple of years and got my Master's. I figured that was enough. I could've gotten a doctorate in another year and a half, or but didn't really want to be in school anymore.

What was unique about the contributions of each of your teachers?
They were utterly different. I also studied a bit with Lenny Breau the great jazzer. His arranging sense and approach to the instrument was very fingerstyle oriented and somewhat contrapuntal. His use of harmonics and tone clusters…He had a unique way of playing one note within a chord as a harmonic to raise it up an octave, allowing him to get Bill Evans-type clusters on the guitar which is as hard as it gets because being tuned in fourths when we start sacking tightly spaced clusters you run out of fingers real quick. It would enable him to the type of comping that any guitar player would look at and go "Wow! How's he getting that?" You can't finger those but he had this cool way of doing it. I picked up a lot from him.

Joe Diorio was just a great inspiration in terms of overall artistic approach, kind of a wild guitar player who had really come from another place, kind of creative in a raw-grade way. You never knew what he was going to do. A wonderful freedom of approach as well as having a vast store of knowledge, of course, but he was kind of an artistic spirit. A painter as well, that kind of thing, he was pretty groovy to study with! A real true jazzer/hipster/artist.

So Diorio is an artist-painter as well?
Yeah, he's a pretty good painter.

I didn't know that.
...As am I now. I started painting a few months ago and I just love it. I'm pretty obsessed with painting now. It's just the freedom…I mean, I don't know what doing; I'm kind of making it up but in a way that's a part of the pleasure. Maybe it's a response to working so hard on music all my life. Now it's free colors, move it around see what happens. It doesn't matter if it doesn't work.

I would imagine you're into abstract expressionism. Am I right?
A lot of them are abstracts. The one I did yesterday was an abstract, but I'm also feeling around with a portrait of my wife, a landscape, and a still life I like very much in Matisse style. I'm just really experimenting, mostly with abstracts but then I've done a couple in cubist style... so I'm just having a great time! That's all I can say.

It's kind of the exact opposite of playing the classic guitar, isn't it- with one kind of relieving the tension of the other?
Yeah, but I get paid to play the classic guitar! It's a beautiful way of expression.

Tell me this- do you notice any parallels between painting and music composition?
Totally! Yeah, I notice this in another way too. I also write computer software. I have a small software company that sells program directing aids, mainly background audio stuff. I love coding. It's something that I'm really good at naturally. No one ever taught me how. I can just figure it out by reading the books or whatever, and write pretty sophisticated programs. To me that's a lot like writing music as well because it's like an endless puzzle; as a matter of fact, it's a super mathematical puzzle. It has a similar feel to me of creating music because I'm creating software that makes sound. I'm usually creating algorithms that have natural organic shape to the beautiful patterns that come out. I had figure out how to do all this mathematically and make it too easy. So there is an interesting parallel there.

Then when I started painting I noticed that as I'm just staring at the painting and I'm putting or here in a very subconscious and nonintellectual way trying to find a sense of balance where nothing bothered me… you know, when you're getting that feeling that something's not right here and I'm not happy and I don't know what to do about it yet but… And it's the same when I write; when I can play the entire piece through and nothing bothers me, I know it's finished; yet if something bothers me, then there's more work to be done. It's an interesting parallel that no matter what the medium is, the same procedure applies for me. Essentially when I'm not irritated, it's finished. It's just identifying the little thing that's right there that's not working.

While we're on the subject of composition, let's just stay there. What inspires you to compose?
Hmmm. (silence)

Do you write to deadlines?
I do that of course as life goes on, and as people pay me to write I have to be able to write to deadlines- and I can do that, especially right up to the deadline. I'll often wait until the stress is enormous. It's just the way I work and it works rather well for me, but in terms of inspiration as just a personality trait, I've always wanted to create the unique thing. Even as a child I always wanted to make something that no one had ever seen before or heard before. It's just this desire to express, create and communicate. I think that's where it comes from.

That need is never lost, I think partly because I can't express myself in words. It seems like when I do articulate my thoughts, they're mainly from my intellectual center- not always but that's the part that dominates in my speaking. So I can't really express fine details of emotion or experience. I just find that very hard, but music being so nonverbal... Certainly there is syntax and the qualities of language in some respects but at least I don't use my verbal center so much I'm able to articulate very fine shades of emotion and feeling and very complex ones that I couldn't begin to explain in words. That's really why I write.

Once you've begun a piece, do you sit down for 2-4 hours a day or just when lightning strikes?
I'm not a disciplined person. I don't do things in a regular manner. If I have a commission or a deadline, then I'll do it because the clock is ticking. I love to work and learn. I'm really autodidactic but I'm not a Hayden who composes every day. In that period, you would write every day for x number of hours- I'm just not that personality type.

Christopher Parkening and John Williams have played your pieces. Did you just meet them in the scope of your travels or how did those connections happen?
Well, speaking of Spain, which I love by the way- I'm going to be teaching near Barcelona in May and I'm going to try to teach in Spanish. My Spanish is not that great. I can express my needs and if people don't talk too fast I can often understand them. I don't want to rely on an interpreter; I would rather teach in Spanish. I'll be in a town called Mozón. I've been in that area but I'm not sure where that is.

The first time I went to Europe I lived there for a good long while and I went to a festival in Cordoba where John Williams was teaching. And he was teaching ensemble so a buddy joined me and we played through some Tchaikovsky arrangements, which I had done for two guitars, an entire suite. So I hit it off with John Williams, He really liked it a lot. Ben Verdery knew I was writing some solo stuff that was all very new then- this was around 1986; he said, "Why don't you play on this afternoon's concert, do a couple of pieces?" So I played "Muir Woods" and "Sunburst". "Muir Woods" wasn't really Williams' cup of tea but he was really taken with "Sunburst". He even told me, "I don't know if I could play that." Are you kidding? Of course it's hard for a lot of players but for a good player it's not nearly as hard as it sounds.

I've heard that Williams can sight read almost anything.
Great sight reader! He really is… I hadn't written it out yet though I had recorded it so when I got back home I wrote out and sent it to him. He toured around with it for a while and ended up recording it.

I had known Chris for a while and he had asked me to write "Evening Dance" for him as a duet, which I did and we'd gotten together and kind of worked it out. I wrote it but he wasn't happy with the ending, and I didn't want to change it but then I thought, "Ok, why not try it?" I wrote another ending and then I wasn't happy with second one. It was too involved. So I wrote the final ending- which is what we have today. Chris really liked that piece and recorded it beautifully with David Brandon.

Then a couple of years later Chris was doing a record with Kathleen Battle. I actually wrote some songs for them for an album called Angels Glowing. They were inundated with material but because I knew Chris they read through my stuff and Kathleen liked one of the songs I wrote but it supposedly didn't make the final cut. That's ok. I've still got them and some day I'll record them. What did happen was that Chris had one solo spot [on the album] and wanted to do "Sunburst" and asked me to write an introduction to personalize it for him, which I did, and he ended up recording it under the name "Jubilation".

You're a soloist now.
I have been all along!

The quartet essentially has been four soloists who come together to play in an ensemble. We're all very much soloists. John [Dearman] hasn't really played solo career-wise but he's certainly capable of it. When I knew him in college, he was great. People would go out of their way to hear him play. As an individual, he's very sensitive. He's the only one in the group who didn't pursue a solo career as well.

The other three all had quite active solo careers and one of the many reasons I left was so I would have more time- because I was giving up a lot of interesting projects because the quartet was so busy on the road so much. It was a nice problem to have, but I wanted to move into new territory and it's not like I'm becoming a soloist, I'm just allowing myself more opportunities to do more solo projects. I'm sure your repertoire is totally different now. How do you keep it interesting for yourself, or choose a repertoire for a new concert season?

I pretty much have devoted to myself to doing my own pieces. As the years go by and I have a greater library of work that I've written, it gives me a lot more to choose from in different styles, so I'm able to put together really strong programs. It takes time to write good music, as you know. I'm in a nice spot in my life where I have a lot of material- and then I supplement it; I still love to play Bach. I often do one of the cello suites- the one in C Major and tune like a cello. It's just fantastic. I love playing that piece. Now and then I'll throw in a piece by Couperin or maybe Vince Guaraldi- "Linus and Lucy"- something for fun.

But primarily I just want to do my own music. There are too many guys. I don't want to be a David Russell. Who needs another David Russell? He does it perfectly. There are a lot of guys out there who are astoundingly good at playing the traditional repertoire and also new repertoire and I don't want to be in that genre; I want to be something new- the same idea I've had since I was a kid- I want to do my music. That's where I've stood. You make your choices as an artist and that's the choice that I've made. I love David Russell. He's really an artist who happens to play guitar. It's great that he's doing that, and I want to do what I do. I like the idea of finding where you need to be, and I can do something unique and no one can write music like me, so I want to play it!

To be continued in May...