Guitar Sessions: Who or what events inspired you to play the guitar?
Joseph Thompson: My earliest memory of a strong musical experience was listening to a music box on top of my mother's dresser drawer. I remember, as a young child, going back to it repeatedly to listen to those tiny little notes. On my tiptoes, I was just barely able to raise the lid of the music box to start the music. The tune was the old classic popular song by Irving Berlin, "Always". I remember being able to actually see the notes.
GS: What did the notes look like? Were they in different colors?
JT: They appeared as tiny points of light that formed geometrical patterns. Each melodic interval would produce a different shape. It is funny- I never talked to anyone about this as a child. I thought everyone experienced music this way. I later learned I was having an experience called synesthesia. The word "anesthesia" means "no sensation"; "synesthesia" means "joined sensation". A "synesthete" is a person who gets input through one sense and experiences a sensation in a different sense; for example, a taste producing a sensation of shape.
GS: Do you still see those shapes when you listen to music?
JT: I don't see notes any longer when I hear music and I don't remember when it stopped happening. However, sometimes I still get a vague feeling of shapes when I have a powerful musical experience. I am a huge fan of the piano music of Glenn Gould, especially his playing of Bach. When the genius of Bach meets the genius of Gould, I can sometimes feel shapes in the patterns of the music. For as long as I can remember, I've had a really good ear for melody, melodic intervals and harmony. I believe this relates back to my initial experience of music as geometrical shapes. I have always thought geometrically on the guitar fingerboard, relating to the shapes created by the points where my left-hand fingers land on the grid of frets and strings and then relating these shapes to the resultant tones and harmonies.
GS: Was music or the classic guitar a part of your household when growing up?
JT: As a kid, I had no inkling of anything remotely related to classical guitar or even classical music. I lived in Phoenix, Oregon, a tiny town of 600 in southwestern Oregon next door to my Dad's gas station. I spent half my childhood on my bicycle exploring the wooded hills near my home and what seemed like the other half holding the flashlight for my dad as he dug into the grease and grime under the hood of somebody's old pickup truck. I had listened a lot to my older brother's record collection. He had a huge stack of 45's and a good-sized stack of 33's. I listened to his records way more than he did. It was mostly popular music from the 50's. The closest I had come to live music was my neighbor who had an accordion but I was warned, "Don't ever touch it!"
GS: How old were you when you began to play the guitar?
JT: I got my first guitar for Christmas in 1962 when I was 14. It was a beautiful red and black Harmony steel-string with f-holes and an elevated pick guard. It didn't come with lessons or a book or anything. I didn't even know how to tune it.
GS: What styles interested you when you first began to play?
JT: Around the time I got my first guitar I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. That was earthshaking for me. I wonder how many kids were impacted that night. I really loved their music. I'm still a big Beatle fan. Then a kid at school who had heard I had a new guitar asked me if I wanted to be in his band. I told him I didn't know how to play. He said that it didn't matter and so I joined the band. We practiced in my friend's garage. A guy named Rick Bolz used to come over to our practice sessions. He was older and knew more about rock 'n roll than we did and he would give us pointers.
I was the bass player, so I only had to play one note at a time. As it turns out, this was great ear training as well as an introduction to music theory because I had to figure out what notes sounded right with which chords. Later, due to personnel changes in the band, I became the lead singer as well. This was my introduction to counterpoint and how to manage two voices simultaneously. I also found that it was easy for me to learn songs from records. Nobody else in the band could do that, so I began learning the songs and teaching them to the rest of the band.
After a couple of years in the garage we played our first dance gig at our high school. A local booking agent, Harry Arnold was there and he hired us on the spot. He had a stable of about ten or twelve bands that he was able to keep working pretty regularly. We put a down payment on a Dodge van to carry our gear and ourselves and started playing regional dances every weekend on the road in the Pacific Northwest and down into northern California. This was 1964-65 and we were flying high. Still in high school and doing gigs on the road! The band's name was "The Changin' Tymes". That was the beginning of my professional career in music. We were a cover band. We didn't really do anything original. We did songs by The Beatles, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, and a lot of the San Francisco bands of that period.
GS: What teachers did you seek out or was there any method book that was particularly helpful?
JT: I was a late bloomer in my classical playing. I didn't have a teacher until later. The classical connection didn't happen until I was 19. An older friend, Tom Ryan, who was a drummer in another band, had been a music student at the local college. He played a recording of Pablo Casals performing the Bach cello suites for me. I had never heard anything like it. It was mesmerizing. Then he played a recording of the Brahms Cello and Piano Sonata in E minor. Listening to the music on those two records changed my life. Tom told me I would need a guitar and said it was better if it had nylon strings. I quit the band, hawked my electric bass and amp and he helped me pick out a Giannini classical guitar for $99.
Tom had all kinds of books on music theory, music history and the lives of the great composers. I spent a lot of time poring over those books and listening to all of his classical records: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. I discovered that the local music store had only one classical guitar book and I bought it. It was Matteo Carcassi's famous Guitar Method and, with my mishmash of a guitar technique, I started learning some of the pieces in it. Tom told me the best way to learn to read music was to compose music, so I started writing music for guitar, secretly pretending I was one of those great composers, trying to make sounds like what I was hearing on Tom's records and trying some of the things I was reading about in his books. It was the winter of 1968-69, I was 20 years old and I knew that the rest of my life would be totally committed to music. Tom was really important in getting my head turned in the direction of classical music.
GS: So how did you go about getting your formal music training?
JT: My formal music training and my informal training are so closely interwoven that it is hard to talk about one without talking about the other. It was around this same time- early 1969- that I sought out a guitar teacher that could show me more about how to play. I found a man in the larger neighboring town of Ashland, Oregon named Bernard Windt. Mr. Windt, a kindly giant of a man, was really a cellist who knew a good deal about classical guitar and about classical music in general. He was a composer and a builder of guitars and other instruments. He was also the music director for Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It was a bus ride and a two-mile walk to my lessons but I found a teacher who showed interest in my compositions and made suggestions about how they could be improved. He made note of the guitar technique I had cobbled together and suggested that, at some point, we might want to talk about it.
I immediately liked him, with his easygoing style and his gentle and encouraging manner. As I sat in his home teaching studio and admired his vast library of books and manuscripts and instruments, I had the feeling that I had finally arrived home. This was the beginning of my formal education in composition and guitar but it wasn't to last long. After my fourth lesson with Mr. Wendt, I received my draft notice and was inducted into the U. S. Army. I ended up working as a finance clerk at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
GS: You know, I also studied guitar with Mr. Windt. I don't believe I ever told you that he mentioned you and your compositional gifts, as well as your being drafted into the U.S. Army.
JT: The Army put my music studies on hold for almost two years. I had a mountain of pent-up energy and desire to begin my music studies and practice. When I enrolled in Southern Oregon College in Ashland, Oregon, I learned to my huge disappointment that the music program did not offer guitar as an instrument of study. Back then, it was rare for any school to recognize classical guitar as a serious instrument. So I was a piano major my first two years in school. I worked hard at my piano studies over those two years putting in many hours of practice. As a result, I'm quite comfortable reading a piano score on guitar. Also reading guitar in bass clef is easy. I think any serious guitar student should learn to read in bass clef. The Bach cello suites are a great place to start.
GS: Mel Bay author Johnny Smith would agree with you about guitarists reading bass clef.
JT: I continued to work on my guitar practice on my own and I started hanging out at a place called "The Pillars", a coffeehouse in downtown Ashland. It was one of those wonderful Old World places with creaky wood floors, a wood stove in the corner, people playing chess, poetry readings and a nightly folk music scene. I missed performing and decided to work up a repertoire of folk songs and see if I could strum and sing my way into a job. My plan worked and I became a guitar strumming, coffeehouse folksinger doing songs of Bob Dylan, Donovan, and some of the Beatles and Byrds songs from my rock and roll past.
As I learned new classical pieces, I would include them in my repertoire. So a typical set could go from Dylan's, "Blowin' in the Wind" to Bach's "Bourée in e minor", to Country Joe's "Fixin' to Die Rag", to a Sor study. In the summer of 1971, I played two nights a week at the coffeehouse. It was a quiet local crowd until the Shakespeare Theatre let out. Then the tourists would flood in and the joint would really start jumping. I began to make friends who had a mutual interest in music. Among the many friends from that summer was a fellow who was taking classical guitar lessons from my old guitar teacher, Bernard Windt. That was you Steve, well before you went to Barcelona, Spain to study the guitar.
That was fate working to our mutual benefit.
One afternoon that summer, I was playing at the Pillars when you walked in with a fellow I had never met before. I took a break and sat down with you only to learn that your friend was the great classical guitarist and lutenist, Karl Herreshoff. I had heard of Karl but had never met him. He had been touring the U.S. out of New York City, traveling with two instruments. He played the first part of his program on the Baroque lute and the second part on classical guitar. He had made quite a name for himself as a member of an early incarnation of the Paul Winter Consort, appearing in concerts and on two of the Winter Consort albums. He was in Ashland for two weeks playing concerts with the Peter Britt Music Festival. Karl liked Ashland a lot and found our Pillars Coffeehouse a great place to hang out. The three of us spent a lot of time together during those two weeks.
I attended Karl's concerts that summer and, for the first time, heard a true concert guitarist in action. After hearing Karl play, I knew this was what I wanted to do. One day over coffee, I told Karl that I had especially liked the three modern pieces on his program by Pierre LaVal that had been named after three American cities. I think they were "New York", "Nashville" and "Chicago". He smiled and said that they were his improvisations. As I tried to digest that piece of information, I told him that I had also especially enjoyed the unusual "Prelude and Dance" by George Enesco. This wonderful piece was in 7/8 time. He said that was also an improvisation.
Karl must have seen the puzzlement on my face because he explained that while he liked to improvise in his concerts, when he did- the published reviews were consistently critical of his improvisations. So he decided to make up titles and composers for certain areas of his programs and then use those spots to improvise. After this adjustment, the critics praised him for his innovative programming of modern music. Sometimes, as much as half of his program consisted of improvisations. Karl had also spent time in India and later studied the classical music of India at the Ali Akbar Khan School of Indian Music in Marin County, California. Consequently, most of his concerts included extended Indian Ragas performed on classical guitar. Karl Herreshoff's concerts were always a grand adventure in music.
I would have liked to study with Karl but I wasn't prepared to move to New York City. Instead, I moved to San Francisco in search of a teacher. Through a remarkable set of coincidences, I was sitting with a number of other guitar players at a table in a Spanish restaurant (La Bodega) on Grant Street when Karl Herreshoff walked in the door and sat down at the same table. Karl had just moved back to San Francisco from New York and that very evening I became his student. This chain of events confirms the wisdom of the Zen expression, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."
Lessons with Karl were an adventure in life. I remember Karl once playing at the Marigold Café on 9th Avenue in San Francisco. The great Michael Lorimer was teaching at the S. F. Conservatory at the time. He had heard about Karl's playing and showed up at the Marigold to check him out. In the middle of his performance, Karl introduced one of his fictitious composers and titles and played one of his improvisations. Michael's wide eyes never left Karl's hands. After Karl had finished, Michael asked where he could get a copy of the sheet music and Karl said, "I think it's out of print."
GS: What role has arranging played in your development as a musician?
JT: Well, I've done a ton of arrangements: Bach, Telemann, O'Carolan, Gershwin, Fats Waller, Piazzolla, Brahms, Bartok, Jobim- the list goes on and on. I've got stacks and stacks of stuff, mostly for solo guitar but also guitar with flute or violin, and a lot of two and three-guitar things. Back in Bach's time and even earlier, one method of training people in the art of music was to have them write out the works of the great composers. The theory was that they would learn through a kind of osmosis. My experience has been that there is a lot of truth to that. I've transcribed over 100 of Bach's Chorale Preludes for guitar with flute, two guitars with flute and two guitars. As a result, I have a much stronger feel for counterpoint, voice leading, and harmony. It has helped me to think vertically and horizontally at the same time. The process of working out all of the guitar fingerings for them has given me a greater awareness of the variety of solutions possible for any given fingering situation. The impact of all that work on my composition has been huge.
GS: Have you ever had to weather a creative dry spell in your playing or composition? If so, how did you overcome it?
JT: I have creative dry spells when I lose patience with myself. When I'm composing or arranging, I have discovered that if I work with a musical idea for a while, enough to get my mind really involved with it and then leave it alone- just walk away from it and do something else- my brain keeps grinding away at it. If I come back to the idea within the next 24 hours, I can move the idea forward and develop it in interesting ways.
If I wait too long to come back to it, then the creative impetus my brain generated dissipates and there is nothing to come back to. I have walked away from a composition with great frustration at not being able to find a solution to a particular problem, only to come back later, sit down and have the solution appear as if by magic. This has happened to me so many times that I don't question it anymore. I use it as a tool. I call it "working to the edge of frustration" because when I get to that edge, I know it is time to walk away and let my brain find the next step. In fact, I've learned to seek out that edge. If I have a dry spell, it is either impatience or laziness.
GS: Is there anything on your wish list as far as equipment or instruments?
JT: About three years ago I bought a Richard Howell guitar. It is a spruce top classical with Indian rosewood back and sides. Howell is a luthier in Mornington, Australia. He works out of a small shop and produces one guitar at a time using mostly hand tools. This guitar is my dream guitar. I've always had this sound in my head of what a really great guitar tone would sound like, but was never able to produce it to my satisfaction, or even believe it would be possible. I've always liked my sound but had never really loved it. When I heard this guitar, I just had to have it. It has been a revelation to me. I absolutely love the tone I am able to produce now. I have my guitar, now I'm happy. Richard Howell's website is: http://www.users.bigpond.com/howellguitars/
GS: You work as one-third of a guitar trio as well; tell me about that. Have you had other interesting collaborations?
JT: Over the years, I've done concerts with singers, flutists, violinists, and a cellist as well as other guitarists. Because the classical guitar is a relatively quiet instrument, it can be difficult to find a dynamic balance with instruments other than another guitar. The guitar trio is great fun. We call it "The Dark Rose Trio" and we've played a fair number of concerts in the two years we have been together. There is a lot of music for two and four guitars, but not much for three. I think three is a good number for keeping everyone in the ensemble playing interesting things. I've arranged most of our repertoire and I like the instant gratification of getting to hear a new arrangement at the next rehearsal. I was also a member of a group called "Baroque Invasion", playing the bass line and reading bass clef. That was also a great experience. We played mostly trio sonatas. Then I was a member of an electronic music improvisation trio called "Trapezium" in which I played my MIDI guitar. We played improvised space music concerts of music from the Orion Nebula.
GS: Coming back to earth, do you teach or act as a musical mentor?
JT: Yes, teaching has been an important source of income for over thirty-five years. I have a private teaching studio in downtown Ashland. My students range in age from 8 to 75 years of age. I remember when I was coming up in this area, there just wasn't much information available to someone interested in the classical guitar. All of that has changed now. My philosophy is that music is central to our humanity and everyone has a right to explore his or her own musical nature. I enjoy helping people open up that opportunity for themselves. I do insist on technical excellence with my students so we pay a lot of attention to the basics, such as: posture, hand positions, relaxation, tone production, and sight reading. The guitar society meetings have been an inspiration for my students because they get to perform. They also get to see their fellow students in action and compare notes. A number of student ensembles have formed out of the society.
GS: What keeps you interested in the music business?
JT: That fact that I've never been interested in the business end of music has been an ongoing problem all of my musical life. I tend to be drawn to music projects that don't generate much income. But, I've never lost my passion for exploring my own musicality. I just love creating music, whether it is playing, arranging or composing. When I'm not being musical in some way, I feel physically uncomfortable and awkward.
I think "passion" is the answer to your question, although sometimes when people are passionate about something, it can look like an obsession- like practicing for eight hours a day. I don't think that is healthy to do over a long period of time, but I think many great players have had a period in their development when they did just that. I know I did. From the outside, that can look like an obsession. I think this kind of perception is a problem in our society, not in the individual. Generally, society doesn't acknowledge passion very readily. Passionate people tend to get a bit unruly and difficult to manage.
GS: How has your family affected your music?
JT: My wife, Marcy, is a poet. She has a wonderful understanding of what it means to be a working artist. We live and work really well together. We are able to support each other and stay out of each other's way when the creative urge takes hold. Many days, we are both working at the same time in our home in adjacent studio spaces and we wander out to warm our coffee or whatever and bump into each other and check on how the work is going and then wander back into our own space. I feel very lucky to be in a relationship with this wonderful woman.
GS: Apart from music, what are your interests?
JT: I've had a passion for the game of golf for about 25 years. It is difficult to describe why it is such an interesting game. If you explain it to a golfer, they're saying, "Yeah, yeah- right!" But if you try to explain it to a non-golfer, you just sound stupid. The highlight of my golf life was playing a couple of rounds with [Scottish virtuoso guitarist] David Russell and my friend Steven Novacek after the Northwest Guitar Festival in Seattle about seven or eight years ago. David is such an easy going and approachable fellow. On the golf course, he was just one of the guys. Oh, and by the way, he is an outstanding golfer.
GS: What musical avenues do you wish to explore in the future?
JT: Music composition. I enjoyed composition in my early days in music. My composing has been very sporadic over the intervening years because I've been too busy making a living in music. On the other hand, I feel like I've done enough arrangements and transcriptions to earn a couple of doctorate degrees. I've always thought I would get back to it. In the last year, I made a commitment to write a new solo guitar piece every month for the entire year and then play it at our local guitar society's monthly meeting. And I did it! Some months I had two new pieces to play. So I now have a collection of about 16 new compositions that I really enjoy playing.
On another front, a guitarist friend of mine and I started the Jefferson Classical Guitar Society a little over three years ago. It is amazing to me the way it has grown. There is something unique about bringing the energy of people together in a common cause, such as a love for the classical guitar. It has become much more than the sum of its parts. The whole purpose of the society has been to create a nurturing space for classical guitarists and classical guitar lovers to come together. We meet once a month and play for each other. It has been a great opportunity for area students and amateurs as well as for professionals to work on their performance skills in a non-threatening environment and share the things they have been working on. Classical guitarists tend to be musical hermits and not spend time with other musicians. But when they get a taste of sharing music and ideas, they can't get enough of it. The "Dark Rose Trio" was actually an outgrowth of the guitar society.
The guitar society has recently started a concert and master class series. We had Michael Partington in October of 2004 and Martha Masters in January of 2005. Jason Vieaux will be here in March. It has been an exhilarating experience to spend time with these outstanding artists and to see where the next generation is taking the classical guitar. Martha Masters recently did a master class for us. She is plugged into the guitar world at a very high level and is one of the best guitar teachers I have ever seen in a master class setting. It was great for my students because she reinforced so many of the basic concepts that I teach. It was great for me to get confirmation from such a fine player that I am on the right track as a teacher. From our perspective here in Ashland, Oregon, the classical guitar tradition is alive and well. For any of your readers who would like to see what we have been up to, I built a website for the society at: http://www.JeffersonGuitar.org
I love being a part of a small, friendly, artistically vibrant community. I love the idea of a "local culture" as distinguished from a mass media culture. Sometimes I play my own pieces on a locally built guitar for a local crowd. For me, that is as good as it gets. That makes our music different from that of the next village over the hill. I have memories of this place that go back over 50 years and I know older locals who share stories that stretch back even further. These memories are associated with this place and are part of the fabric that makes up our "local culture". Not that the big cities aren't exciting places to be. Just that it is good to remember, in many regards, you can go home again.
GS: Thank you for that insight on what guitar life can be like in a small town.
JT: My pleasure, Steve.
To learn more about Joseph Thompson and the Jefferson Classical Guitar Society, please see the society's website at: http://www.jeffersonguitar.org/.
If you wish to learn more about lutenist and guitarist Karl Frederick Herreshoff III, please visit Philip Hii’s tribute webpage at: http://www.philiphii.com/notes/herreshoff.html. A further link to Dr. Douglas Pressman’s touching memoir regarding Karl Herreshoff is available from this page.
