New York Guitar Seminar at Mannes - Brazil & Beyond

by Julia Crowe

(Article originally printed in Classical Guitar Magazine, December 2004 issue.)

The sounds of Brazilian music marked the theme of this year's New York Guitar Seminar, held from 6-10 July at Mannes College of Music. Artistic directors Michael Newman and Laura Oltman presented five full days of classes and concerts with a focus on well-known Brazilian composers and performers, including Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Fabio Zanon, Mario Ulloa, Celso Machado and Arthur Kampela. The composer Alexandre de Faria was unable to attend at the last minute, due to an unexpected illness in his family. The programme concluded with a final Saturday ensemble concert by the participants, which was open to the public.

"It's been an absolute thrill for us to have guitar lovers travel from all over the world to join us at Mannes College in New York City for the fourth year of the seminar," Michael Newman says. "People came from New Zealand, Scotland, England, Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Canada and from throughout the United States.

"Laura and I have been in love with Brazilian music for years - starting with playing Villa-Lobos and Luis Bonfá at age ten - but once we actually traveled to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador and up the Amazon River to Manaus, we were completely hooked. From the start of the New York Guitar Seminar at Mannes four years ago, we hoped to bring many of our Brazilian friends to New York, as the depth and diversity of Brazilian culture and its musical styles is so profound. Finally having the opportunity this year was very exciting and immensely gratifying for us."

Oltman added: "When visiting Brazil I was especially impressed by how different the culture generally is from that of the US, despite a history of some shared experiences like the importation of Africans for slaves and the collision between Europeans and Amerindians. For example, in Salvador, there is a lot of public art, like statues and fountains, depicting deities of West African religious traditions. You don't see that in North America. Certain aspects of African cultures seem to have survived more intact in Brazil. We wanted the seminar to give participants some sense of the unique musical and cultural elements that come together to form Brazilian music."

This year, the seminar reached its capacity of 50 participants, including auditors, who were able to perform in master classes selected in advance with Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Fabio Zanon, Mario Ulloa, Arthur Kampela, Frederic Hand, Michael Newman and Laura Oltman. "We have seen exponential growth in attendance but we're striving to keep this event small so that everyone can get the full benefit of a hands-on experience," Newman says.

The programme offered a core of classes that define the teaching philosophy at Mannes College of Music, which focuses on developing a strong foundation in the Techniques of Music program (basics of music education), including Ear Training Skills for Sight Reading Proficiency, taught by Stanley Dorn and a return of Approach to Analysis, taught by Srdjan Berdovic. Other classes offered this year included Stress Management and Yoga, taught by Robin Rigby. A physiotherapist, she taught various breathing control techniques combined with stretching and modified yoga positions designed to alleviate performance stress and anxiety.

Fabio Zanon lectured on Villa-Lobos and Beyond: Nationalist Guitar Music in Brazil, educating listeners with a comprehensive overview of Brazilian history, it's regional music influences and composers from the 1500s through to the present. Celso Machado offered a Rhythms of Brazil workshop, demonstrating samba rhythms and patiently chalking out rhythm notations. Corey Christiansen of Mel Bay Publications returned this year with his well-received Guitar Fingerboard Theory from the Jazz Perspective. Chris Park, who teaches theory at Mannes, offered Understanding Villa-Lobos, a fascinating look at the distinctive forms within several of Villa-Lobos' compositions compared with a Debussy prelude, a Chopin mazurka and a Mozart piano sonata. The Composer Arthur Kampela provided a discussion of The Tapping Technique: An Invention for Contemporary Guitar. He demonstrated a variety of tonal and percussive discoveries that he incorporates into his compositions, including how to play the guitar with a polystyrene cup, a spoon, pencils, chopsticks, spring coils and a ping-pong ball that is not cut up and glued to the underside of a fingernail.

A Young Artist master class was held on the fifth day of the seminar for ten young students, ranging from ages six to 14, and taught by Michael Newman, Laura Oltman and Mariano Aguirre. They offered a charming sight, parading through the hallway with aplomb, some with guitars no bigger than a hairbrush. Laura Oltman said: "This programme will expand next year because we're finding there is a demand for high level learning for very advanced young players."

An audience of nearly 1,000 turned out for the four evenings of faculty concerts, which began with the Newman & Oltman Guitar Duo and Celso Machado. The duo performed Brazilian pieces by Luiz Simas, Ernesto Nazareth, and Pxinguinha, along with the New York premiere of Lowell Liebermann's Nocturne-Fantasy, Opus 69. Celso Machado joined them on percussion for three of his compositions, Bolinhas de Queijo, Sambalanço and Xaranga do V?v?.

In his first ever New York performance, Machado performed eight lively and original compositions-Depois de Años, Varal, Corpo, Boliviana, Parazula, Katapa and A Felicidade-before invoking audience participation in a magical evocation of the sounds of a Brazilian rainforest through the use of rattles, whistles and the audience's clapping to recreate a realistic-sounding rainstorm and scatter of birds and animals.

Frederic Hand performed several of his arrangements, including two "Arie Antiche" by Marco Cesti, Five Sephardic Songs and his Desert Sketch, Waltz for Maurice and Trilogy (third movement). Fabio Zanon followed with an intense performance of Francisco Mignone's Six Studies, a world premiere of Alexandre de Feria's Prelude No. 2: Death of Desire and Ronaldo Miranda's Appassionata.

The following evening's concert featured Terry Champlin playing several of his original compositions, accompanied by voice and guitar with his wife, Helen Avakian and violinist Earl Maneein. Carlos Barbosa-Lima dazzled the audience with a lively program of his arrangements, ranging from composers Pernambuco, Nazareth, Barrios, Cordero, Dominguez, Barroso, Jobim and Alfredo de Rocha Vianna Jr.

The last evening concert opened with the debut of The Guitar Project, four young guitarists from Baltimore and New York who perform against a multimedia backdrop of dazzling visual effects. They gave the world premiere of Bryan Johanson's No Yoicking Gabbling, Quothing and treated the audience to projected close-ups of the unusual objects-pencils, chopsticks ping pong balls, polystyrene cups and a spoon-all required to perform Arthur Kampela's Polimetria.

Once the stage was cleared of scrim, ladders and wires, Mario Ulloa, an international competition winner on faculty at the University of Salvador de Bahia, sat down on a simple seat and footstool for his first New York concert. He played a rousing set of Brazilian pieces, including his arrangements of Dorival Caymmi's Four Peças Brasileiras and Wellington Gomes's Rondando, a piece dedicated to Ulloa.

The 5th New York Guitar Seminar at Mannes: El Maestro/The Tradition of the Masters will take place June 29 - July 3, 2005 at Mannes College of Music, New York, New York. The focus of the upcoming seminar will be pedagogy in the guitar world, and will pay tribute to Bruce Holzman, teacher of many of America's top competition winners, concert artists, and university professors. Performers and teachers scheduled to teach and perform at the seminar will include Mannes faculty Michael Newman, special guests Eliot Fisk and Ricardo Iznaola, and Holzman students Laura Oltman, Ricardo Cobo, Adam Holzman, Michael Chapdelaine, Lily Afshar, William Carter, Stephen Robinson, Leo Welch, Roger Allen Cope, Oren Fader, Matthew Dunne, among others. For more information visit the website at www.mannes.edu/guitar.