FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                         March 4, 2018

BACH FROM MUMBAI & CAGE ON GUITAR

American guitar virtuoso Aaron Larget-Caplan returns to San Francisco for a one-night-only performance of ReImaginationS at the Center For New Music on Saturday April 7 at 7pm, 55 Taylor Street in San Francisco, Tenderloin neighborhood.

ReImaginationS explores keyboard works arranged for solo guitar by J.S. Bach and John Cage. The Cage compositions are from his early and mid-career, that vary from simple contrapuntal forms (Round, Canon) to dance works influenced by composer Erik Satie and Japanese music and aesthetics: spacious, modal and lyrical. Larget-Caplan’s arrangements were recently published by Edition Peters, and seek to explore the timbre qualities of the guitar and the spirit of the 20^th century American icon. They are the first sanctioned arrangements for guitar.

Indian-American composer Vineet Shende (Bowdoin College) reimagined J.S. Bach through the prism of him being born in Mumbai, India in his Preludes from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Shende’s ‘Carnatic Preludes, After J.S. Bach’ rewrite them in South Indian Carnatic musical language using ragas (modes/scales), as well as tala (shifts in rhythmic groupings and metric modulations), which often play an analogous role to what harmonic tension/release does in Western music. The three Carnatic Preludes on the program are paired with Larget-Caplan’s artistic transcriptions of the original keyboard preludes for guitar. The musical collaboration is a true fusion of musical cultures between India & European classical music, and the musical epochs of the 18th and 21st centuries. All of the compositions featured are California premieres!

Larget-Caplan is on a solo 2-week 10-concert tour on the west coast that takes him from Los Angeles and Bakersfield through the Bay Area and Sacramento, before he heads to Oregon. “I am very excited to be returning to C4NM and the Bay Area. The Bay Area is a perfect metaphor for my artistic imagination of various cultures positively influencing each other, living side-by-side and sharing in their arts. The Center for New Music is a gem and an important part of sharing in the cultural fabric that classical music often forgets to do or keeps in academia. I look forward to premiering these works with the SF community!”

ABOUT THE ARTIST & ARRANGER
Noted for his “astounding technical proficiency and artistic delicacy” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer, Aaron Larget-Caplan is an international recording and touring guitarist, as well as an outlier in the classical music community. He often performs new music in rural and non-academic venues for people of all-ages, he has premiered over 75 compositions with many being written for him, and regularly highlights composers of non-western backgrounds in his concerts. Aaron’s arrangements of the music of John Cage are published by Edition Peters, and a recording dedicated to John Cage on guitar will be released in 2018 on Stone Records (UK). Stone, Albany, and Parma Records issue his solo and chamber recordings. He is on faculty at University of Massachusetts Boston and formerly Boston Conservatory.

Video Introduction of the John Cage Collection (2’): https://youtu.be/vJdTXTcxJfE
Center For New Music: www.CenterForNewMusic.com
Artist info: www.ALCGuitar.com • info@ALCGuitar.com
C4NM Contact: Kurt Rohde, kurtrohde@dslextreme.com
C4NM Event Page: http://centerfornewmusic.com/calendar/reimaginations-cage-shende-bach-on-guitar-aaron-larget-caplan/
Audio of Carnatic Prelude N. 1: https://soundcloud.com/aaronlcguitar/shende-carnatic-prelude-1

CALENDAR LISTING

Saturday April 7 at 7pm • San Francisco, CA
ReImaginationS – Cage, Shende & Bach on Guitar
Aaron Larget-Caplan, guitar
Admission: $10 Members • $15 General • Door or Online
Where: Center for New Music, 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
Info: (415) 275-C4NM (2466)
Info: www.centerfornewmusic.com/?p=4126
FBevent: www.facebook.com/events/141279946502125/

Recent Sheet Music Releases: John Cage, Spanish Renaissance Music for Guitar, and Raúl Maldonado

John Cage
Piano Music Arranged for Guitar
(arr. Aaron Larget-Caplan)
Editions Peters, 20 pp.

Aaron Larget-Caplan is fast becoming perhaps the greatest guitar advocate for the music of John Cage (1912–1992). Having previously arranged Cage’s Six Melodies (originally written for violin and piano) for violin and guitar, he has now put together a collection of Cage piano pieces arranged for solo guitar. As Larget-Caplan notes, the collection “features five early and mid-career compositions by John Cage, dating from 1933 through 1948. . . The compositions required little adjustment from the originals, mainly in the form of register modifications, and fit very well on the guitar. All phrase and dynamic markings follow the published originals. Very few left and right hand fingerings are included in the publication, to allow the performers their own realizations. All of the works retain their original keys and are presented in chronological order.”

If you still think of Cage as either a peculiar modernist or wispy minimalist (or both), you will probably be surprised by the warm and sonorous nature of many of these pieces. In its piano version, for example, In a Landscape, almost sounds like it could be a lovely evocation of a Japanese woodblock print, with its delicate, unfolding melody and elegant and mesmerizing short scalar runs, which resemble a koto in parts. Two of the Three Easy Pieces (all very short) look back at Baroque and/or early classical music. Dream (watch below) is quiet, tender, contemplative. The other two works are “A Room” and “Chess Pieces,” each interesting and attractive as piano works, and no doubt on guitar as well.  —Blair Jackson 

The first review of CAGE – PIANO MUSIC ARRANGED FOR GUITAR!!

Thanks to Julio J. Sequeira and the quarterly MU PHI EPSILON (ΜΦΕ) Triangle.

READ IT ONLINE: http://online.fliphtml5.com/tuhv/dvrd/#p=10