On Sunday November 20th at Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Dorchester, I had the pleasure of collaborating on an exciting program of chamber music for Convergence Ensemble with three wonderful musicians: violinist Heidi Braun-Hill, violist Michelle LaCourse, cellist Hyun-Ji Kwon, and myself. 

Strings Galore featured music duos with guitar for violin, viola, and cello by John Cage, Antonio Celso Ribeiro, and Thomas L. Read, as well two quartets for strings and guitar by Roland Dyens and Libby Larsen. A trio by Beethoven, and two guitar solos by Bach and yours truly rounded out the program.

Directed by Rachel Goodwin, Convergence Ensemble seeks to stimulate, support, and inspire stronger connections within and between New England communities through chamber music concerts and community enrichment programs. 

This was my first collaboration with Convergence Ensemble and the musician, and it was awesome!

Rarely do I have the pleasure of sharing 40min of chamber music, and relatively new chamber music, in a single concert. 

Huge thanks to Rachel Goodwin, Rose Hegel, and the Convergence Ensemble board for organizing the concert.

To the composers and friends Antonio Celso Ribeiro and Thomas L. Read, and to the lovely musicians who were gems to create music with.

We will be performing more, so stay tuned!

Microphone by Your Heaven Audio. Guitar strings by Hannabach

After being asked what repertoire I was performing this fall, it became apparent that I needed to make a list. Some of these works are being repeated on multiple concerts, others presented by Now Musique series, many New Lullaby Project solos, and others are part of a tour in Southern California in November. I know there will be more, and I left off few encores and pieces I have’t quite committed to, but I’ll try to update. Many of the pieces are recorded or on youtube.

Did I forget anyone? If there is something you’d like to hear, leave a comment.

Repertoire Fall 2022

Roland Dyens – Tango en Skaï (1992)
Larget-Caplan – moving still (2021)
J.S. Bach – Prelude in C-major, WTC Bk 1 N. 1, BWV 846
Bach – A Small Prelude and Little Fugue BWV 926 & 961
Bach – God’s Time Is The Very Best Time, BWV 106
Tom Nazziola – Lull-a-by-the-sea (2021)
Dean Rosenthal – Sewing Piece (2021)
John Cage ­– In A Landscape* (1948)
Keigo Fujii – Legend of Hagoromo (1992)
John Johnstone – Blue Lullaby (2015)
Bach – Two small Preludes, BWV 924 & 930
Larget-Caplan – minding play (2022)
Ronald Pearl – Berceuse Inquiète (2021)
Brian Schober – Winter Lullaby (2021)
Scott Wheeler – Nachtlied (2009)
Lainie Fefferman – Carousel (2020)
Tom Flaherty – Steps & Leaps (2019)
Ian Wiese – Midnight Train (2021)
Gregory Biss – Lullaby (after Schumann) (2015)
Stefanie Lubkowski – Drifting (2018)
Dennis Bathory-Kitsz – Lullaby For Justin* (2022)
Larget-Caplan – TBA
Laurie Spiegel – Remembering (2020)
Anthony Green – Counting Backwards (2020)
Jim Dalton – World of Your Own (2012)
Michael Veloso – Little Dancer (2010)
Cutis Hughes – Lullibule (2020)
Francine Trester – Assortment!
Gershwin/Takemitsu – Summertime
Arlen/Takemitsu – Over the Rainbow
Larget-Caplan – sweet nuance (2022)
Bach – Chromatic Fantasy, BWV 903
Cage – Bacchanale (prepared guitar duo)
Vineet Shende – Carnatic Preludes, After J.S. Bach (2017, 2019)
Libby Larsen – Cajun Set (Quartet)
Thomas L. Read – Concert Champêtre (cello-guitar) (2013)
Antonio Celso Ribeiro – 3 Vintage Portraits (viola-guitar) (2018)
John Cage – Six Melodies (violin-guitar)
Ian Wiese – Seeketh Not His Own (2017)

*world premiere

One of my most popular videos, España Cañi by Pascual Marquina is a classical music standard, though not for guitar! Originally written for orchestra there are few transcriptions for guitar solo. I made this at the request of the phenomenal flamenco and bolero dancer Gabriela Granados.

This is the premiere performance in 2011 in Springfield, Massachusetts and filmed on point and shoot camera. Who knew it would take off!?

My arrangement has changed in a few places since 2011, but the energy and excitement of the music remains central to the realization. It combines classical and flamenco techniques into a serious solo. You can find scores (tab and standard notation) in my website STORE.

For the second year of concerts for Now Musique, I’m very excited to be returning to the concert stage with Chicago-base violist and passionate new music advocate Michael Hall. We will be performing in Dorchester, New York City, Boston, and Providence from March 19-24. We will also be performing on MIT Radio’s WMBR ‘Not Brahms and Liszt’ with Alley Stoughton on Monday March 16 and an interview for ‘Conducting Conversations’ with Mike Maino on WCRI will air March 22. The Boston and Providence programs are produced by my Now Musique. A complete tour schedule is below.

Q: Who is Michael Hall?
A: Simply, Michael Hall is a fantastic violist who lives in Chicago.
• More complex, Michael Hall is fantastic violist who lives in Chicago, loves contemporary, taught at Vandercook College, has a DMA from UNC Greensboro.
• Complex Truth, Michael Hall is fantastic violist who lives in Chicago, loves contemporary, taught at Vandercook College, has a DMA from UNC Greensboro, premiered over 50 works written for him, editor of contemporary music for viola, co-founded the Bandung Philharmonic – the first professional orchestra of Indonesia. A dad and husband.

Q: How do I find out more about him?
A: http://michaelhallviola.com/

Q: How did you two meet?
A: We met over new music on Twitter and then in person at the Boston “New Music Gathering”

Q: What are you performing?
A: ‘America’ – Contemporary duos & solos for viola and guitar by living composers. Each concert will have a slight variation due to program length.

PROGRAM (not order)
• Francine Trester: Borrowed Blue (2019)
• John Anthony Lennon: Infinite Arrow (2004)
• Darleen Mitchell: Images
• Thomas L. Read: Traveller’s Frolic* (2019)
• Antonio Celso Rebeiro: Melancholy Dressed in Yellow (2019)
• David Liptak: Freight – Guitar Solo
• Tom Flaherty: Steps and Leaps* – Guitar + Electronics (2019)
• Alice Shields: Sri Mata – Viola solo
• David Froom: Shades of Red – Viola solo
• Matthew Davidson: Magyar Rondo – Viola solo

Q: How Can I hear you two?
A: Youtube! Music & Interview

TOUR INFORMATION
Monday 3/16 – MIT Radio WMBR – 4pm, Live performance & interview
Thursday 3/19 – Dorchester, MA – 5:30-6:30, Upham’s Corner Library
Saturday 3/21 – New York City – 7:30pm, National Opera Center
Sunday 3/22 – WCRI – Conducting Conversation with Mike Maino
Sunday 3/22 – Boston, MA – 7:30pm, Arlington Street Church
Monday 3/23 – Providence, RI, – 6:30, The Music Mansion
Tuesday 3/24 – Boston, MA – 12:30-1pm, King’s Chapel
Complete information at Aaron’s Calendar

Bacchanale by John Cage

Prepared Piano intoPrepared Guitars

Bacchanale was Cage’s first piece for prepared piano. Finding that the stage was too small for both  dancer/choreographer Syvilla Fort and the needed battery of percussion, so Cage decided to fix weather stripping, bolts, screws and nuts into the strings of the piano to create a percussion ensemble, Fort, a colleague of Cage’s at Cornish College, asked for a composition of African inspiration. Only twelve notes are used in the piece, all of which are prepared. In the piano version preparation is predominantly weatherstripping and the performer is instructed to “determine position and size of mutes by experiment.

*click below to listen to Aaron & Adam Levin perform Bacchanale – track 14

Translating the preparations to the guitar posed a couple of challenges and I asked myself a few questions:

Q: Why prepare the strings at all, since the guitar will already not sound like a prepared piano?

A: I actually played the work completely as written with no preparations for a while. It fits on two guitars (guitar 1 = right hand, guitar 2 = left hand), without much adjustment, so I knew it was possible.

I was also not a big fan of prepared guitar with the works I had heard and seen in the past. At times I felt such works were more of an excuse to the performer to be seen as dramatic and serious. But, as I listened to more and more recordings of prepared piano and experienced the vast changes of timbre and percussion vs. piano sounds, I was inspired to experiment on my own.

Q: Isn’t guitar already considered a percussion instrument. 

A: Yes and no. A flamenco guitar has a much lower action (strings closer to the fret board), which allows the strings to hit the frets when played apoyando (reststroke) or rasgueado (flamenco strumming). In such case, yes, it is both melody and percussion.

A classical guitar has a higher action (strings further from the fret board), which allows for more timbre choice, louder individual notes, more resonance, and depending on the player, cleaner tone.

These are broad generalizations, and do not say one is better than the other. Each guitar represents a very different style of music and artists are aware of it.

As a side note, a recording engineer I work with originally didn’t want to record guitar, because to him it just sounds like a box with strings. I convinced him otherwise.

Q: What are some of the challenges of preparing the guitar? 

A: 1 – Gravity. If I clip something on to the strings and hold the guitar in the normal playing position those clips can easily flip towards the ground touching ‘higher’ strings or the wood of the soundboard. I also had to find a way to hold the substitute for weatherstripping in the strings without letting it fall out when being played.

2 – Only one string. Each note of the piano has three strings, so one can add a screw between two strings and not touch any other pitch.

3 – No slurs. Yes, if you do a left hand slur (hammer or pull off) the preparations don’t really sound.

4 – Nylon strings and no cast iron frame. Since the strings use much less tension weatherstripping will completely mute the string. I had to find a substitute that gave a percussive sound and a bit of pitch.

Q: When and where can I get the score?

A: Edition Peters will be publishing my arrangement in early 2019.

Piano Preparations

Guitar Preparations

Purchase the album on Amazon: http://a.co/d/1u6L6kk

Boston Musical Intelligencer
Review by Ian Wiese • OCTOBER 1, 2018

“Larget-Caplan stretched the limits of the sound of the guitar, experimenting with playing positions most others do not tend to use: sul tasto, sul ponticello, finger vs. nail, etc. It’s refreshing to hear and very rewarding.”

FULL REVIEW:
Introspection and catharsis abided on the Pickman Hall stage Saturday with Radius Ensemble’s “Solace,” an eclectic set of comforting pieces highlighting composers who suffered within or escaped from totalitarian regimes along with a pairing of two living composers, an underplayed oddity, and a titan of the repertoire. Eugene Kim on cello, Aaron Larget-Caplan on guitar, Megumi Stohs Lewis on violin, and Randall Zigler on bass, joined the core ensemble.

Osvaldo Golijov compiled the majority of Lullaby & Doina from the score he wrote for the 2000 movie The Man Who Cried, taking much from “Entendre Encore” (I still believe I hear) from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (the two different worlds met in the movie itself). Extracting score cues under the melody of “Entendre Encore,” Golijov constructed a decent hybrid of both composers’ styles, though he seemingly emphasized Bizet’s melody over his own material. Sarah Brady on flute and Eran Egozy on clarinet sounded like one instrument. The strings of Lewis, Noriko Futagami on viola, Kim, and Zigler supported the winds admirably and functioned well in the solos, especially Futagami, whose throaty C string playing complemented the clarinet well. The main star of the show, however, was Egozy. When he played, this reviewer paid full attention; his phrasing of the decidedly more folk-like and klezmer-like passages spoke to a deep understanding laid bare for everyone.

Eclogues, Op. 206 of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco sets an odd combination: flute, English horn, and guitar. Brady and Radius founder Jennifer Montbach on English horn joined Larget-Caplan in trotting out this underplayed set of bagatelles. Through the lynchpin of the flute, the strange combination of voices functioned pretty well. There were some cracks in the orchestration between the guitar and English horn, but that is not the performers’ faults. Brady and Montbach once again became a single voice, responding to one another lyrically and smoothly when in imitation and united as a single complex voice when in harmony. Larget-Caplan stretched the limits of the sound of the guitar, experimenting with other playing positions most others do not tend to use: sul tasto, sul ponticello, finger vs. nail, etc. It’s refreshing to hear and very rewarding. The piece itself, though, left a lot to be desired. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, despite having excellent melodies and a highly exploitable palette of timbres, instead crafted formulas to use over and over again: English horn states a phrase, flute responds, guitar plays like a piano and accompanies on chords. Rinse and repeat. The fourth movement broke the trend by reversing it, with much-needed freshness after stifling loops of the same ideas over and over.

Responding to the shooting of noted Islamic women’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai, Elena Ruehr (in attendance that evening) wrote Liftfor solo cello. It clearly had moved Miriam Bolkosky of the core ensemble. Before she set he bow on the strings, she discussed what the work meant to her, a visual sensation that reminded her of Yousafzai’s home she had to flee for speaking out. Though perhaps that sensation did not translate to the audience as well as she hoped, Bolkosky did an admirable job with the solo. The lower register material at times mirrored that of an organ or a choir, multiple voices resonating with the help of the cello to expand the instrument far beyond any perceived limitations. At times, it sounded as though there was more than one instrument playing in the lower registers, thanks to the power of the overtone resonance. The upper register, however, did not fair as well. What was intended to be lyrical sometimes came across as choppy, bow strokes cutting the smoothness of attack that the low register basked in. Some notes also took a moment to settle, Bolkosky needing a noticeable moment to lock them in. Despite these issues, Bolkosky delivered.

A firework of a piano trio rounded out the evening. Shostakovich’s incredibly personal and introspective Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 resonated with pianist Sarah Bob when she too became grief stricken (this reviewer cannot recall why), mirroring what Shostakovich felt upon the death of close friend Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky. Grief begetting grief. How appropriate. Lewis and Bolkosky, and Bob truly thundered, especially through the third and fourth movements, which became the brain and bite of the evening, as personal anxiety and anger mixed with the pervasive and unwanted hand of Papa Stalin through Soviet Realism. Bob and Lewis ruled here, as though they went through the composer’s tragic loss with him, filling the notes with angst in the third movement and biting grit in the fourth. It should be released on CD for the world to hear.

The radians began their 20^th anniversary season with a bang rather than the soothing whispers the concert’s theme suggested. The group’s been all about dichotomy whether intentionally or. Pay attention when a performance of theirs comes up. It really can be life changing.

Ian Wiese is a doctoral candidate composer at the New England Conservatory of Music. He studies with Mr. Michael Gandolfi. Several of his friends and colleagues performed on this evening’s concert.

           Thomas L. Read

I have always been intrigued by music that looked towards the visual arts for inspiration. Of course Pictures in an Exhibition by Mussorgsky is one of the most famous, but I am equally thrilled by the Joan Miró painting  Equinox, which inspired Toru Takemitsu’s guitar solo of the same title, which I recorded in 2005 and again in 2015. In 2013 composer Thomas L. Read composed a guitar and cello duo for me titled ‘Concert Champêtre’ .

                                 Titian

Read, professor emeritus of University of Vermont Burlington and an New England Conservatory alumni, wrote me about the piece:

“The initial concept of the duet emerged with recollection of two famous paintings: Le Concert Champêtre, c. 1509, by Titian, and Et in Arcadia Ego, 1639, by Nicolas Poussin. The music is cast in three interconnected movements played without pause.”

‘Le Concert Champêtre’ (The Pastoral Concert) is an oil painting of c. 1509 attributed to either of the Italian Renaissance masters, Titian or Giorgione. It is in the Musée du Louvre in Paris

                         Nicolas Poussin

‘Et in Arcadia ego’ is a 1637–38 painting by Nicolas Poussin. It depicts a pastoral scene with idealized shepherds from classical antiquity clustering around an austere tomb

I gave the first performance of Concert Champêtre at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia with cellist  Anton Andreev on May 22, 2014. I have since performed it in Boston, New Hampshire and again in Russia. The Spanish premiere is being planned for summer 2016 and there is hope for a near future recording. The work is published by the American Composers Alliance and the guitar part is edited by me.

Here is a video in Boston with cellist Anton from November 2014:

 

Exciting news!

Aaron’s Arrangement of ‘Six Melodies’ for violin & guitar by John Cage is now published and available through Edition Peters!

http://www.edition-peters.com/product/modern/six-melodies-for-violin-and-guitar/ep68526?TRE00000/

    Six Melodies by John Cage

Written in 1955 and originally for violin and keyboard, Aaron’s arrangement is the first John Cage composition featuring the guitar to be published by Editions Peters, the official publisher of the music of John Cage.

I can say the spring was quite busy for me; hence, this is my first post since late April.  It was a very exciting time taking me to both the west & east coasts of the US and then back to Russia for my Moscow debut concert and then St. Petersburg.

May 2 – 405 Shrader, San Francisco with mezzo-soprano Betany Coffland (watch video HERE)

May 4 – Oysterville, Washington for a literally packed house solo performance.

May 10 – Saco River Theater, Buxton, Maine

May 13 – Arrive in Moscow for Days of American Culture in Russia, an exchange organized by the Educational Bridge Project

May 14 – Solo Recital, Oval Hall at the State Foreign Library – Russian premieres by Ken Ueno and Francine Trester, Moscow premiere by Kevin Siegfried (Video Here

Luba Kostenko

).

May 16 – Master class at the State University of Arts and Culture; Collaborative Recital with Russian actor Georges Devdariani at the Actors House; Red Arrow overnight train (former part of the Orient Express) to St. Petersburg.

May 18 – Luba Kostenko’s Art Studio Salon

May 18-21 – Rehearse Concert Champêtre by Thomas L. Read with cellist Anton Andreev of the Rimsky-Korsakov String Quartet for world premiere concert.

May 20 – Solo performance at Baltic State University; sit, play and be drawn by Artist Luba Kostenko.

May 21 – Performance at St. Petersburg Izmailovsky Library.  Night tour of open bridges over the Neva River.

May 22 – Performance at Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory.  SPB premieres of New Lullabies by Ken Ueno and Francine Trester, and the world premiere of Concert Champêtre by Thomas L. Read with cellist Anton Andreev.

May 23 – A tour of Catherine’s Palace in Pushkin, Russia.

With Catherine at Catherine’s Palace

May 24 – Depart Russia.  Hope to see you soon!

The Days of American Culture in Russia was organized by the Educational Bridge Project, Ludmilla Leibman, Director, and with financial support from the Eleanor Hale Wilson Summer Scholarship from the Mu Phi Epsilon Foundation.