BY CARISSA DYALL
In many ways, the classical guitar is an isolated instrument.
If you’ve ever seen it performed, it’s likely you’ll have heard solo transcriptions from composers such Bach or Albeniz. If you’ve heard it with other instruments, it’s most likely the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo, continuing the association of classical guitar with Spanish music.
Despite its popularity as an instrument, there is limited Australian music for classical guitar in combination with other instruments – particularly in a chamber music setting.
This is where the Matt Withers Australian Music Composition Competition comes in. It’s run biennially to encourage the growth of new music for guitar. This year’s winner is Wade Gregory.
With a variety of experience composing for a range of different ensembles and settings, this is Wade’s first time composing for the classical guitar, with the added challenge of being in a chamber music setting of guitar with string quartet.
We had a chat with Wade about his compositional process and some of the challenges he faced composing for a not-as-often heard about chamber group.
You describe yourself as a ‘chameleon composer’ specialising in jazz and world music. How did this variety come about?
Out of necessity, really. As a performer, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been surrounded by lots of brilliant musicians who specialise in jazz or world music. It was a logical progression to go from performing in ensembles such as these, to arranging and ultimately composing for these groups.
I studied jazz and so it remains my first passion. I particularly enjoy the melding of improvised sections with composed sections – as a composer, you lead the performer in a certain direction harmonically, or form-wise, and trust the performer to continue the compositional process. The line between composing and improvised is blurred – improvisation is merely composing without the chance to go back and edit your note selection!
My interest in world music stems from Chinese and Brazilian worlds. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in China, and I have many Brazilian friends in Brisbane and am in a Brazilian band. Again, the composing and arranging flowed logically from my involvement as a performer, and being inspired by those incredible musicians around me.
How did you hear about this competition and what interested you in entering?
In a Facebook group, of all places. Matt Withers is very active on social media, and I read a comment he’d made on an international orchestration group. Even though I consider myself a pianist first and foremost, I can slowly get my way around a guitar to compose. It can be quite liberating and a great challenge to compose for ensembles without piano. It forces me to be more economical and exact in my process, as I can’t use the piano to gloss over or embellish any section whatsoever.
What made me particularly interested in this competition was the inclusion of string quartet. I’ve been getting into quartet writing in the last 12 months or so, as I’ve been writing all the orchestrations for my first piece of musical theatre Dookie: The Musical. I jumped at the chance to compose again for quartet. There’s something about sharing the melody among all four members, as well as composing for the quartet as a unit, that’s really satisfying.
The inspiration for this year’s competition was Stormy Seashore, a trio of watercolours by Sue Needham. Run us through a bit of your creative process, from viewing the artworks to getting the notes down on the page.
I took the obvious approach of looking at the three movements and breaking the composition into three distinct movements. For me, having to compose three pieces each around three minutes in length somehow seemed less daunting than a nine-minute through-composed piece. That said, I still wanted the movements to be part of a unified whole, and so I made sure to take melodic ideas and develop them across the movements.
The other thing that united the movements was the concept of water, and the depiction of the water cycle that jumped out at me from Sue’s artworks – storm clouds that bring rain to fill the rivers and estuaries, which flow into the ocean, ultimately starts the cycle again.
Once I had the title of the larger work, and the titles of the individual movements, it helped lead my process. The stormy impatient clouds drove the rhythm and metre in the first movement; the ripples on a river inspired the guitar accompaniment and texture of the slow movement; and I decided to throw in a beach-inspired samba to finish as a bit of fun.
The classical guitar is notorious for being a soft-sounding instrument; I remember being asked to play louder in my own chamber music settings! How did you overcome this issue when composing for guitar combined with four much louder instruments?
It’s a real concern, and something that I won’t really know until I hear it live myself! I suppose it comes down to an accompanying role – in a lot of water music, the guitar is often accompanying the strings, either as a unified quartet or as individual string players, and the guitar often drives the rhythm. I made sure I gave some of the melody to guitar, and featured it whenever I could. In the slower, softer movement, I kept the strings as sparse as possible so that the guitar’s beautiful accompaniment would shine through and be a feature on its own.
Ultimately, you have to have faith that musicians will try their best to bring out the relevant melodic lines and balance themselves as an ensemble – something I’m certain they’ll do wonderfully.
When composing, how did you approach the idiosyncrasies of the guitar as a harmonic instrument?
The guitar as a harmonic instrument was actually what drove much of the compositional process. Form and harmonic progression tend to come early in my composing, and I spent much of the first stage of composing just sitting on the couch with the guitar, and trying out various chords and harmonic progressions. As a jazz pianist, that’s what comes easiest to me. Putting in jazz extensions such as b13s and #11s, etc., is bread-and-butter for me on piano. And so I made sure that whatever extensions I was contemplating were physically possible on the guitar. Studying (and attempting to play) bossa nova really helped me in this regard.
The guitar’s harmony drove the compositional process in almost every section, apart from the first subject of the first movement where it was the guitar’s bass riff that drove the process instead. So the guitar’s role is really quite pivotal throughout the whole work.
Did you learn about any new guitar-specific techniques during this process? If so, which did you find most interesting?
When it comes to any extended techniques, I simply don’t have that level of facility on the guitar, so I’d rather leave it to the professionals! That said, I wanted to make sure the guitarist had fun in the last movement, so I threw in a few thumb slaps and percussive noises on the guitar body to help the samba along.
I heard that you are also an audiologist. Tell us a little about what this career involves for you, and how it has influenced your musical voice as a composer.
That’s correct – in my day job, I spend a lot of time in soundproof rooms testing hearing, problem solving, and chatting to people. I don’t think it has directly influenced my musical voice, but I suppose a greater understanding of sound, frequency spectrum, and acoustics in general can assist in one’s musicality.
Probably the greatest impact it has had, along with living in a laid-back regional city with zero traffic, is the time it’s allowed me to focus on my music in my spare time. I finish work at 5pm, am home by 5.05pm, and still have hours left in the day to compose, arrange, or head off to a rehearsal, whether that be for the local choir I take or the community orchestra I play in.
What is the biggest lesson you’ve taken away from your experience in the competition?
Persistence! I have entered many competitions like this over the years, and it can be disappointing at times when you invest lots of time in a composition that will probably be unsuccessful and may not ever get performed. But the learning experience isn’t from the piece itself, but a greater understanding of your own compositional process. And I’ve learnt to compose what you would like to hear if you were an audience member yourself, not what you think you should write. Write what you know, write what you love, extend yourself slightly, and then you’ll enjoy the journey as much as the destination.
Hear the winning works of the Matt Withers Australian Music Composition Competition in the Imaginations tour with the Acacia Quartet, Canberra’s National Arboretum, 18 August; Sydney’s Independent Theatre 2 September; and Melbourne’s Melba Hall (at the Melbourne Guitar Festival), 22 September. Order your CD from the Matt Withers website.
We’d also like to give a special shout-out to Rick Alexander, who won second prize with his piece Storming; and Nava Ryan, who won the Emerging Composer U25 prize with Solitude. Congratulations!
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Images supplied. Matt Withers credit: Andy Drewitt. Featured guitar image by Vladimir Agafonkin via Flickr CC BY 2.0.
