This is pretty cool and just out today. The Ex-Aequo Artists guitarist collective undertook a MASSIVE project to commission 9 Black American composers to write new works for the classical guitar: Changing the Canon. I was one of them and wrote a piece based on a scene from Hindu scripture. You can see all 9 works in the playlist at the side. Bravo to Phil Goldenberg for performing my incredibly difficult piece with such tremendous skill and musicality and congrats to all involved. BRAVI!
The Virginia Music Educators Association (VMEA) featured Flippin’s new composition The Covenant: Passacaglia for Minneapolis at the 2021 convention. Featuring Martha Masters as conductor and Matthew Dunlap as electric guitar soloist.
Canadian guitarist and recent Yale graduate and new music specialist Emanmanuel Jacob Lacopo performs Flippin’s Scenes from America.
Jack Davisson is the winner of the Guitar Foundation of America youth competition and performs Jericho at an abandoned military facility near San Francisco.
A new work combining classical guitar quartet and jazz guitar. Inspired by a weeks-long racist mob in 1930s Minneapolis.
"Being alive and able to do the work I love to do. That’s enough to keep me inspired."
- 5 Questions for Tyshawn Sorey: I Care if You Listen Fall 2020
“Music is my profession, and what I love to do. All the rest that goes with it is either fortunate or unfortunate. You have to take the rough with the smooth. I wouldn’t do it unless I got something from it—and I do. I’m stimulated by the feeling of an audience in a concert, that I can give pleasure to them. It gives me a pure yet beautiful reason for the pursuit of excellence. I have to play the guitar often, and that is something I really want to do well. I suppose I’m “locked in,” but it sometimes gives me immense pleasure to be so confined!”
Premiered at the 2020 Guitar Foundation of America convention, this video performance depicts the ancient Lebanese city of Byblos. Kouyoumdjian had traveled there before composing this piece for Duo Noire and electronic backing track.
Duo Noire talked with Katy Henriksen about Covid life, All Lives Matter, patriarchy in music, and the crazy times we’re all suffering through on her new podcast, Sound Off. Check it out:
https://podlink.to/soundoff?fbclid=IwAR0RlgizBs2RouoWy47KVpEthGOZIKL0j0oQrgXpiKCU4hinF7BnICyy7_U
I don’t satisfy people with their usual menu, the usual way of eating what they enjoy. I’m not young anymore, and I had spent quite a long time fighting, suffering, asking myself what I was doing and actually, why I do it. Then at a certain point in my life I decided that it is not my duty to be liked and loved by everybody. My duty is only and alone to bring my vision of the piece with me.’
- Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violinist. Interview in The Strad
