Using Folk Music to Enrich Guitar Performance

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” - attributed to Gustav Mahler

I’ve recently been struck how one of my favourite living composers, Leo Brouwer, as well as being very vocal and wonderfully eloquent about his love of western classical music from Bach to Beethoven to Ravel, is also so brilliantly adept at utilising traditional Cuban melodies and rhythms in his compositions. You could say that it is part of his mission, brilliantly distilled over decades to celebrate and keep alive the music that made him. It has inspired me to think about my own music - should I not be writing music that sounds like where I come from?

Equally, from a performance perspective, in my opinion, some of the most exciting guitarists around today are those who are juxtaposing their interpretations of standard classical repertoire with their own arrangements of the folk music of where they come from.
In this livestream, I’ll talk about how we can use folk music to better represent where we come from in both performance and composition.