Week 1: A Continent Full of Music! 
Welcome to the Main Thread for the first week of the "Music from Latin America" challenge!
- Make sure you've read the guidelines before replying (<- click)
- Watch the kickoff livestream! (<- click)
What do you connect with Music from Latin America?
↓ Happy Sharing ↓
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Alfonso Montes - Preludio de Adios
Surprise! I'm going to submit something early!
When I got home from work today, I started going through my sheet music binder, grabbing Latin American pieces that caught my attention. I just could not wait to get started, so I worked on this beautiful piece until I could play it all the way through.
Alfonso Montes is a Venezuelan guitarist and composer. He wrote this piece as a farewell to his native country as he was forced to leave Venezuela for the foreseeable future. It is full of sadness and beauty.
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Eric Phillips Very nice Eric. I am not familiar with this composer at all.
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Jack Stewart Thanks, Jack. Bill Young posted some background about the composer and this piece a couple posts below this one. Apparently he met him in California (is anyone else you know from California?).
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Beautiful performance of a beautiful piece, Eric!
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David Krupka Thank you, David. I love this piece too.
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Great choice to kickoff another challenge, Eric. You are the champ.
Alfonso Montes and his wife Irina Kircher are also known as the Montes-Kircher Duo. Alfonso composed Preludio de Adios as a farewell to his beloved country when he was forced to seek political asylum and left Venezuela in 2000.
Here is a picture of Alfonso & his wife when they performed at a music school in Santa Clara, California in 2017. The couple lives in Stuttgart Germany.
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Bill Young Thanks Bill for sharing the information and picture. Did you take that picture yourself?
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Eric Phillips yes, I took the picture of Alfonso Montes & his wife. Here is another one.
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Bill Young That looks like a great day!
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Bill Young Oh wow, thank you, you are such an insider! When Eric shared the video, I didn't know the composer, but I think I remember seeing their names somewhere in a concert announcement in Germany!
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Bill Young thank you for sharing this photo Bill.
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Bill Young The group photo was taken at my friends’s music school, California Conservatory of Guitar. This was a concert/workshop on guitar duets & ensembles. Everyone in the picture is a guitar teacher and they often performed in duos except Sean, rightmost on the back. Sean is finishing his masters degree in guitar performance from USC Thornton School of Music. The women in the front row are Irina Kircher, Connie Sheu, general manager of GFA, and Alexandra Iranfar (Mrs. Thomas Viloteau).
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Ahmed El-Salamouny writes a lot of peaces in several grades, so that the advancesd beginner can start with pleasure and develop to the harder version, here a little peace Avenida Atlantica, but it is tooooo slooow, I`m a slowplayer;-)
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz That was great, Stephanie! You have such a strong sense of the rhythm in your playing. I had never heard of this composer, but I'll have to look him up now. I don't think it was too slow at all.
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz Fantastic, Stefanie!! My second guitar teacher went on regular guitar camps with Ahmed El-Salamouny, his compositions opened up the world of Latin american music for me! Unfortunately, the scores by Ahmed are somewhere buried in my children's room in Bavaria, haha!
It's really audible that you really enjoy the soft beat and harmony changes in that piece, do you play a lot of Latin American music?
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Martin I played a lot with Ahmed and I learned it directly with him in his workshops, and during lockdown I followed his Internetsessions he has a platform on internet, https://brazilianguitar.dmanalytics2.com/click?u=https%3A%2F%2Fbrazilianguitar.tribe.so&i=2&d=WM0hUNWTTDKUGHdzf3OL0g&e=go%40mosburger-dalz.de&a=rdE6hIvrQSa146lI-_CbpA&s=LU6dXF5hP64brazilian-guitar
da kann jeder sich anmelden und mitmachen, he is a real wonderful Mensch and teacher.
During lockdown I started to make lessons with Stephanie Jones on internet to work on the Piazzola peaces. My Teacher Roman Viazovskyj gave me peaces to work on that were all brazilian;-)...so....I will show some score of Ahmed in this challenge
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz Beautiful, Stefanie! Or, like probably Ahmed could say: "tá bonito!" You have a good swing playing this piece, thank you for sharing!
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz Very nice playing, Stefanie. . I really like the mood and the swing, thank you for this submission
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joosje thanks, I love that music, I am not so advanced and performing is not my best dicipline on guitar- for I dont know why I have such fears playing guitar while someone is around- always feeling as if I couldnt do it...but I really decided to stop that and now I will try to play and make those little videos, unless the moment, the camera is on record, my mind is nervous...why is that so hard to do? But I think that everyone has that struggle...as Ashley Lucerno said in the livestream..."tortured by that instrumen ;-)"...I made this video a while ago, it is not new but I made some new ones yesterday for the topic southamerican music
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Moyses Lopes thank you very much!
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz great Stephanie, thank you for sharing your interpretation of this work and a composer totally new to me.
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz Very nice, Stefanie. I don't this composer at all.
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in the last 2,5 years I played mostly peaces of brazilian composers or Piazzolaarrangements or modern compositions like Ahmeds. It happened because I tried to learn guitar after a two decade break again and by accident I had always such peaces...my teacher gave me or I had a workshop...and it was that stuff... I want to make some videos of several Piazzolaarrangemens if I can make it, because I have to work a lot this month....but I`ll try.
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz I've actually never played any Piazzola, which is a shame since his music is so amazing. I look forward to hearing your submissions.
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Eric Phillips I was playing Piazzola on Cello and fell so in love... so deep in love with his music. I seached for several transcriptions and I will show the arrangements and the books in the challenge, the best to start ist Gary Ryan, he made very intelligent transcriptions for easy to intermediate....I think intermediate is more the truth. I will show that, because it is a good start. I bought two others, they are more difficult and more stiff. So I see that Gary Ryan is really intelligent, how he arranges it for guitarand you can feel the spirit of the music. I learned toda to make videos and loadthem up, it was a lot of work, but I want to really show the score and the music and share it
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Stefanie Mosburger-Dalz Yes, I found Gary Ryan's book online. I was amazed that the word "easy" is in the title - the arrangements don't look easy to me! I haven't worked on any of it yet, but I would like to. Like I said, I really look forward to hearing you play his music.
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End of the Year Challenge: Finish Strong!
