No one lit a classical guitar on fire or used the fretboard to roll sushi. Outside of that, that most modest of musical instruments was transformed into the vehicle for sounds and uses previously unimagined at a night to remember in Sprague Hall.
Two performers slid up and down the strings with a bottleneck. Others drummed on the guitar. Another fed its sounds into a computer-generated graphic display.
Did I mention the chopsticks?
The occasion for all this nylon madness was Saturday night’s tribute to guitarist Benjamin Verdery on his 20th year as a Yale School of Music professor. Present and former students came from around the world to perform Verdery’s compositions, which range from instantly accessible Bach-inspired pieces to genre-bending and mathematically Monk-like expeditions tinged with blues, jazz, rock, and New Age meditations.
Besides teaching classical guitar at Yale, Verdery travels the world, improvising and recording with artists ranging from former Police-man Andy Summers to Windam Hill-style acoustic guitarist William Coulter and Verdery’s wife, the flutist Rie Schmidt. We in New Haven are fortunate to be able to see him perform for free a couple of times a year. Those concerts are always a treat, and always fresh: One night he’ll stay largely in a Chamber vibe, while on another he’ll rework Prince, hook up to sequencers and digital delays and veer off into the Pink Floydosphere.
Saturday night’s performance offered variety of a different sort: Musicians, the former students, of differing vibes and musical outlooks taking turns on stage tapping into the many genres of Verdery’s original music. That variety kept the night moving from one exciting turn to another, at once peaceful and beautiful, at others discordant, polyrhythmic, and always transporting.
Rene Izquierdo and Elina Checkan captured the loose, romantic, freewheeling and joyous element of Verdery’s music in their renditions of “Capitola” and “Milwaukee.”
Eyes closed, Kim Perlak returned us to earth — then hypnotized us into Om-like reverie — with “Keanae.” When she reached for the bottleneck slide, she took us on a slow, yearning journey up and down the top strings.
The duo of Geremy Schulick and Brett Parnell followed with a bad-to-the-bone electric-and-acoustic shuffling of “Miami” and “Mobile, AL.” (Look for a recording and an upcoming tour by these guitarists, who are one year out of music school.)
Not a trick had been missed, it seemed, until the second-to-last performance by Mesut Ozgen. He sat alone at the center of the stage. Well, “alone” in the sense of no other human sitting next to him. He had plenty of digital company. As Verdery will do in some of his performances, Ozgen fed riffs into a loop, then built new parts on top of them. Meanwhile, at the back corner of the stage a programmer worked a computer keyboard to process the Ozgen’s musical lines into animated sequences. Those colorful images played on a screen set up behind Ozgen. Ozgen at one point placed the guitar on his lap and ran chopsticks along the strings (a technique I’ve seen Verdery use on another occasion). It all worked — even without any psychedelic chemical enhancement.
The finale brought 36 guitarists on stage for a rendition of “Ellis Island,” an orchestral-guitar Verdery piece that has been performed across the U.S. as well as in Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. This piece combined the Verderian elements of the previous pieces into a grand gumbo — from quiet solo picking (performed from the balcony) to layers of repetitive passages, topped at the end, of course, with distortion-flecked leads on an electric guitar. Verdery came on stage to conduct the last piece, bouncing with gleeful energy.
In the end, this was, I believe, “classical” music. I always come away from a Verderey performance realizing that. Even when he launches into Cream’s “White Room,” he’s not doing a cover version. He’s tailoring it to the nylon strings of his “classical” guitar and turning it into something new, grounded in centuries of musical conversation, enriched with the sounds and experiences of his own visit to the planet. How fortunate we are to share in it.
Ben Verdery will direct a guitar Chamber music recital at Yale’s Sudler Recital Hall on Wednesday, April 19, beginning at 8 p.m. The free performance will include “works by Radames, Gnattali, DeFalla, Verdery, and Petrussi.” For details call 432‑4158.
Ben Verdery has been such an influence on certainly my life, as well as, I believe, on many others, that no wonder thirty six guitarists came together to join in his orchestra to celebrate his 20th teaching year at Yale! His creative brilliance as an artist together with his radiant and penetrating enthusiasm for the music and guitar helped so many students to raise their artistic level tremendously, while also making them feel happy through his most sincere and friendly aproach. It was an honor for me to join this celebration. Thank you, Ben! We need you many more years...