{"id":137810,"date":"2016-09-30T13:28:59","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T12:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geraldgarcia.com\/wordpress\/?p=137810"},"modified":"2016-09-05T03:14:38","modified_gmt":"2016-09-05T02:14:38","slug":"what-i-did-at-huddersfield-contemporary-music-festival-1985","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/?p=137810","title":{"rendered":"What I did at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 1985"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nJust a bit of history – the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival<\/a> used to have composition competitions, and the year I played there, the compositions were all for guitar.<\/p>\n

The thing is, not all entries were in until the week before, and I had to play them all – some at sight. This was an entertaining experience and pieces ranged from graphic scores to pieces which were purposely impossible!<\/p>\n

Anyway, here is a review from Classical Guitar magazine such as it was in those days (when it was published in the UK).
\nAs well as the winning entries, I played ‘Nasiye’, written for me by Michael Finnissy<\/a>, ‘Monogram’ by Gilbert Biberian<\/a> (I gave the first performance in the Wigmore Hall), Tippett’s ‘The Blue Guitar’ and ‘Parabola’ and ‘Decameron Negro’ by Leo Brouwer.<\/p>\n

That was just for starters (just kidding). The audience was large and appreciative unlike my earlier concert which \u00a0I played\u00a0at a nearby Guitar Society a few days before and was met with a prize comment from the secretary – “That was OK, Gerald, but I was hoping you would play ‘Recuerdos'”!<\/p>\n

Here is the text of the review – the pdf is below<\/p>\n

from Classical Guitar July 1986<\/p>\n

GERALD GARCIA and NEW GUITAR MUSIC at HUDDERSFIELD<\/p>\n

by Richard Leigh Harris<\/p>\n

\u2018A contemporary music festival? In Huddersfield?\u2019, a colleague asked, frowning deeply.
\nAdmittedly he wasn\u2019t a new music buff, but that comment demonstrates well enough the\u00a0general reaction by musicians to developments in the music of their own age, as well as to\u00a0the all- too-familiar clich\u00e9d images of Northern industrial towns and cities, perpetuated by
\nnumerous jokes and snide asides.<\/p>\n

Since its modest inception in 1978, however, the annual Huddersfield Contemporary Music\u00a0Festival has \u2018taken off\u2019 to a degree hardly envisaged in the early days by its Artistic
\nDirector, Richard Steinitz, a lecturer in the music department at the Polytechnic. Indeed,
\nwithin the last few years and despite quite heavy financial difficulties, Huddersfields\u2019\u00a0annual gathering now very much bears all the hallmarks of enlightened, stimulating
\nprogramme planning and excellence of execution that makes it in many areas a serious\u00a0challenger to the major European festivals of new music such as the Venice Biennale,\u00a0Royan, ISCM, etc as well as those promoted through or via college campuses in the
\nUnited States. This international quality and ambience was reinforced at the last, 1985,\u00a0festival by the presence of leading Italian figures of the eminence of Berio, Aldo Clementi,\u00a0Salvatore Sciarrino (the latter two names relatively new to British audiences), Bussoti,\u00a0Donatoni plus the ltalian- influenced Englishman Bernard Rands, now resident in Boston,\u00a0Mass. Jonathan Harvey and Michael Finnissy completed the list of featured composers
\nwho during the eight days of intense activity (19-27 November) talked informally about\u00a0prospective performances of their pieces, directed student workshops, adjudicated and\u00a0were on hand generally to give advice and point the way forward.<\/p>\n

An incidental aspect of the 1985 festival was the presence of the \u2018Oxford connection\u2019 in the\u00a0form of guitarists Gerald Garcia, David Harvey, ex-Abingdon composer Jeremy Pike plus\u00a0the present writer who travelled up from Oxford with Gerald Garcia and pretty well, in the\u00a0words of the late Philip Larkin \u2018. . . waking at the fumes\/And furnace-glares of Sheffield\u00a0where I changed\/And eat an awful pie . .\u00a0 although not so many furnaces these days and
\nmore of a stale BR sandwich than a pie .<\/p>\n

Gerald Garcia was invited to Huddersfield in a twofold context: giving an open guitar\u00a0workshop on pieces submitted for the Yorkshire Arts Association Young Composers\u00a0Competition, plus a late-night recital held in the Huddersfield Art Gallery and sponsored by\u00a0W. H. Smith.<\/p>\n

At the risk of preaching to the converted, the following points are perhaps worth restating.
\nUntil Julian Breams\u2019 policy and, indeed, advocacy of commissioning new works from\u00a0leading composers expressly for the solo guitar, this most subtle and intimate of solo\u00a0instruments went neglected and unsung as far as new pieces were concerned (see\u00a0Classical Guitar, Feb\/March 1986). Since the major mid-Sixties landmark of Britten\u2019s\u00a0Nocturnal and the subsequent flow of works from established figures such as Walton,\u00a0Henze, Maxwell Davies, Richard Rodney Bennett and, most recently and importantly, Sir\u00a0Michael Tippett and Elliott Carter (\u2018Changes\u2019 for David Starobin), at long last the guitar is
\nnow being seen by living composers as a viable instrument for which to write, as well as a\u00a0challenge to produce music which is still recognisably composer X\u2019s while being ready and\u00a0willing to respond to the technical, syntactical idiosyncrasies of the guitar. Perhaps above\u00a0all, new music for the guitar is now taken seriously and no longer (thank God) relegated to\u00a0the fourth division of so-called aesthetical \u2018good taste\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Just a bit of history – the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival used to have composition competitions, and the year I played there, the compositions were all for guitar. The thing is, not all entries were in until the week before, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[995,58,651,994,437,21,993],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137810"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137810"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137829,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137810\/revisions\/137829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/137814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/geraldgarcia.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}