The guitar is one of those instruments that can be hard to classify—in part, because it seems to have developed in many different directions at once. In addition to its longtime role in the classical tradition, the guitar, in its various acoustic and electric iterations, has grown to become a mainstay of rock, jazz, blues, folk and countless other musical styles. So not only can “guitar music” mean pretty much anything these days, the instrument itself has come to symbolize a huge breadth of traditions—in many cases, becoming one of the defining commonalities between otherwise disparate music scenes.
There's no better example of this spread than the concerts happening in Toronto this month. In the new music world, TO.U Collective, a new series this year at St. Andrew’s Church, features two solo guitar recitals that feature “contemporary music” in the truest sense of the word—with every work on these programs composed between 1980 and present day. On January 18 at noon, guitarist Graham Banfield presents a free concert of works by Eve Beglarian, David Lang, Matthew Shlomowitz and Fausto Romitelli. That show is followed up on Saturday, January 28 at 8pm, when TO.U presents Rob MacDonald in a ticketed program of pieces by Helmut Oehring, Simon Steen-Andersen, Philippe Leroux, and local composer Jason Doell. The composers on both programs are known for their unique experimentations with sound, with Banfield’s show in particular playing on the guitar’s multifaceted nature and borrowing heavily from rock—a link which, thanks to contemporary music groups like Bang on a Can (of which David Lang is a founder and member), is less tenuous than one might expect. Details on the series, and info on tickets for MacDonald’s show, can be found at www.toucollective.com.
The following week at the beginning of February, the RCM presents guitar(s) of a very different kind, with a February 3 show featuring Harry Manx at Koerner Hall. Billed as a musician in the tradition of “blues-meets-ragas”, Manx will perform on an Indian slide guitar, an all-metal National slide guitar, a banjo, a cigar box guitar, and harmonica, and will be accompanied by a string quartet. A difficult-to-classify but remarkable musical figure, Manx is an exciting addition to Koerner’s non-classical “Music Mix” series for 2017. More on the show at http://performance.rcmusic.ca/event/harry-manx://performance.rcmusic.ca/event/harry-manx. (Manx also appears the night before in Hamilton alongside Clayton Doley on Hammond organ, who himself wrote the string quartet charts for the Koerner performance; ticket info at http://www.ticketmaster.ca/harry-manx-hamilton-ontario-02-02-2017/event/1000517D91FD4557://www.ticketmaster.ca/harry-manx-hamilton-ontario-02-02-2017/event/1000517D91FD4557.)
Nor is classical guitar, playing classical and folk repertoire, left behind in the bustle: on January 28, the Guitar Society of Toronto presents the Bandini-Chiacchiaretta Duo, an Italian guitar/bandoneon team who will play works by Piazzolla and Pujol, while on January 30, the University of Toronto’s vocal DMA students will sing a free show of songs with guitar accompaniment. And further afield in Hamilton, guitarist Steve Cowan presents a guitar recital at McMaster on January 24, and the Bandini-Chiacchiaretta Duo reprises their Toronto program on January 29 as guests of Guitar Hamilton.
All this to say that the long-contested identity of the guitar remains popular ground for concertizing—and that whether you’re a fan of the instrument or think you aren’t, the scene here continues to allow local audiences the opportunity for surprising, and potentially fruitful, moments of (re)discovery.
Sara Constant is a Toronto-based flutist and musicologist, and is digital media editor at The WholeNote. She can be contacted at editorial@thewholenote.com.
