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Photograph by Stephanie Cabral
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If classical guitar makes you think of Bugs Bunny’s matador routine, you need to acquaint yourself with the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society. Every month, it brings in musicians from Russia, Argentina, Spain, and spots domestic, who bend genre as easily as they do notes and nylon strings. Case in point: the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, which marks its 30th anniversary this year. LAGQ was founded, in the words of co-founder Bill Kanengiser, as “protégés of the Romero school,” but quickly moved beyond Spanish and classical music. The group won a Grammy Award for 2005’s Guitar Heroes, on which LAGQ interpreted “everything from Chet Atkins to Jimi Hendrix to straight-ahead jazz.” This month, the group brings its guitar chops to town with Spanish Renaissance music from the time of Cervantes, arranged for Gentleman Don Quixote (a show the quartet wrote for actor John Cleese), and works by eccentric British composer Peter Warlock. “Those pieces are especially beautiful,” Kanengiser says. “They’re both based on Renaissance pieces, but you can really hear the difference in the French style, which is very elegant and sweet, and then the Spanish style, which is very earthy and emotional. I like the juxtaposition.”
Tracks from the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet
A Q&A With Bill Kanengiser, Los Angeles Guitar Quartet
SLM: So, why would the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet be a good place to start for someone who’s never experienced classical guitar?
WK: [Laughs.] Well, I think we’re a good place to start when it comes to guitar ensemble. We’re actually celebrating our 30th anniversary of playing together this year. We’re sort of protégées of the Romero school. There’s a very famous guitar quartet, Los Romeros and one of the main members of that, Pepe Romero, was our teacher, and part of the reason we formed. I think what we represent is a connection to the past, the tradition of the Romeros, which featured a lot of classical and Spanish music, but we also are contemporary American musicians who grew up listening to rock and roll and jazz and world music and everything. So we also represent that side of ourselves, the exploratory, the experimental, the creative side. I guess what you could expect to see is chamber music, you know, really good guitar playing, beautiful sound, that kind of thing—traditional guitar—but also exploring totally unexpected areas of sound and of style.
SLM: Right, because you guys do a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of Brazilian, a little jazz…even a little bit of the rock ‘n’ roll stuff, right?
WK: Over the years, we’ve covered just about everything. We have an album that’s all Baroque music. We have a CD that’s all Renaissance music. And then we have the one that we won the Grammy for, where we played everything from Chet Atkins to Jimi Hendrix to straight-ahead jazz. We have a restless curiosity about where we can take this thing. I think one of the ideas is that the guitar itself, as an instrument, is a real chameleon. It can work in so many different musical styles. It can work in so many cultural styles. I think some people think of the classical guitar as being one thing. Oh, it’s really good for Spanish music. Or it’s really good for classical music. But you can get so many sounds, so many sonorities out of the nylon-string guitar, and make it imitate the sitar, or a banjo….you can make it imitate so many things, and take on a new identity.
SLM: Just because the strings are so pliable?
WK: Well…nothing against metal strings [laughs], but I think the classical guitar has an incredibly wide range of sound possibilities, from the very bright to the very warm and rich, and it’s something we explore a lot. We do a lot of things where we use the guitar as a drum, and tap on it in all these different ways to get all these percussive sounds out of it. We sometimes even put foreign objects onto the strings—we’re not doing it on this tour, but years ago I used to imitate Indonesian gongs by putting these clips on the guitar. We’ve done all these different things. And right now, I think our sort of current fascination really is Renaissance music, and we’re doing a lot of different kinds of Renaissance pieces. The really big thing that’s the featured work, I would say, in the program, is these selected pieces of work from the time of Cervantes. Which is, that came out of a project we did with John Cleese from Monty Python.
SLM: Whoa! Okay, I want to know how that happened.
WK: It was sort of serendipitous. He lives in Santa Barbara, and a few years back we had a concert and he came to the show, and we ended up meeting him, and he expressed a strong desire to do something together, which we thought was just one of those Hollywood things. But his people actually did call our people! [Laughs.] But his time was really limited. He couldn’t develop a project, but he was happy to do something that we presented to him, and so we thought, let’s do Don Quioxte, because he has that look, and it just seemed like the right thing to do. Essentially, I spent about a year and a half developing a full stage production with him, basically adapated the book and created a 60-minute narrative script for him, with 12 characters. Then I arranged music from the same time that the book was written, basically the beginning of the 17th century. We performed it with him, and it was really a lot of fun. We’re doing it now with Phil Proctor, who’s a member of the Firesign Theatre. So we’ve done the show with narrator, and it’s a lot of fun, but we like playing the music so much we just made a shorter concert set. The Spanish renaissance, for me, is such an incredible resource of music. The sad and melancholy music is incredibly moving, and the fun, dancelike pieces are almost sound like rock and roll, or Latin American folk music. It’s just incredibly joyous stuff. In that little set, we explore a lot of colors. One of the things we do is strum in a particular way that sounds a lot more like the old, Spanish guitars. The actual name for it is vihuela. We try to explore a lot of colors like that, or brass instruments, or recorders, or percussion instruments, to make it a very colorful experience.
SLM: So, on the program you’re doing in St. Louis, you’re performing the work of a composer named Peter Warlock…
WK: That’s the other featured work that has to do with the Renaissance. It’s a piece written in the 1920s, but it was based on French dances from the Renaissance. The guy who wrote it, he wasn’t born Peter Warlock. His actual name is Philip Haseltine. But Peter Warlock was really fascinated with the Renaissance and almost fancied himself to be a real Renaissance name. He made up that name because he felt like it represented his true identity somehow. Those pieces are especially beautiful. They were originally written for string orchestra, and I arranged it years ago for four guitars. It seemed like a nice piece to pair with the Cervantes set. They’re both based on Renaissance pieces, but you can really hear the difference in the French style, which is very elegant and sweet, and then the Spanish style, which is very earthy and emotional. I like the juxtaposition.
SLM: Music from the Time of Cervantes, this is the music you arranged to go with the piece for John Cleese?
WK: Exactly. I shouldn’t really call it incidental music, because it’s more than that, it’s music that accompanies the narration. And it wasn’t intended to live without the narration, but it seems to work really really well just on its own, by itself.
SLM: You guys open with the Barber of Seville, which a lot of people will recognize. Which I think a lot of people might know through it being used as part of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
WK: That’s how I knew the piece! And there’s a lot of pieces in our repertoire that I was first exposed to through Bugs Bunny or Gilligan’s Island, or Walt Disney. [Laughs.]
SLM: So let’s talk about the second part of the program, which is more contemporary.
WK: The second half begins with two pieces from Cuba, and they show a really nice contrast in Cuban pieces. The first one, by Leo Brower, is this incredibly peaceful, atmospheric, gorgeous thing that really puts the audience in the middle of a rainstorm on a tropical island. It’s a simple piece, but it’s very effective. It’s a real mood-atmosphere piece. And then as a juxtaposition, we’re playing a piece by a good friend of ours, Carlos Rivera, which is pure, Cuban dance rhythms. In fact, we even put little wood rings on our left-hand middle finger, that make the guitar, when we slap it, it sounds just like the clave. Actually, that one, the percussion effects are extremely intricate in that, and quite difficult. You have to do separate percussion patterns with each hand, so it’s really almost more like a piece for Cuban percussion ensemble than for guitar quartet. [Laughs.]
SLM: You end with Bizet’s Carmen Suite, which is another piece folks probably know, and may have even come to via Bugs Bunny…
WK: We like to give people something they know, but in a new guise. Instead of hearing Carmen with a full orchestra, they’re hearing it on a new instrument, but they recognize the music. And then along the way, we’re exposing them to a whole bunch of other things they may not expect.
SLM: Anything else that’s important for people to know about LAGQ?
WK: We actually recently released a new CD, Interchange, that’s our first with an orchestra. We actually performed in St. Louis with the Symphony a few years back. We did a recording of a brand-new concerto written for us by a composer named Sergio Assad. He’s a very famous guitar player; he and his brother are—well, they’re The Assad Brothers. [Laughs.] And they played many times for the St. Louis Guitar Society. They’ve played with Yo-Yo Ma and all these famous people. And Sergio wrote a new concerto for us, called Interchange. And we recorded it last year with the Delaware Symphony. We paired it with a piece by Joaquín Rodrigo. For us, it’s very exciting. We’ve recorded over a dozen records, but we’ve never had a chance to do one with an orchestra before. It was really fun, and exciting for us. The photo on the cover, it’s a picture of us over a freeway overpass in L.A. We’re actually standing on Sunset Boulevard over the freeway, right downtown. In the background is this interchange called the four-level interchange. It’s one of the first multi, stacked freeway interchanges that was built. And the reason we are standing in front of it, it’s a cool shot, but it’s also the inspiration for the piece. He was thinking about that we all live in L.A., and I guess he was thinking about us all driving around. And he had this musical idea about each one of us is on our own individual musical off-ramp [laughs]. But somehow, all four of us come together with the orchestra in the end, in a big musical traffic jam. But it does work, and it’s a very eclectic piece stylistically. It has everything from Brazilian music to jazz to Jewish music to Spanish folk music. It is very much a world music piece.
SLM: So, in a way, it’s sort of distilling what you guys have done over the course of your career.
WK: Absolutely. We’ve known Sergio for 25 years. He knows our playing and our personalities really well. He didn’t just write it for four guitars; he wrote it for us, even to the point where each of the movements he wrote for an individual member to be featured. The working titles of the movements were like, “this is Bill,” the second movement is “Scott,” that’s how he structured it. [Laughs.] It was very much targeted to us. I’d also mention that we have a long relationship with the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society. We’ve been there many times; I’ve been invited as a soloist, jeez, at least four times at least. And St. Louis is also a great place for us to go, because we love barbecue. [Laughs.]
The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet perform December 11, 8 p.m. at the 560 Music Center, 560 Trinity at Delmar. Tickets are $24, $28, and $32. For more information call 314-935-6543, or go to guitarstlouis.net.
