In Performance; Studio performance and talk by Thomas and Hugh Geoghegan

In the last segment of in performance Thomas and Hugh Gagan duo guitarist return for a duo arrangement of a composition usually heard in orchestral form. This is the love scene from Romeo and Juliet by Hector barely else. You. Why. You. Were one. Oh.

Think.

The right thing. The love scene from Romeo and Juliet by Hector barely arranged for

duel guitarist Thomas and Hugh Gagan. In 1971 Thomas Gagan wrote a guitar concerto which was performed with the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra Afrin conductor. I talked with Thomas about composing and playing this piece in the concerto edits. Original beginnings actually with the man who built my guitar. He did sing go as repair work and so on and he was not a very well known. A guitar builder however lives in New York and he asked me at one point he died in 1968 and he was always a great supporter of my compositions and believed very much in what I did and he asked me to not fail him but to write a guitar concerto.

And because he you know gave me a big pep talk and so on it one point and while I didn't feel like I was really ready to undertake such a task and I forget what prompted that he had heard a recording of somebody else's work or something like that and it was not. He was very skeptical of a lot of modern composition. So in any case three years after he died I got to think about it more and more and I suddenly realized I thought would she maybe i should you know try this. And so I sort of got my courage up and the composition of the piece actually went rather rapidly. It was written actually in a matter of weeks. The draft was the work but then never having written any orchestra scores before of this size anyway. I spent about six months orchestrating it and even then when I had finished I wasn't sure whether

this unusual combination would be that successful because I one of the things was I wrote it and in having. The guitar non amplified and that was part of the point of writing it because of I had heard other concertos that had been amplified and the effect was very often rather discouraging. So after I wrote it I sort of like put it in my drawer more or less I did over the years show it to a few conductors to see if anyone was interested in performing it and no one was which was sort of discouraging. Was there a special feeling that you wanted to say musically by writing the concerto. Well I tend to be. Most things that I write I tend to be rather formal.

I've never been one for I could never be accused of being an experimentalist. It really would be the way to put it. I think that if one's talent lies more in that direction I think that's all very well but I've always been of a slightly more conservative nature I mean I. I figure if I'm going to sit down with a piece of paper and pen and do something I'd like it to be finished. And I've seen for my own part so many scores which are written by composers that are experimental in nature and get one performance in and are never heard of again and something and I tend to be kind. I like to once I put some work into something. I like it to be done and. And that's it. Do you find that having this piece now in your collection should

we say have pieces that you've composed and you have composed duos for your brother and yourself. Do you find that it's it's a little frustrating to have this sitting here and no one performing it. Well I being a composer. I don't know I of tend to. I find that music is something I do myself most interests me when I'm writing it. And then the playing of it is all very well but I've never been one to really make much of an effort to get things played other than guitar music I've written for all different things but I guess I could be accused of a kind of a negligence of my own work. As far as actively you know trying to get other people to do it things like that.

It's it's not really that frustrating although I suppose I would like to hear somebody else do it that's always very interesting to see what somebody else would find in one's own work. Dechen be very exciting or it can be there's always kind of. Trepidation in one's mind too about what somebody might find in it which I really didn't intend to be there. In the end I would like to elicit the concertos that I've written for the star I would like to premiere each of them myself at least two so that I could at least have a tape which would demonstrate to anybody else who wanted to play the piece at least generally the direction of what I was shooting at. So they would be too far off. I think every composer suffers from this of the fear of of being misunderstood.

How did you deal with the problem of the sound of the guitar and its balance with the orchestra and your concerto. That was a very difficult problem. The music had to be written material in such a way that the the the orchestration the parts so on either would have to be above the guitars is one way to solve the problem of even if the guitar was playing innocents playing at the same time. To leave a band in which the guitar was playing. A band of silence so to speak that a guitar could fill out and then maybe an octave above it or an octave below it have the other instruments playing. I discovered that that if certain of the other instruments if they cross the band that the guitar is in depending on the instrument it can literally get blotted out its overtones and so on.

Absorbed by the other instruments. The guitar. One characteristic of it which is interesting is the guitar although it is a faint sounding instrument it's not not that loud and the each note it's not a sustaining instrument like a bowed instrument but the guitar has a penetrating kind of a tone. Which you utilized correctly it can stand out very distinctly even though dynamic wise it may be being overwhelmed by the other instruments. I depended on in this piece also on. Certain solo mystic things taking place in the woodwinds in particular the oboe of course which I discovered more and more to have certain characteristics of sound not unlike the guitar. And a kind of a nasal quality and so on which matches the guitar very beautifully.

As one can hear in this recording with Neil Boyers great playing. It was certainly nice to have. This is a work in and three movements and I wonder if you could talk a bit about each of the movements. The work is cyclical in nature actually the the material of all three movements. It's all they're all very much related. The first movement is actually it's built out of two figures that are both stated at the very beginning in about the first 12 or 15 measures kind of melodic fragments of this begin and everything is developed from that. And the work. Well it's funny in describing one's own work like this. The work is

kind of pure metal in shape. It works towards the center of itself and then from the center central point it kind of goes backwards again as far as this is a restating of things which happen and things which are stated in the first part come back again with renewed emphasis and importance. And the second movement I don't know it's an adagio and more soloist it for the guitar cadenza to be getting this third movement as a Rondo short but to the point and utilizing scenes from the first two movements. Good Will let's listen to the Concerto for guitar and orchestra written by Thomas Kagan. EPHRON gate is conducting the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra and the composer is the guitar soloist.

Why.

You're. Right. The only.

Thing. On.

A. Nude.

In her. Living. Room. Interior for department performed by Thomas Kagan after

DDT ducting. In Performance concludes with more music composed by Tom Gagan will hear his second duo written in 1974 followed by four Spanish folk songs. Hugh and Thomas Gagan duo guitarist. The. A.

Hugh and Thomas Kagan do love guitars performing a duo and for Spanish folk songs written by Thomas King. The performances of human Thomas Kagan were part of a live broadcast on evening pro moussaka in Boston at WGBH and the concerto was recorded in Spalding auditorium of Hopkins Center. Both performance tapes were provided by Thomas K.. Thanks go to Bill Kingston for sharing his poetry and thank you for listening. The engineers for

this program were Daniel Hertz lawyer and Phil Bowman. I'm Frank Hoffman inviting you to join me next time for in performance a series of music and spoken word programs featuring artists from Vermont. And New Hampshire. In performances made possible in part by a grant from the New Hampshire commission on the arts and is a production of Vermont Public Radio.