古典吉他人物——David Leisner

無聊軍隊

好象牛比的鼓手都很少用踩叉

新鼓手~Ci@

真牛比~~~~~~~~~~~~
无敌！~~~~

新鼓手~Ci@

我靠！~
真是牛比！~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

無聊軍隊

别问中国有没有这样的小孩了
估计连这样的小孩他爸也就不错了
小孩双踩和滚揍简直绝了

xfe102

谢谢

金属猎手

以下是引用無聊軍隊在2002-7-28 4:36:59的发言：
别问中国有没有这样的小孩了
估计连这样的小孩他爸也就不错了
小孩双踩和滚揍简直绝了

这只能说有没有
只要打鼓能考级 我想中国要培养这样的小孩 简直不用作宣传

巡弋

挺牛的~~~

wangjianguo

英国古典吉他杂志最新一期（February 2004: Volume 22 Number 06 ）封面人物：David Leisner


http://www.ashleymark.co.uk/classicalguitar/cg_current.htm





个人主页：http://www.davidleisner.com/


另外一家吉他杂志的专访：http://www.guitarramagazine.com/Issue47/leisner_int.asp


Guitarra Magazine: Can you tell us about your development as a guitarist? When did you start playing, and what made you get professionally involved with the instrument? What recommendations do you have for young guitarists who are trying to get ahead in a world already full of guitarists?David Leisner: I started playing folk guitar at age 10. When I was 13, my teacher introduced me to playing classical music, which I had been listening to since I was a little kid. For several years then, I performed folk, popular and classical music in the same concerts. By the time I was 17, I was totally seduced by classical music and began playing it exclusively and with more seriousness. Four years later I won 2nd Prize in the first international guitar competition in North America, Toronto '75. The other prize winners in that amazing event were Sharon Isbin, Manuel Barrueco (Manuel and I tied for 2nd) and Eliot Fisk. A few years later I made my New York debut. Things just heated up professionally after that. Those were the days when the New York Times reviewed just about every debut concert in the major halls, so it meant something. Now, since a New York debut is hardly ever covered, it doesn't mean much at all. It's more important for a young guitarist to get as much performing experience as possible. Play for everyone and everywhere. I played in a restaurant several times a week during my first 3 years of living in New York. It was a great way to run through a lot of repertoire and get comfortable in front of an audience, even if they were more interested in the cheesecake. I would also advise a young player that performing itself is more important than the fees in the beginning. Later, if your career is successful, you can perhaps be more demanding, but first you want the experience of performing and the exposure to a bigger audience, so go out of your way to get concerts on any level. When possible, try to encourage reviewers to come. This will help build your portfolio. Try not to worry about how many other guitarists are competing with you. This thought doesn't help. Just focus on your own performance, and be generous to others. This will radiate good feelings, set a good example, and put you in the best possible light. The amount of competition out there is just what it is. You will find your rightful place in the mix. GM: As an active performer, composer and pedagogue, what do you think about guitar education in major universities and colleges? Is it the best it could be? How can it be made better? DL: Guitar education has improved greatly in the last 20 years or so. The level of musical awareness and technical sophistication has risen considerably. Courses in guitar history and literature, pedagogy, chamber music, fingerboard harmony, etc. are much more common now, where they were rare or non-existent 20 years ago. Things can always be better. I'd like to see much more attention paid to chamber music with instruments other than the guitar, more discussion of the importance of anatomical knowledge and body awareness as it relates to guitar playing, and more required courses in Alexander Technique or the Feldenkrais Method. The famous violinist, Midori, apparently doesn't even accept a student in her studio unless they have had Alexander Technique training! GM: Classical guitarists are mostly known for being solo performers, and there is a lot of emphasis in that part in all schools. But one thing I think guitarists in college are missing is the opportunity to play in ensembles not only with other guitarists but with other instruments. With my experience in college I think that the emphasis given to ensembles of guitarists and/or other musicians is almost none. Don't you think that ensembles combining guitarists with other musicians should be part of the curriculum, or should it stay the same as it is now? DL: Yes! Chamber music experience with other instrumentalists is essential to a guitarist's development as a musician. While there is more of it than there used to be, it is still under-valued and under-accomplished in schools. Since guitarists don't play in orchestras, as virtually every other instrumentalist does, or have chamber music repertoire, which is standard in most concert programming, like pianists, they lack enough contact with other musicians and with the mainstream of music. They tend to ghetto-ize. Whatever ensemble playing they do with anyone else tends to be with other guitarists, who have similarly poor habits of sight-reading, cuing, rhythm and ensemble coordination. Playing with other instruments and singers takes one out of the little world of the guitar. It encourages one to make a line sing more like a wind instrument or bowed string instrument or singer, to acquire a more precise sense of rhythm, to become bolder in communication, and to develop a broader sense of the meaning of music in general. GM: We all know you had to stop playing guitar for some time due to a physical ailment. How did you succeed in mastering and overcoming the awful problem that disabled your right hand, a difficulty that could have been terribly discouraging if you hadn't dared to meet the challenge and cope with it as you did? Based on this experience, do you intend to write and publish a guide that may benefit other musicians, particularly other guitarists, who suffer or are apt to face the same trouble you had to deal with? DL: You can read a couple of interviews on my website, which describe in full detail my experience of dealing with and curing focal dystonia. Click on Articles and check out the interviews in Guitar Review and Classical Guitar. The long-story-short version is that I had this miserable hand condition, called focal dystonia, where some of the fingers of my right hand curled into the palm without control and with no pain. After trying in vain to get other people to fix it, I finally started looking inside myself for a cure and found it in some pioneering ideas which I developed about using the larger muscles in the armpit and back of the shoulder. I just used the knowledge that I had gleaned from seeing all those professionals who couldn't help me and combined it with my own intuition and figured out that I had to support the smaller muscles in the forearm with the use of the larger ones. First I started with big, exaggerated motions to help me isolate the larger muscle engagement, and then gradually refined it over time to smaller and faster movements. It took me 4 years, but the progress was clear and steady. The whole experience lasted 12 years. What an ordeal! It is very much on my mind to write two books, one on guitar technique in general and one on curing focal dystonia in particular. It would be good to make a video (DVD or whatever) to go with the dystonia book. But at the moment I need to focus on my performance career, since I was out all those years, so these book ideas are on the back burner. But trust me, the flame won't go out. GM: Among classical guitar composers, past and present, whose compositions are you happiest to include in your repertoire? DL: I almost always love to have some Bach in my programs, even though he wasn't a guitar composer. And I'm certainly devoted to music of the 19th century guitar composers, Mertz above all, Giuliani, Sor, Regondi, Coste, Carulli. The 20th century and contemporary repertoire is so vast and my tastes so eclectic that it's hard to single out just a few, but certainly among my faves are Falla, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ponce, Villa-Lobos, Britten, Ginastera, Henze, Takemitsu, Sculthorpe, Tower, Harrison, Hovhaness, Gilardino, and Richard Winslow. GM: In what ways has your mastery of guitar and extra emphasis on performance technique affected your manner or style of musical composition? DL: None. One is simply a tool with which to express the other. GM: Being a writer of music yourself, what creative plans, projects, or ambitions do you have for future works of yours? DL: The commissions I'm about to write are non-guitar works. I'm really excited about both of them. One is a set of songs for voice and piano, commissioned for the 85th birthday celebration of one of America's best living poets, William Meredith. And the other is work for baritone and string quartet, commissioned for the great baritone, Wolfgang Holzmair. I'm sure I'll go back to guitar writing soon after that. I would love to find commissions to write a big work for guitar duo and a guitar concerto. GM: What do you think about contemporary guitar music? Is it progressing, or has it become static? What's good about it? How does it need to evolve? DL: I believe that contemporary guitar music, like contemporary music in general, is neither progressing nor static. It's in a state of transition, just what you would expect around the turn of a century. We're finding our way into a new era of expression, just as the Romantic style evolved into the so-called Modern style. It always takes a while before we find ways of expressing in music our feelings and thoughts about the world and era we live in. Guitar composers keep getting more and more clever about writing idiomatically for the instrument. There's a clear progression, for example, from the writing of 19th-century guitar composers to that of Villa-Lobos, Gilardino, Bogdanovic and myself. The guitar writing gets more and more sophisticated in its idiomatic use of the guitar. GM: How do you give birth to new musical ideas? Is improvisation part of that process? Do you first compose on the instrument before writing? DL: First I take a long time to just live with the idea of a piece. I live with it in my imagination, never with an instrument. Eventually musical ideas come to me. I like to take long walks, long showers, anything where the automatic physical actions take over so that my mind is free. I heard once about a physicist who would dig a tunnel in his backyard until he started to get ideas. I don't sit down with pencil and paper and don't like to compose on computer until I have a very good idea of the overall shape of the piece and some melodic, rhythmic and gestural ideas in mind. Sometimes I use the guitar, sometimes the piano, sometimes no instrument at all. I start to notate my ideas. Then, as I'm going along, usually something will come along to surprise me. It's a sort of improvisation, but not quite, because I've never been very good at that. At this point, the piece usually comes out very quickly, in a kind of intense white heat. The incubation period is almost always long, but the hatching part is really quick. GM: In order to be a great composer, in your opinion, is it necessary to compose for other instruments? DL: Unquestionably, especially for a guitarist. The guitar is wonderful, but there's a whole world of possibilities out there involving other instruments. Being in contact with it expands your imagination and broadens your palette. Besides writing a good deal of chamber music, I've written two works for orchestra, and that experience really opened up my musical perspective. After that, writing a piece for solo guitar seemed like playing with a little toy.

第七弦音

I performed folk, popular and classical music in the same concerts. By the time I was 17, 强！

wangjianguo

Besides writing a good deal of chamber music, I've written two works for orchestra, and that experience really opened up my musical perspective. After that, writing a piece for solo guitar seemed like playing with a little toy.
同样强！

JiangYing

"...I had this miserable hand condition, called focal dystonia, where some of the fingers of my right hand curled into the palm without control and with no pain.............It took me 4 years, but the progress was clear and steady. The whole experience lasted 12 years. What an ordeal!"


真不容易！！

小兵吉他

"i want to go to china, i want to speak in chinese"


————————多体贴咱们啊

wangjianguo

[glow=255,red,2]找了半天，原来是兵哥自己编的话，这就来点中文翻译介绍，来不及润色了。[/glow]大卫·雷斯纳是位格外多才多艺的音乐家，职业范围就很多面——演奏艺术家、有名的作曲家、大师班教师。作为美国领先的古典吉他艺术家之一，他那优秀的音乐才能和激情的吉他演奏受到了全世界听众和评论家的击节称赞。《纽约时报》赞其为“三种专长（Triple-threat）的演奏家”，《波斯顿全球》称其为“认真、富有探索精神和想象力的音乐家”。


雷斯纳从1975年多伦多国际吉他大赛和1981年日内瓦国际吉他大赛中幸运地脱颖而出，他的的吉他演奏生涯幸运地从此开始了。20世纪80年代，一场局部肌张力不全症（focal dystonia）使他的手近乎残废，中断了他如日中天的演奏生涯，并一直折磨他长达12年。基于对吉他演奏的身体条件方面的了解，他通过一种先进的训练技术逐步恢复身体，现在已经完全康复了，雷斯纳再次开始了他活跃的演奏生涯；所到之处，赞誉不断。


大卫·雷斯纳当前的表演日程安排全美，包括作为独奏者与亚特兰大交响乐团首次登场、到澳大利亚和新西兰做重要巡回演出，以及在日本及波多黎各首次登场。他最近的演期因为一个在纽约卡耐基音乐厅的Weill独奏厅举办的别开生面的三场音乐会系列（其中包括在纽约历史上第一场完全巴赫作品吉他独奏音乐会）而引人注目，在远东马尼拉举办的备首称赞的首演、在希腊Corfu国际吉他大会上的演奏、在拉丁美洲墨西哥Cuernavaca国际吉他音乐节的演奏等。他还出现在下列地方的系列音乐会上：波斯顿约旦音乐厅和加德纳博物馆、美国克利夫兰艺术博物馆、亚特兰大Spivey音乐厅、洛山基Royce音乐厅、Kansas城Folly影剧院、圣达菲St. Francis礼堂、纽约市Augustine吉他系列音乐会及其他著名的美国聚集地，另外在瑞士、澳大利亚、丹麦、爱尔兰、英国、意大利以及捷克共和国等都留下了他的身影。


作为Azica唱片公司一位有号召力的唱片艺术家，雷斯纳已经发行了4张备首赞扬的独奏CD，音乐作品包括巴赫、维拉·罗伯士、梅兹、舒伯特以及当代作曲家的作品。不久就要发行的是他自己的作品专集。他与波斯顿交响乐团的长笛演奏家Fenwick mith合作的作品已经由the Etcetera Koch唱片公司录制，曲目是Rorem和Pinkham的作品。他最近的霍夫哈奈（Hovhaness，1911- 苏格兰裔美国作曲家、指挥家、管风琴家；二十世纪创作交响曲最多的作曲家）和海顿（Haydn）的室内乐作品录音是与Telarc公司的竖琴演奏家Yolanda Kondonassis 以及Koch唱片公司在Santa Fe室内音乐节合作的。


雷斯纳作为独奏家与许多国际知名的管弦乐团合作过，包括the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New York Chamber Ensemble 以及 the Chamber Orchestra of New England。他最近在布鲁克林爱乐乐团的独奏首演（由Robert Spano指挥），被《纽约时报》认为是完全的辉煌。同样，作为室内音乐家，雷斯纳的演奏也炙手可热，他是圣达菲、Bowdoin, Vail Valley, Cape and Islands, Bargemusic 以及Angel Fire音乐节上的常客；与长笛演奏家Eugenia Zukerman的二重奏，在New Mexico, Colorado以及Maine等地让听众欣喜不已。


作为拓展吉他演奏曲目的著名人物，大卫·雷斯纳已经为古典吉他引入了许多重要的新作品，从而成为一名孜孜不倦的对过去被忽略的音乐宝库的大力提倡者。他已经首次公演了当今许多最著名的作曲家的作品，包括Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, Richard Rodney Bennett, Peter Sculthorpe以及Osvaldo Golijov等人，他还是重新挖掘Johann Kaspar Mertz (1806-1856)作品的先锋，所录制的Mertz的on The Viennese Guitar for the Titanic，已由Theodore Presser出版公司编辑发行。


在他不能演奏的期间，雷斯纳因为他在情感表达和戏剧力量上的音乐成就而成为倍受尊敬的作曲家。他的作品《精神病院舞蹈》，最初为小提琴和吉他版本，后来改编为管弦乐版本，两者都上演了上百场次。他的作品已经被世界上著名的艺术家，如Sanford Sylvan, Paul Sperry, Robert Osborne, Juliana Gondek, Susan Narucki, D'Anna Fortunato, Warren Jones, Eugenia Zukerman, Benjamin Verdery, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, the Saturday Brass Quintet, the Eastman and Oberlin Percussion Ensembles 以及全美的众多管弦乐队演奏过。Sony Classical, Dorian, Centaur, Signum, Athena, Barking Dog and Acoustic Music等唱片公司录制他的作品。最近公演的作品有：为St. Lawrence 弦乐四重奏和雷斯纳而作的竖琴作品on the 20th Century Unlimited Series in Santa Fe；为Fairfield (CT) 管弦乐队而作的Embrace of Peace，被《Westport News》描述为反映了“耀眼的才智与夺目的敏感性的结合” ；为大提琴演奏家Laurence Lesser和新英格兰音乐学校打击乐队而作的Battlefield Requiem 等。因为这些音乐贡献，他受到了Aaron Copland基金会、美国音乐中心、the Alice M.Ditson基金会、新英格兰艺术基金会以及Meet the Composer的捐助。


作为一位受尊敬的著名教师，大卫·雷斯纳最近在曼哈顿音乐学校的当教员，并在新英格兰音乐学校已经执教了22年。他生动的大师班课程在下列地方已经很有号召力了：耶鲁大学、北卡大学、Cleveland and Peabody音乐学院、圣弗和辛辛那提音乐学校等。他是卫斯理大学的毕业生，主要靠自修成为吉他演奏家和作曲家的，他并曾向John Duarte, David Starobin 以及Angelo Gilardino 等人学习吉他演奏，向Richard Winslow, Virgil Thomson, Charles Turner 以及David Del Tredici等人学习作曲。

wangjianguo

原文（值得翻译的应该是上面的采访录，过些日子再看看）：








DAVID LEISNER is an extraordinarily versatile musician with a multi-faceted career as an electrifying performing artist, a distinguished composer, and a master teacher. Regarded as one of America's leading classical guitarists, his superb musicianship and provocative programming have been applauded by critics and audiences around the world. He has been acclaimed as "a triple-threat performer" by The New York Times and a "serious, exploratory and imaginative musician" by The Boston Globe.Mr. Leisner's career as a guitarist began auspiciously with top prizes in both the 1975 Toronto and 1981 Geneva International Guitar Competitions. In the 1980s, a disabling hand injury, focal dystonia, cut off his blossoming performing career in mid-stream and plagued him for 12 years. Through a pioneering approach to technique based on his understanding of the physical aspects of playing the guitar, Leisner gradually rehabilitated himself. Now completely recovered, he has once again resumed an active performing career, earning accolades wherever he plays.David Leisner's current season takes him around the US, including his debut as soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, and a major tour of Australia and New Zealand, as well as debuts in Japan and Puerto Rico. His recent seasons were highlighted by an innovative three-concert series at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York, which included the first all-Bach guitar recital in New York's history, and acclaimed debuts in the Far East performing in Manila, in Greece at the Corfu International Guitar Congress, and in Latin America at the Cuernavaca International Guitar Festival in Mexico. He also appeared on concert series in Boston's Jordan Hall and Gardner Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Spivey Hall in Atlanta, Royce Hall in Los Angeles, the Folly Theater in Kansas City, the St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe, the Augustine Guitar Series in New York City and other notable American venues, as well as in Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, the U.K., Italy and the Czech Republic.A featured recording artist for the new label, Azica Records, Leisner has released 4 highly acclaimed solo CD? of music by Bach, Villa-Lobos, Mertz and Schubert, and Contemporary composers. Soon to be released is an album of his own compositions. His collaborations with Boston Symphony Orchestra flutist Fenwick Smith have been recorded on the Etcetera and Koch labels, with music by Rorem and Pinkham, and his most recent chamber music recordings of Hovhaness and Haydn are with harpist Yolanda Kondonassis on Telarc and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival on Koch.Mr. Leisner has appeared as a soloist with many internationally renowned orchestras, including the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New York Chamber Ensemble, and the Chamber Orchestra of New England. His recent solo debut at the Brooklyn Philharmonic with conductor Robert Spano was deemed ?bsolutely splendid?by the New York Times. Also in great demand as a chamber musician, he has been a regular performer at the Santa Fe, Bowdoin, Vail Valley, Cape and Islands, Bargemusic and Angel Fire Music Festivals. His duo with flutist Eugenia Zukerman has delighted audiences in New Mexico, Colorado and Maine.Celebrated for expanding the guitar repertoire, David Leisner has introduced many important new works and has been a tireless advocate for neglected gems of the past. He has premiered works by many of today's most important composers, including Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, Richard Rodney Bennett, Peter Sculthorpe and Osvaldo Golijov. He was also a pioneer in the rediscovery of Johann Kaspar Mertz (1806-1856), whose music he recorded on The Viennese Guitar for the Titanic label and edited for publication by the Theodore Presser Company.During the time he was unable to perform, Mr. Leisner became a highly respected composer noted for the emotional and dramatic power of his music. His Dances in the Madhouse, in both its original version for violin and guitar and as an arrangement for orchestra, has received hundreds of performances. His works have been performed worldwide by such eminent artists as Sanford Sylvan, Paul Sperry, Robert Osborne, Juliana Gondek, Susan Narucki, D'Anna Fortunato, Warren Jones, Eugenia Zukerman, Benjamin Verdery, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, the Saturday Brass Quintet, the Eastman and Oberlin Percussion Ensembles and orchestras from coast to coast. His music has been recorded for such labels as Sony Classical, Dorian, Centaur, Signum, Athena, Barking Dog and Acoustic Music. Recent commissions and premieres include Vision of Orpheus for the St. Lawrence String Quartet and Leisner on the 20th Century Unlimited Series in Santa Fe, Embrace of Peace for the Fairfield (CT) Orchestra, which was described by the Westport News as reflecting "a brilliant intellect in combination with brilliant sensitivity," and Battlefield Requiem for cellist Laurence Lesser and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble. He has received grants from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the American Music Center, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and Meet the Composer.A revered and distinguished teacher, David Leisner is currently on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and taught at the New England Conservatory for 22 years. His lively master classes have been featured at such institutions as Yale University, University of Southern California, the Cleveland and Peabody Institutes of Music, and the San Francisco and Cincinnati Conservatories. Mr. Leisner is a graduate of Wesleyan University. Primarily self-taught as both guitarist and composer, he briefly studied guitar with John Duarte, David Starobin and Angelo Gilardino and composition with Richard Winslow, Virgil Thomson, Charles Turner and David Del Tredici.

wangjianguo

唱片：


[B]Le Romantique[/B]





Villa-Lobos - The Complete Solo Guitar Works       





J.S. Bach - Works for Solo Guitar       





Music of the Human Spirit

wangjianguo

雷斯纳的唱片片段视听：Villa-Lobos: Complete Guitar Works







David Leisner talks to Colin CooperClassical Guitar, June 1997After his 1979 New York debut, David Leisner was clearly headed for a major performance career with performances around the US and in Canada and Europe, a Silver Medal at the 1981 Geneva Competition, and abundant critical praise. He was commissioning and premiering many new works by major composers such as Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem and others. His debut recording 'The Viennese Guitar', issued in 1980, was the first to feature the works of Johann Kaspar Mertz (half of the album was Mertz, the other half Giuliani). This album plus Leisner's published editions of Mertz helped to reestablish his central importance in the guitar repertoire of the 19th century. Another composer who David Leisner championed was Regondi, whose works he introduced in programmes as early as 1981. In 1984, he was about to sign a recording contract with Nonesuch Records when he began to have problems with his right hand.David Leisner is on the faculties of both the New England Conservatory in Boston and the Manhattan School of Music in New York, and enjoys it immensely. He taught at the latter for three years and has been commuting to Boston for 16 years. When I met him in New York, he was about to leave for the Midwest to adjudicate. It was early in the morning and time was limited, but he generously stayed and answered my questions when there must have been a lot of other things to do.A composer, guitarist and teacher, he shared second prize with Manuel Barrueco in the 1975 Toronto competition, when Sharon Isbin carried off the first prize. and Eliot Fisk took third. Over in France that same year, Roberto Aussel, Eduardo Ferndndez, Miguel Angel Girollet and Baltazar Benitez were sharing the honours in the Radio France Competition. It was a good year for revealing guitarists of talent.Nine years later, David Leisner began to have problems with his right hand. With patience, perseverance and a fine intuitive sense of discovery, he has fully recovered and is now performing again.DAVID LEISNER: It's been quite a journey. In 1984 I had the beginnings of a hand condition, now known as focal dystonia. it is the same condition that the pianists Leon Fleischer and Gary Graffman have. They made this condition famous. It happened to them quite a few years ago, and it's been talked about ever since. It's a condition where the fingers, the ring and pinky in my case, curl into the palm without control and without pain. No pain is the distinguishing factor. You don't know where the problem is. It could be in the hand, it could be in the arm, the shoulder, the back. If you have no pain to pinpoint it, it becomes very elusive and difficult to fix. And in fact no one until now has cured focal dystonia. It is the performance problem that has stumped the performing arts medicine community and the musical community.When it happened to me, I gradually cancelled concerts one by one, and finally stopped everything. I went to experts and doctors and alternative specialists of all sorts. I went from one to the other, doing exactly what they told me to do, all telling me they could help me. And each time my hopes were raised and then dashed down to the ground.I did five years of this. I went to different cities around the country; I spent a good deal of money, time and psychic energy, and at the end of the five years I felt like a spent rubber band, in every way. The last treatment I underwent, an eclectic Eastern kind of treatment, did me damage. And I thought, 'I'm fed up with this, it's not worth it'.I had found out by that time that, in fact, it was well known in the performing arts medicine community that nobody knew how to cure this condition. So I stopped everything. I didn't even try to continue on my own to try to make it better. Then one day I picked up the guitar and started to pluck the strings. I just wanted to make music with my fingers (though in the meantime my composition career had taken off, and of course my teaching continued, and so on, and there were lots of things to do). So I plucked away, realising that I was able to play many pieces with two fingers - thumb and index finger. It was sounding so good that I thought 'Well, if it sounds this good without practising, if I practise a bit it might sound really good'. So that's what I did, I started to practise and to figure out fingerings, some of which were very unorthodox and often surprising. I really was playing some very impressive virtuosic repertoire with thumb and index, for instance the Richard Rodney Bennett Sonata and the Paganini Sonata - pieces that are even difficult for people with five fingers.I just found that where there's a will there's a way. It took a little persistence, a little ingenuity, but there were almost always ways around the problem.So, I started with little informal concerts. First, half a concert, then a whole concert. Then I got my confidence up and I decided, 'OK, I'm going to do this in public now and see what happens.' I tried it in Boston, a major hall, in 1991. It was a hit. I had a rave review. The audience loved it. Nobody knew that anything was wrong with my hand. They thought that my hand had recovered. So I began to do concerts in that way.About a year later, I gravitated intuitively towards the idea of involving the larger muscle groups, in the upper arm and shoulder, in the stroke. Something somebody said one day made me wonder what would happen if I just swing at the string. I came home that day and started to do that with these large motions that were involving my upper arm.Within five minutes of doing this, I was able to use my ring finger, that I hadn't used for eight years. Five minutes! Now, you have to understand that until this time I couldn't even place my right hand at the strings without the fingers curling in. At this moment, not only was I able to put my hand at the strings but I was able to actually use the ring finger to pluck the string independently. I knew I was on to something.I proceeded to refine these ideas, and I came to find out - and I'm quite sure of this now - that the focal dystonia place is here, in the back of the shoulder, at the apex of where the arm meets the torso.I started to feel, as I plucked the strings, the contact with that area and also the triceps area in the upper arm. I would think of my hand as a big nothing, a big blob that was attached to my arm by way of a stabilised wrist. And the wrist, being stabilised, made the arm and the hand move as one piece. And I moved this large lever from the elbow down, from the string up towards my face in this large motion. As I grabbed the string I would feel the string's tension in those large muscle groups in the upper arm. And I would pull it towards me.Sure enough, within a year I was able to use my middle finger much more, and in another year I was able to use my ring finger in concert, and as of this year my hand is one hundred per cent. I may be the only person to have completely recovered from focal dystonia. If there are others. I am not aware of them.I'm very excited about it, of course, not only for myself but also for other people. There are many, many guitarists and pianists, and a number of bowed string players and other instrumentalists, who have exactly the same problem and do not know how to fix it. I think I have at least the beginnings of a sense of how to fix it.The basic understanding is very simple, and that I think is the beauty and probably the rightness of the whole thing. Einstein said he could explain the Theory of Relativity to a six-year-old. I thoroughly believe that. This idea is not to be compared to Einstein, God forbid! But I think it's an important and far reaching and basic understanding of how the arm works. It's something that I teach all my students. None of my students ever have any hand problems, and I want to prevent them from having problems in the future. A very nice additional effect of this whole thing is that one gets a bigger sound and a more beautiful sound with less effort.Can faulty teaching or faulty learning cause the syndrome? I wouldn't care to lay blame. I would simply say that we're learning. Technique in the guitar world is maybe just past the infant stage. The keyboard instruments and the bowed string instruments have hundreds of years of technical expertise and tradition behind them - But they still get this problem sometimes! That's true! This is, in fact, a 20th century problem that has to do with larger concert halls, more pressure to play faster, louder, more often, more difficult repertoire. And what we are beginning to find out is that the technique that instrumentalists in general have developed is not up to those tasks.So we learn as we go along. People like me have to fall down and pick themselves up again, but maybe to the advancement of the whole thing.There seems to be a similarity with the degenerative disease called the Dupuytrens syndrome, in which the fingers curl inwards. It's difficult to reverse, but I believe it can be checked.It's completely different, because that apparently can be fixed in an office visit: a subtle incision is made - I think one that needs only local anaesthesia - and it's a cure. But this is something very much more complex.Has it cut into your composing time, this recent increase in playing activity? How do you balance these two things? I must say this is a very difficult balance, because I'm attempting to have serious careers in both performance and composition. (I'm not just writing guitar pieces, I'm writing orchestral works, large chamber works, vocal music with piano.) However, I'm fortunate that I'm the kind of composer who does not have to compose every day. There are two kinds of composers: one who needs to write every day - an automatic appointment with the Muse. Then there's the other kind, like myself, who only write when we have something to say. With my dual career, I'm fortunate that I'm this kind of personality, because it allows me the time to practise and perform during the times that I'm not composing. In fact I compose usually only two or three times a year, and when I compose I do nothing else, I have no appointments, no teaching, and it leaves me entire days free for several weeks.I'm also fortunate that I write quickly. Once I begin writing, after the initial period of gestation, it comes out quickly, in a white heat. Then of course there's time spent refining and the dreaded job of copying, which is terribly time consuming.You don't use a computer for this? No I don't. I'm totally illiterate in computing. Hopefully some day I won't be, because it can be a great help.What happens if you want to write something but you have a number of concerts or other engagements to fulfill? Will your Muse wait for you? Of course! I store it up. It's like a solar cell. I really believe that the important ideas stay. One can have an idea one day, say a melodic or harmonic fragment, and think it's the greatest idea one's ever had. And then a week later you think: 'Well, maybe it's not the most exciting thing'. The really important things stick with you, I think; they're persistent. I'm not afraid of losing them.Are you performing a lot? This is a very busy and exciting season for me. In addition to concerts in Cleveland, Columbus, Atlanta, Philadelphia and a bunch of other places, I'm doing a unique series of three concerts, in both New York and Boston. The opening concert of the series is an all-Bach programme. This is, I believe, the first time a guitarist has presented such a programme in a major hall in either city. Then comes a recital of the early Romantics - Paganini, Schubert, Giuliani and Mertz. And last is 'Music since 1976', which will include the Sonatas of Alberto Ginastera and Richard Rodney Bennett plus works by Joan Tower, Peter Sculthorpe, Yours Truly, and a terrific new piece written for me by Randall Woolf, a very talented younger composer living in New York. The series in New York will take place at the Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, while in Boston it will be in three different venues. (The New York concerts began on 18 November 1996, continuing on 20 March and 12 May 1997. The Boston concerts began on 16 November at the Longy School, continuing on 9 March at the Gardner Museum and 4 May at Jordan Hall - Ed.).I'm also playing at a number of summer festivals. I'm doing my yearly residence of six weeks at the Bowdoin Festival, which people usually don't know how to pronounce (Bo'-den - Ed.), doing quite a bit of performing there. in addition to my teaching. And then I play at two very fine chamber music festivals in the Southwest, the Bravo Festival in Colorado and the Angel Fire Festival in New Mexico.They're keeping me very busy in both places, with both chamber music and solo performances. Last summer I played with some great musicians, like flutist Eugenia Zukerman, baritone Kurt Ollman and violinist Ida Kavafian. Working with such high-calibre artists is very stimulating. I hope that all this performing, especially my series in New York and Boston, will make a bit of a splash because I want people to know that I'm back. I returned to the stage in '91, but now I'm back with all my fingers intact, and while my playing in those first couple of years was strong, now I feel completely like the virtuoso that I used to be, but better. It's a whole new level of playing.In the virtuoso days, you came near to winning the Toronto Competition in 1975. That was a remarkable competition, because it was the first international competition for guitar in all of North America. There were a number of exceptionally talented young guitarists who were dying for this opportunity, and here at last it was placed in their laps. The prizewinners were Sharon Isbin, who took first prize, Manuel Barrueco and myself, who tied for second prize, and Eliot Fisk, who took third. Well, that's a very impressive bunch of American players! I, you see, had only been playing classical music on the guitar for about three and a half years, so I must say that I was very happy with my second place. I couldn't complain. There were others who were not as happy with their positioning, and then there was a lot of controversy about it. But competitions are always like this.People may say that the wrong decisions were made, but I felt at the time, and I still feel that, for that time, the way everyone was playing then, it was absolutely the right decision. With players that good and ultimately that important, it doesn't make that much difference. We've all gone on to bigger things.It opened up a few doors for me. And when I won a prize in Geneva in 1981, that added to it. It helps. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is the strongest reason for doing a competition, if at all. Otherwise they're terribly wearing, and often decisions are unfathomable. We have a few seasoned competitors in Europe now who are making a living out of competition winnings. They make more money than they would on the concert platform. That's deadening. One can forget the higher purpose of making music. I think that players need to put the competition in perspective. It's just a stepping-stone, it's not a goal. Real music has nothing to do with the stuff of competitions, nothing at all. Did you have any formal training in composition outside the guitar? I studied orchestration with David Del Tredici. David is not only one of the finest American composers, he also is a genius orchestrator. I audited some orchestration classes of his, and then asked him for private lessons when I wrote my first orchestral piece. It was an orchestration of a violin and guitar piece called Dances in the Madhouse, my best-known piece. I took it to David, who helped me immensely. He gave me to understand that my orchestration sense was already very strong, but he refined it with a whole world of detail that was new to me. Orchestration is one of the few aspects of composition, in my opinion, that is really teachable. And David Del Tredici taught it extremely well.I also had a couple of very informal lessons with Virgil Thomson, who taught me in the space of one hour more than most people teach over years about the nature of setting words to music. He was such a master of it that again, like Einstein explaining the Theory of Relativity, he explained this whole discipline to me in the space of an hour. And it's all that I think I ever really needed to know. Because I continue to harvest the results from that one session. He was very good to me, very kind; he believed in me as a composer. He was the first major figure to give me support as a composer, which I was very grateful for. I had some bad experiences early on with some academic people who did not like my music and made me feel that it wasn't worth very much. Those were the days of stylistic dictatorship. Virgil re-established my self-confidence.Otherwise I studied in college with a man named Richard Winslow, who taught at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, where I went to school. He did not do much about getting his music out into the world for performances. Instead, he was a bit like Mr Bach, quietly churning out pieces for church every week. He didn't really care about getting major performances of them. I think his music was stronger for it. He was my compositional mentor, and planted in me some good basic wisdom about composition and artistry in general. He's written a beautiful guitar piece, by the way, called Variations on a Tune of Stephen Foster, which Theodore Presser publishes; it was written for me and it's a very, very fine piece.The other teacher I had was Charles Turner, who was a former disciple of Samuel Barber. So there is an indirect line from Barber there too.In general, my process of learning, in both composition and guitar, has been to teach myself. All these people I've mentioned were people I studied with for a very brief time. As were my guitar teachers. I've studied with John Duarte, David Starobin, Angelo Gilardino - all for a very short time. They were all immensely important and helpful to me, each of them crucial to my development. But I always needed to return quickly to my own strong persona and figure out how to incorporate each teacher's ideas into it. Have you set a lot of words to music? Oh yes, I have. I've written hours and hours of vocal music, some with guitar and some with piano. In fact in a couple of weeks I'll have a major concert in Boston of my vocal music: three pieces with piano, two with guitar. With some rather stellar performers, major singers, Warren Jones the pianist. who's accompanied some of the great singers in the world. It'll be quite an event.Bridge Records has also expressed an interest in putting out an album of my vocal music. Are we going to have a guitar concerto? I hope so. I expect to write one, but basically I have to wait for a commission opportunity, because it ties up a lot of time and it' s not cheap to do copies of parts. I expect that somewhere along the way it will happen, and I very much look forward to that.So do I. Going back to vocal music, I've always felt that the guitar was a natural to accompany the voice, and I can't understand why there aren't more voice and guitar recitals.I'm glad you mentioned that. I agree. Not only is the voice and guitar a natural combination, but the repertoire is fabulous! There's Britten, Handel, Schubert, all the contemporaries. What a great literature! So many yet-undiscovered pieces for voice and guitar - old pieces as well. It's one of the most profound and substantial areas of repertoire we have.And there's so much that can be transcribed decently and honestly without losing anything. Exactly! And Schubert is the prime example. The accompaniments are often simple in nature, and the guitar's natural intimacy and humility serve them beautifully.