Classical guitar player Chris Anderson has a long history with WV; he studied music at Bethany College and taught at Shepherd University, where he created a degree program for guitar performers. Anderson will be playing a recital tonight at Glenville State College.
Chris Anderson grew up across the street from a music shop in Hagerstown, Maryland. So perhaps it was inevitable that he became a musician.
"I was in fourth or fifth grade when the Beatles were on ed Sullivan, when guitar sales internationally went through the roof, so it seemed at that time everybody was playing guitar, and it was sorta a natural thing. I played steel string instruments: the guitar, acoustic guitar, mandolin, banjo, and to a much lesser degree the electric guitar. And by the time I was a teenager, was performing pretty regularly in the folk music scene."
But it wasn’t until college that Anderson discovered the classical side of guitar.
"When I was in college, at Bethany College, in the Northern Panhandle of WV, I heard quite by accident, Bach’s double violin concerto in d minor, just totally captured my attention. Started going to the library and listening to well-tempered clavier, brandeburg concertos, you know, anything I could get a hold of, recordings of Bach’s music.
"And then about two months after that introduction, a friend of mine, for my birthday, gave me a recording of Bach’s music played on a classical guitar. And it was an instant Paul-on-the-way-to-Damascus kinda moment; 30 seconds into it I was done … I’ve been a classical guitarist pretty much since then."
So, he knew what he wanted to do, but there were challenges to his new direction.
"Bethany at the time did not have any guitar studies, I started on my own under the piano professor at Bethany, and he was very helpful. And then I graduated, and I had a major in history and a rather large minor in music."
But Anderson persevered, continuing his guitar studies at Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Virginia. He then taught at Shepherd University, where he designed a new guitar performance degree at the school.
And over the years, he’s seen the classical guitar’s standing in the world of music improve.
"The short history of the guitar recently, in the past 3 or 4 decades, there has been a tremendous, huge explosion, of the level of technique. When you go back to a guy like me who entered college in 1971, there were maybe 5 accredited programs of study in all of North America, now some 30 couple years later, there’s over 2000 college institutions where you can study per se exactly guitar performance or use guitar as your principle instrument towards other studies."
Still, Anderson still worries about the classical guitar being integrated into the broader classical music community.
"We have become what a very great concert artist on the current music scene Manuel Barrueco refers to as the 'guitar ghetto' – which is guitarists playing music by other guitarists for guitarists. It’s become a bit incestuous. And I think the next challenge for the classical guitar community is to reach out to the broader classical music audience, and begin to get their attention not just as an interesting subset of the classical world, but fully integrated."
Anderson now focuses on performing and recording. He plays a variety of music written and arranged for the guitar. For recitals, he’s created an arrangement of a Robert Johnson tune…(music) not to be confused with the blues musician Robert Johnson.
"This particular Robert Johnson was actually the last of a very distinguished line of lutenist-composers that worked in England from roughly1580 to 1630 or so."
"I have always had this great interest in Elizabethan English music, that same period, and I made this transcription from facsimile of the lute manuscript a couple of decades ago, and I still find it to be just a really compelling piece of music, and it’s one that I often start concerts with, because I think it’s important to get a modern audience to slow down initially.
"We get bombarded left and right by all kinds of stimuli, and music comes at us from speakers in the ceiling and out of car and out of our cell phones, when they come into the concert hall, it’s important to get the heart rate slow down a little bit, and the breathing to go a little deeper, and start to try to focus the attention. The English pavan which is somber and slow is a good way to do that."
Chris Anderson performs Friday night at 7pm at Glenville State College.