The joint recital by Ashland guitarist, David Rogers and San Francisco Bay Area (Mill Valley) eleven string guitarist, James Kline on Sunday afternoon, March 3, 2002 was an auspicious beginning for the Jefferson Classical Guitar Society's mission of classical guitar concert sponsorship and community education. This program gave our fledgling society membership and the community at large a taste of the exciting possibilities offered through the sponsorship of classical guitar concerts by JCGS. It also gave us a good look at the kind of involvement necessary to produce a quality event. (Click here to see the concert poster, which is 144 KB.)

The Kline/Rogers concert offered a wonderful study in contrasts by two superb musicians who, over the years have come to approach the guitar in their own highly unique way. Rogers' presentation was that of the quintessential classical musician, quietly letting his music do his talking for him. Kline, on the other hand, was the story teller. Every set of pieces had a story associated with it. Rogers performed on a copy of a Lacote guitar from the era of Fernando Sor (circa 1810) which is considerably smaller in both size and sound than the modern concert guitar. It was built by Larry K. Brown of Asheville, North Carolina. Though the body of Kline's guitar is similar in size and shape to that of Rogers', it is different in that it has 5 strings in addition to the standard 6. The instrument he played on this concert was built by Alan Perlman of San Francisco. Rogers' approach is unusual in that he plays the guitar without fingernails, in the style of the early guitarists and lutenists. He uses the pad of the fingertip to produce a relatively soft sound which has a silvery quality (much like, I suppose, the sound ascribed to the lute on so many occasions by William Shakespeare). Though Kline plays on a kind of hybrid version of an early guitar, he adopts the more modern approach of using a finely polished fingernail edge to produce a bright tone with a bit more crispness in the attack. Both performers opted for the use of amplification, inspite of the small size of the venue. Personally, I would have welcomed the opportunity to hear both instruments without the modern electronic enhancements. At the same time, those of us in attendance were continually reminded by the soft rumblings of the traffic on nearby Siskiyou Boulevard, that we are no longer living in the quiet of those bygone eras.

James Kline is a kind of throw back to the age of the troubadours of 11th -13th centuries who lived and worked in the south of France and the north of Italy. The troubadours were poet-musicians who traveled from town to town and from adventure to adventure, telling their stories and playing their music. Kline's early classical guitar adventures took place in the Pacific Northwest (Portland and the Olympic peninsula of Washington). His later travels took him to Spain where he was a student of noted teacher, Jose Thomas, to Belgium where he came across the concept of the 11 string guitar (he was able to convince a luthier friend to help him design and build one), and to France where he spent 6 months out of the year working as a street musician and the other six months recuperating on a tropical island. He returned to the United States about 6 years ago and has taken up the life of an itinerant musician. He spends a portion of each year in the remote, Copper Canyon of Mexico. One problem with being an eleven string guitarist is that there is essentially no repertoire for the instrument. Kline arranges or composes everything that he plays. As a result, the music and stories of his concert programs are often a reflection of the places he has been and the people he has met. Kline's music has a sweet, almost unearthly, ethereal quality, due to the resonance resulting from the sympathetic vibrations of the eleven strings. His consummate mastery of the 11-string guitar and the sheer beauty of his sound may tempt 6 string guitarists to follow his path, but few will be able to overcome the difficulty of creating a new repertoire.

David Rogers' program included works by Fernando Sor and renaissance vihuelist, Luis Milan. Following in the footsteps of the early guitarist/composers, Rogers included some of his original works as well. Rogers is relatively unique among modern guitarists, in that he comes to the guitar with a deep sense of the history of the instrument. A master of the ancient arch-lute as well as numerous other early plucked stringed instruments, his no-fingernail approach presents us with a wonderful opportunity to hear the guitar as it would have sounded in the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. Through recordings and concerts, our modern classical guitar ears are accustomed to hearing the brilliant tone of a Julian Bream or the fat, syrupy sonorities of an Andres Segovia. Obviously, we will never have recordings of the great guitarist/composers of this earlier era such as: Sor, Guilliani, Coste, Regondi, Carcassi, et al. However, for those of us who would like to get a sense of the sound of those first truly "classical guitarists", Rogers' performance opened up a window into the past.

According to Webster, atavism is the recurrence, in an individual, of a form typical of ancestors more remote than the parents. James Kline and David Rogers are both atavists of the highest order. They seem to have heeded a calling from some ancient voice to pick up long forgotten threads of our musical heritage and continue to play them out in their own inimitable fashion. It was an uncommon treat to have an opportunity to participate in their playing out.

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