Someone once said to me, “The world doesn’t need another guitarist playing Spanish music!” I forget who said it, but it had an impact on me. While establishing a career as a classical guitarist in the late 80s and early 90s, it became clear that to make an impression and sustain a presence in a crowded music market, I needed to identify and develop a distinctive approach.
Despite being a relatively young country, and maybe because of it, New Zealand has embraced the guitar in its various musical traditions, sometimes being ahead of its time compared to other countries. One of New Zealand’s first professional classical guitar players, Walter Smith (1883-1960), studied and worked in the USA for twenty years with the renowned Cornelius Schettler, who holds the honour of being the first classical guitarist to perform in New York’s Carnegie Hall (in 1904). Smith was active as a performer even before Andrés Segovia had given his debut recital! Smith later went on to prominence in Auckland’s jazz scene in the 1920s and 1930s before returning to the classical guitar in the early 1950s during his retirement.
The guitar has featured strongly in Māori music, as well as in the dance bands, jazz bands and radio bands of the early to mid-twentieth century which contributed to a rise in popularity of the instrument in New Zealand. Art-music composers were also early adopters, with David Farquhar and Douglas Lilburn both writing for the guitar in the early 1950s – some fifteen years or more before their counterparts in Australia, Canada and Ireland.
This album consists of a collection of short solo classical guitar pieces written over a forty-year period between 1951 and 1991 by New Zealand composers, and includes the first known guitar work by a recognised New Zealand composer: Musette by David Farquhar. They are all world premiere recordings and were recorded in three separate sessions between 15 February 1993 and 5 September 1995 in Studio 1 at Radio New Zealand’s Broadcasting House in Wellington, specifically for broadcast on their national networks. This album is a tribute to the fine work that was, and continues to be done by RNZ’s excellent producers and engineers.
Fragments is a reflection of how I settled on my “distinctive approach” as a musician, which was to be an advocate for New Zealand guitar music – to commission it, perform it, record it, and celebrate it anywhere and everywhere. These were my first steps. There’s more to come.
Matthew Marshall, February 2020