26/7/2017 Composer Steven Mackey uses electric guitar to add popular mix to concerto

Composer Steven Mackey uses electric guitar to add

popular mix to concerto

By Peter Tonguette/For the Columbus Dispatch

Posted Nov16,2016at12:01AM
Updated Nov17,2016at11:14AM

As a composer, Steven Mackey does not mind being the odd man
out. This weekend, the Columbus Symphony will perform a
program in which Mackey is the sole contemporary composer
represented. Alongside Mackeys Four Iconoclastic Episodes - a
2009 concerto for electric guitar, violin and string orchestra - the
last works to be composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-
91) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93) will be performed.

As a composer, Steven Mackey does not mind being the odd man out.

This weekend, the Columbus Symphony will

perform a program in which Mackey is the sole
contemporary composer represented. Alongside
Mackeys Four Iconoclastic Episodes a 2009
concerto for electric guitar, violin and string
orchestra the last works to be composed by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) and Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-93) will be performed.

I like being in concerts with dead composers,

said Mackey, 60, a professor of music at
Princeton University. Dispatch - Daily Highlights
Despite the centuries that separate them, Mackey
feels a kinship with Mozart.

Mozart was taking all these diverse influences Austrian folk song, Turkish military music,
Italian opera, sacred music, learned counterpoint from the previous generation and putting
these things all together in close contact, Mackey said.

In Four Iconoclastic Episodes, Mackey looks to equally eclectic sources of inspiration,

including a Radiohead song and African popular music.

http://www.dispatch.com/entertainment/20161116/composer-steven-mackey-uses-electric-guitar-to-add-popular-mix-to-concerto 1/3
26/7/2017 Composer Steven Mackey uses electric guitar to add popular mix to concerto

The unusual thing about my piece is the sheer fact of the electric guitar and the elements of
popular music, Mackey said. But those things are in Mozarts music and in Tchaikovskys
music except for the electric guitar.

For this weekends concerts, Mackey will be heard on electric guitar and Anthony Marwood
will perform on violin. Columbus Symphony Music Director Rossen Milanov will conduct.

As a youth in northern California, Mackey dreamed of a career in rock music, but a music-
appreciation class he took while attending the University of California-Davis awakened him to
classical masters.

I heard Mozart piano concertos and Beethoven string quartets and Stravinsky ballets and
George Crumb pieces, Mackey said. I felt like, This is what I should be doing.

In his composing, however, Mackey eventually aimed to mix genres.

Those influences of rock music sort of seeped in, but it didnt completely purge my training,
either, Mackey said. So I ended up being a mutt like Mozart.

Four Iconoclastic Episodes sprang from a previous collaboration with Marwood: In 2004, the
violinist played first violin in a performance of Mackeys Physical Property, a piece that also
called for an electric guitar.

At the end of that first time playing together, Marwood said by email, I asked Steve whether
he would write a concerto for the two of us to play.

The composer commended the pairing of electric guitar and strings.

Strings have so much variety, Mackey said. They can scream like an electric guitar, they can
pluck like an electric guitar and they can, of course, do a lot of nuance that the electric guitar is
not capable of.

Bookending the piece will be the overture to Mozarts The Magic Flute and Tchaikovskys
Symphony No. 6 both created late in their composers lives and both informed by maturity,
Milanov said.

I think people know when their final hour has come and they know when the piece that
theyre writing at that particular moment might as well be their last piece that theyll leave,
Milanov said.

Mackey is glad to share the bill with such weighty works despite his occasional concern that
audiences for classical music diverge from those who might enjoy an evening of electric guitar.

But I think Im wearing people down, he said, and in the last decade, (it) seems like those
audiences are coming together.

http://www.dispatch.com/entertainment/20161116/composer-steven-mackey-uses-electric-guitar-to-add-popular-mix-to-concerto 2/3
26/7/2017 Composer Steven Mackey uses electric guitar to add popular mix to concerto

READ NEXT

New Zealand 26 hours, 29 How to avoid Space sounds 5 simple ways to

rabbits hop on Trump false or ying in the like an eerie speed up your
sheep to ee misleading dreaded middle chorus of alien phone
Postedat12:30PM Postedat10:47AM Postedat12:45PM Postedat12:45PM Postedat11:45AM

http://www.dispatch.com/entertainment/20161116/composer-steven-mackey-uses-electric-guitar-to-add-popular-mix-to-concerto 3/3