{"id":11917,"date":"2019-01-07T15:39:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-07T23:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=11917"},"modified":"2019-01-07T15:39:44","modified_gmt":"2019-01-07T23:39:44","slug":"duo-noire-salutes-modern-women-composers-on-latest-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/duo-noire-salutes-modern-women-composers-on-latest-album\/","title":{"rendered":"Duo Noire Salutes Modern Women Composers on Latest Album"},"content":{"rendered":"
BY JEFF KALISS | FROM THE WINTER 2018 ISSUE OF CLASSICAL GUITAR<\/a><\/h6>\n

Duo Noire\u2014named for the African American ancestry of guitarists Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett\u2014has a wonderful way of promoting humanitarianism and contemporary guitar chamber music without needing to shout about it. It all comes naturally. <\/span><\/p>\n

Supported by Yale University (where both men completed master\u2019s study) and by the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society, the duo has introduced classical guitar to kids in economically disadvantaged areas, including Harlem and Ferguson, Missouri. \u201cWhen they saw us, it kind of altered their perception,\u201d reports Mallett. \u201cWe would ask them, \u2018What had you thought about classical music?\u2019 and they would say, \u2018White guys with wigs.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBut it wasn\u2019t just who we were, it was the music we were choosing to play,\u201d he continues. \u201cWe\u2019d play a piece like Miami<\/i>, by Benjamin Verdery, where you rub your finger on the guitar to make an ocean sound, and it\u2019s very fast-paced and has a lot of licks that are rock-influenced. So the kids were like, \u2018This<\/i> is classical music?\u2019 And they were surprised that composers are still writing this stuff.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Night Triptych<\/i><\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/strong>, Duo Noire\u2019s latest release on New Focus Recordings, sustains the surprises. Not only does it feature six new compositions for guitar, but it certifies that new music can be as tuneful and entertaining as it is ground-breaking. And it may be the first such compilation for ensemble guitar featuring all female composers, who Mallett tags as \u201crepresenting another under-represented group in classical music.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Mallett, the son an African American father and an Italian-American mother, found more African Americans\u2014but few females\u2014in the rock and punk bands he grew up playing with in Southern California. At Grossmont College in San Diego County, he heard teacher Fred Benedetti perform Ernesto Lecuona\u2019s Malague\u00f1a <\/i>and \u201crealized you could do a lot more on a guitar using the fingers of your right hand than you could with a pick. So I started growing nails and teaching myself as fast as possible to play Bach\u2019s \u2018E minor Bourr\u00e9e.\u2019\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Benedetti referred the young guitarist on to private lessons with George Svoboda, and soon his former fellow rockers \u201cwere wondering what had happened to me, because a big part of playing in a rock band is going out and partying, and I was staying at home on weekends and just wanting to get better at classical guitar.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Soon enough, Mallett began to perceive the boundaries between classical, rock, and other techniques as being more flexible. \u201cMy dad took me to my first classical guitar concert, with Pepe Romero [another San Diego County resident], and I heard him play Gran Jota<\/i>, by Francisco T\u00e1rrega. It was a piece where you cross the strings and play the guitar like a drum. It blew my mind that you could make an acoustic instrument sound that way, changing the color and dynamic. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I heard a classmate of mine play Nikita Koshkin\u2019s Usher-Waltz<\/i>, and it opened my ears even more, because Koshkin had the vocabulary of rock, as well as classical.\u201d Like his later inner-city students, Mallett \u201cthought classical music was from the 19th century and before, I didn\u2019t know people were still composing it. So I started going down the road of looking up different contemporary composers, like Carlo Domeniconi and Roland Dyens. Even though I\u2019d dropped electric guitar, my ear was still into that kind of sound, and I wanted to achieve it on a classical guitar.\u201d And those composers \u201care all still firmly grounded in the classical-guitar world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

From Grossmont, Mallett transferred to studies with Stephen Aron at Oberlin College in Ohio, \u201cwhere everything was music and I could practice all the time. Steve did a great job refining my technique and making me a more solid classical player, because I played a lot of traditional repertoire there.\u201d But rock remained in his mind\u2019s ear, and he went on to graduate study with Ben Verdery <\/span>at Yale, \u201cbecause Ben was somebody who was playing a lot of rock-influenced stuff. He played [Jimi Hendrix\u2019s] \u2018Purple Haze\u2019 and \u2018Little Wing\u2019 on classical guitar, and did a lot of hitting of the instrument. He\u2019s also great at getting musicians to find their own voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even before receiving Mallett on the New Haven campus, Verdery had paired him with Flippin, an older student who\u2019d come to Yale from the University of Chicago as the classical guitar program\u2019s first African American. The two were asked to showcase a piece by Juilliard composer Ray Lustig at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut. \u201cWe\u2019d never met each other, and as soon as we started playing together, it was like we\u2019d been friends for our whole lives,\u201d Mallett says of Flippin. \u201cBoth of his parents are African American, and neither of us had ever met an African American classical guitarist before.\u201d Lustig ended up writing five more pieces for the newly-
\n<\/span>formed Duo Noire, recorded in 2014 on their debut album, Figments<\/i>, released by the composer.<\/p>\n

The duo\u2019s outreach <\/span>programs in New England, <\/span>New York, and Missouri <\/span>were intended, among other things, to show minority schoolchildren \u201cthat there are other African Americans doing this kind of music.\u201d Throughout the decade, the St. Louis\u2013area program became sustainable, with repeated <\/span>visits from the duo, and one of their high school participants went on to undergraduate studies on classical guitar at nearby
\nWebster University.<\/p>\n

\u201cThomas and I played a lot of traditional stuff,\u201d says Mallett. \u201cWe arranged some Scott Joplin and Nathaniel Dett [both early 20th century black composers], but we also enjoyed creating, not just new things, but different things. From there, we started thinking: What kind of project can we do that will not only benefit us, but also the music community at large?\u201d His wife, Nathania, had studied guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where \u201cit was difficult for her to find music written by living female composers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Night Triptych<\/i> was conceived to shed some light on the potential of women in guitar music, prompted by Flippin\u2019s attendance at Eric Clapton\u2019s Crossroads Festival in New York City, where Flippin lives. \u201cHe was amazed,\u201d Mallett reports, \u201cthat out of multiple days of concerts\u2014blues, rock, and even jazz-fusion\u2014there was not one female leading act. And out of all the concerts I\u2019ve been to in the past year, it\u2019s been very rare to see a female guitarist; even rarer to find a female composition.\u201d (Guitarist Connie Sheu had, in 2012, self-released The Woman\u2019s Voice, <\/i>solo works by woman composers, but not all of them still living.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The Diller-Quaile School of Music in New York, where Flippin teaches, commissioned Duo Noire\u2019s concept album, and they sought potential composers through Lustig and Sarah Kirkland Snider of New Amsterdam Records. \u201cWe didn\u2019t reach out to Clarice Assad because she was S\u00e9rgio\u2019s daughter or anything\u2014we just knew she would create something for us that we would love,\u201d says Mallett. \u201cShe came up with the perfect work in Hocus Pocus<\/i>,\u201d comprising three short and delightful sections, and, as the album\u2019s opening selection, an engaging introduction to extended technique.<\/span><\/p>\n