Steven Watson: Creative Guitar

I often complain about popular music, claiming it is dull, repetitive industrial product. But the classical music world also has its dull, repetitive aspects (and not just Philip Glass). A few decades ago, classical artists mostly had their own individual character. Nowadays, one wonders if the distinguishing feature, of women soloists at least, is their choice of costume.

Pianist Yuja Wang

Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili

When I was trying to advance my career, the older artists such as Narciso Yepes and Julian Bream each had very much their own personality reflected not only in their phrasing but also in tone color. But even with my generation there was starting to be a sameness rigidly enforced by the need to win competitions. The robotic repetitive industrial aspect of the music 'industry' comes out in biographies that all read virtually the same with just different names. Interpretations are standardized. Tone color is very similar. And the same narrow repertoire is everywhere.

But occasionally one runs across a genuinely individual artist outside of the usual haunts. That brings us to the English guitarist Steven Watson whom I have been following for a few years. He is a committed no-nails guitarist. At first his clips on YouTube were short pieces, often off the beaten path. Then he started putting up performances on unusual instruments like banjo, lute, and ukulele. Here are a few of those clips. Tarrega on gut strings:

Paul McCartney's Yesterday arranged by Toru Takemitsu:

Telemann on 7-string banjo:

Machaut on lute:

And lurking out there somewhere is his cover of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme.

But his latest is so unusual it forces us to consider him from an entirely different angle: as a truly creative musician and composer. This is all 1 hour and 20 minutes of Ad Infinitum, which I strongly encourage you to listen to in its entirety--you won't want to miss the moment of stagecraft where he adjusts his glasses around the one hour mark.

This seems to breathe the influence of Morton Feldman's very long pieces of chamber music like his six hour String Quartet or Violin and String Quartet (2 hours). But the texture also strongly reminds me of one of the strangest pieces by Bach, his Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu from The Art of Fugue where the comes arrives after four measures, in double note values, down a fifth and in inversion. The austere effect is very similar to Steven's piece. It might also share some musical DNA with Eric Satie's Vexations, a short piano piece with a lot of tritones which is to be played, if I recall correctly, eight hundred times...