David Starobin: Helping the Guitar Find New Music

An early Knoxville connection

David Starobin was a classical prizewinner at Knoxville’s 1971 Chet Atkins Guitar Festival, held June 4–5. The festival was separate from the society that became Knoxville Classical Guitar. Cash Box, June 26, 1971, p. 31

That brief appearance in a local historical record opens onto a much larger musical life. Starobin’s later career asks an important question: how does an instrument acquire music that did not previously exist? A composer has to imagine it, someone has to make it playable, and performers and listeners have to give it a chance. His work has occupied several of those roles.

Learning to listen beyond one instrument

Starobin began guitar lessons at seven with Manuel Gayol and later studied with Aaron Shearer at the Peabody Conservatory. His education also included close work with pianist Leon Fleisher and participation in the Marlboro Music Festival. Those experiences place his guitar studies within a broader chamber-music education. Curtis’s biography credits him as dedicatee of more than 350 new works. Curtis Institute of Music

“Dedicatee” means the person to whom a composer dedicates a work. It does not necessarily mean that person commissioned every piece or played every premiere. The number nevertheless suggests the extent to which composers have treated Starobin as a musical partner.

A composer and a guitarist work together

Elliott Carter’s Changes provides an unusually clear example. Carter wrote the solo in 1983 for Starobin, who commissioned it and advised him about the instrument. Starobin premiered it at New York’s 92nd Street Y on December 11, Carter’s seventy-fifth birthday. In his note about the piece, Carter described sharply changing moods held together by their underlying harmonic and rhythmic organization. Elliott Carter’s official work page

This is a helpful invitation for a first hearing. A listener need not identify every chord to notice a shift from an energetic gesture to a more suspended moment. Try following changes of character, as you would follow changes of emphasis in a conversation. Then listen again for features that make apparently different ideas sound related.

The practical collaboration matters too. A composer may imagine a sound before knowing which combination of strings and fingers can produce it. A performer can explain what rings naturally, what becomes awkward, and what might be possible with a different solution. Carter’s acknowledgment of Starobin’s advice gives us evidence of that exchange rather than an abstract claim about artistic influence.

New music in company

The title of Starobin’s New Music with Guitar offers another useful clue. Its selected first three volumes include solo works alongside music with voice, alto flute, harp and mandolin. The program places Carter’s Changes near Toru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea, Hans Werner Henze’s Carillon, Récitatif, Masque, and a Stephen Sondheim song set arranged by Michael Starobin. Bridge Records, New Music with Guitar, BRIDGE 9009

The program also resists a narrow definition of contemporary music. Different composers bring different ideas about melody, texture, drama and time. Moving among them can be more revealing than trying to decide whether one unfamiliar piece represents an entire musical category.

A lasting partnership with Poul Ruders

Danish composer Poul Ruders wrote several substantial works for Starobin. Bridge’s collection of their collaborations includes Psalmodies, Etude and Ricercare, Chaconne, and Paganini Variations, the second guitar concerto. The collection places solo playing beside music with an ensemble and orchestra. Bridge Records, BRIDGE 9136

Ruders’s own note explains that Starobin asked him to write the concerto that became Paganini Variations. Its starting point is Paganini’s famous Twenty-fourth Caprice. The composer’s account connects a new guitar work to the long practice of finding fresh possibilities in an existing theme. Wise Music Classical, composer’s program note

A variation changes something while leaving enough of an idea for us to recognize a relationship. Rhythm, harmony, register or texture may change. Listening becomes a game of remembering and rediscovering: what survived, and what has become surprising? That makes a variation work a promising doorway for listeners curious about unfamiliar concert music.

Making recordings that remain available

Starobin founded Bridge Records in 1981. The company describes a catalog combining twentieth- and twenty-first-century music with older repertoire. Becky Starobin joined the business and became its president; their son Robert later took responsibility for digital distribution and operations. The history is a reminder that preserving performances involves organizational work as well as artistry. Bridge Records, company history

A premiere reaches the people in a room. A recording allows a piece to be encountered again, elsewhere and years later. For someone listening in East Tennessee, that difference is practical. A recording can become the first meeting with a composer, preparation for a concert, or a reason to ask a teacher about an unfamiliar score.

Teaching extends that work. Starobin joined Curtis in 2011 and helped establish its guitar program. Earlier, he chaired the guitar department at Manhattan School of Music from 1993 to 2004. Curtis Institute of Music

Bringing the questions home

The 1971 Knoxville festival gives our community an early point of contact with Starobin’s career.

At a recital, try carrying one question from that career into the room: what can this piece teach us about the guitar that familiar repertoire has not? The answer might involve a new sound, an unexpected instrumental partner or a different sense of musical time. Starobin’s work gives listeners many places to begin.

Sources

Editorial suggestions; add the final published URLs before publication. – Laurie Randolph: A Guitarist’s Life Across Musical Worlds – Anisa Angarola: The Guitar as a Shared Voice – Classical and Fingerstyle Guitar in East Tennessee – Knoxville Classical Guitar concerts and events