The Singing Guitar

2022 GRAMMY® nominated, Best Choral Performance

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A Chicago Tribune Best Classical Recording of 2020, A WRTI Best of 2020 Album, Apple Music Featured New Album, and Qobuz Grand Selection.

Music for choir and guitars with Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, Texas Guitar Quartet, Austin Guitar Quartet, and cellist Douglas Harvey.

Johnson curated a program woven together by exquisitely crafted music for voices, guitar, and stories of women.

Nico Muhly’s musical mediation How Little You Are evokes powerful landscapes of American pioneers in a compelling work for choir and 12 guitars; soprano Estelí Gomez is a featured soloist. Kile Smith’s The Dawn’s Early Light sets selected text from Native American Sarah Winnemucca’s autobiography that addresses the significant divisions in our human family.  The texts present contrasting perspectives of Sara Winemucca, the first Native American to publish and English language narrative, and the pioneer women whose texts are set in Muhly’s piece.

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail’s “When the Guitar,” in a new instrumentation created for Conspirare and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, opens the CD. Conspirare’s sopranos and altos join cellist Douglas Harvey in Craig Hella Johnson’s “The Song That I Came to Sing”.

Conspirare gratefully acknowledges the following for their support of this recording: Anonymous, Dale and Tina Knobel, Legacy of Sound 2, Hella Circle, CAPTRUST: STMM, National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, City of Austin Economic Development Department, Cultural Arts Division and St. Luke’s Methodist Church.

12/25/2020 – Best of 2020: WRTI’s Favorite Classical and Jazz Albums of the Year

12/8/2020 – Chicago Tribune: The best classical recordings of 2020: CSO, Kevin Cole and James Lentini

11/2/2020 – Klassick Centraal (Netherlands)

9/14/2020 – Classical Guitar Austin streaming World Community Radio Network Featuring the world premiere recording of Nico Muhly’s How Little You Are and interviews with Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson, John Dearmanof the LAGQ, Estelí Gomez, soprano

9/13/2020 – Classical Austin: At Home With Conspirare’s Craig Hella Johnson + A Sneak Listen to Their Brand New CD!

Austin-American Statesman Luke Quinton’s review of the world premiere of How Little You Are: 

“It’s a strong, moving work, a richly detailed piece of art that takes worthy stories from the West and makes them into something more than the sum of their parts, piecing just tiny fragments of these women’s lives together in a buzzing, humming vibrating piece of music that manages to move you not just intellectually, but emotionally.”

Andrew McGregor, BBC Record Review:

“The singing of Craig Hella Johnson’s ensemble Conspirare combined with the delicacy of shifting textures of twelve guitars is intriguing and emotionally effective. … I found this a really moving setting for an unusual ensemble. You’ll find it alongside other new pieces for choir and guitar quartet.”

Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune:

“Johnson and Conspirare continue to create indelible work, as in “The Singing Guitar,” which pairs Conspirare’s sublime voices with guitar accompaniment. The melismatic chant of Reena Esmail’s “When the Guitar,” the poignant tone painting of Nicol Muhly’s “How Little You Are,” and the storytelling character of Kile Smith’s “The Dawn’s Early Light” illuminate Conspirare’s versatility and singular sound.”

Track Listing
  1. When the Guitar (Reena Esmail)
  2. How Little You Are (Nico Muhly)
    • We washed our faces at the spring
    • Do you remember
    • A long-drawn wail
    • Interlude: Springtime
    • How little you are
    • The night herders
  3. The Dawn’s Early Light (Kile Smith)
    • I, Sarah Winnemucca
    • My grandfather jumped up
    • While they were fishing
    • The Paiutes are not fond of going to war
    • The Star-Spangled Banner
    • I shall be beautiful
  4. The Song That I Came To Sing (CHJ)

Recorded at St. Luke’s Methodist Church, Houston, TX

November 4 – November 6, 2019

Release Date: 09/18/2020
Label: Delos Productions, Inc.
Catalog Number: DE 3595

Reflections on The Singing Guitar

As When the Guitar begins, we hear single notes—medium to low to high and back again—measured, clear, a pattern.  Our sensory imagination feels the pressure and release of fingers plucking strings. A cloud of sound moves in, as if on a warm breeze, and we intuit a chorus of voices, barely words, wafting above the guitar. Saying “guitar.” The word, the instrument, its sound, its player, the singers who say the word: Layers. Sculptural dimension. Colors interweave. A poem. It builds, until soloists step forward with their lilting cries, female, then male, notes bending, sliding, fluttering in some kind of air. A braid of guitar, song, cry. Song magnifies, a blanket of aspiration, soft, soaring, a multitude, with reverent strings.  Cries return, soulful, nimble.  All parts respected, supported, resolved: Voices woven by strings.

Reena Esmail, composer of When the Guitar, speaks of “…finding tender, warm, deeply resonant spaces within ourselves…” as the aim of her music, and I take that as the goal of this entire, exquisite recording, The Singing Guitar.  Placed in dialogue, the guitar and the human voice find reflection—both instruments of vibration, tuned through refinement, boundlessly expressive, magnified a hundredfold by collaboration with others.  As vessels we are similar—the curves and recesses, the mutual responsiveness—indeed, it’s hard not to see a human torso in the body of a guitar, or the guitar player’s tenderness in cradling his or her instrument—a pietà? Across time, musical genre, and cultural tradition, the guitar serves the keen expression of human joy, arousal, love, and lament. Choruses of voices and guitars, partnered here, exult in reciprocal affirmation and surrender.

Resonating from this place of collective wisdom and trust, The Singing Guitar is an album of stories, especially women’s stories, and women’s voices—as composer, writer, singer, guitarist—soar deep and wide, in a company of excellence.  Within these four unique ensembles, we receive the talents of Nobel Laureates, Fulbright Scholars, Grammy winners, mystics and mavericks—a typical Conspirare mélange of mastery and commonality, assembled to transport us beyond our selves to a shared space of openheartedness.  Oh, how desperately we want to create that now!

This music—crafted by so many hands and voices, and yielding to interpretation by composers, conductor, performers, listeners all—this recording meets each of us where we are.  Can it inspire and activate us, too? In the aftermath of hard-won histories like those mused upon here, can we access the wonder of “how little” we are, the grace of “weird beauty”? Inspired by brave protagonists coming to terms with profound challenges, this music offers models of resilience: “I shall be beautiful while the earth lasts.”  “I live in the hope of meeting.” Exquisite, impossible, bittersweet.  Deep exhale.

-Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Austin, Texas, June 2020

Photo: Regina Vater

Annette DiMeo Carlozzi is a writer, lifelong curator of contemporary art, and a longtime Conspirare listener, thanks to her husband, Dan Bullock. Her life adventures include a career-inspiring George Clinton and Funkadelic/The Last Poets concert when she was sixteen, commissioning Siah Armajani to create the first artist-designed Olympic Cauldron for the 1996 Olympic Games, and raising a son who has built an ethical creative practice as an indie wrestler.