Re: August Watters - two books arrived today
Thanks to all who posted. Since there have been questions, I’ll give a bit more background on the two mandolin books.
The main goal of “Exploring Classical Mandolin” is to introduce the music and techniques of classical mandolin to mandolinists coming from other traditions. (Here in the USA, that’s almost all of us!) ECM is primarily for those who want to use classical techniques to explore mandolin’s range of tone and texture—with or without getting into historical styles of classical mandolin playing.
ECM contains an overview of historical practice, today’s various schools of thought, and my own take on what works. There are cornerstones of the classical mandolin literature, and a section of my arrangements of classical melodies. I can’t call ECM a fully-developed “method” because I was limited to just 75 pages for the instructional part, so ECM is designed to be used along with other materials.
Like ECM, the new book—New Solos for Classical Mandolin—presents new music based on several right-hand techniques drawn from classical mandolin literature. There are also practice pages for each solo—to help the reader develop those techniques, and to extract their musical content and apply to new situations. Scale, arpeggio, and chord-melody methods are explored, since all are important to classical playing.
As far as content, you could say NSCM is an extension and elaboration of Part 1 of ECM. The approach is different, however: in ECM I went into quite a bit of descriptive detail. Not wanting to repeat that, with the new book I took a “progressive studies” approach: concepts are taught by example, and each melody builds on the previous. So although the title presents NSCM as a new repertoire book (its primary purpose), it’s also a book of progressive exercises, exploring right hand techniques drawn from the literature of classical mandolin. But you could just as well ignore the extra exercises, and focus on the melodies.
Rob, yours are not the first eyebrows to be raised by my Scottish-themed tunes: “Road to Inverness,” “Scottish Bells,” etc. But rather than making caricatures of Scottish musical styles, these are just my own impressionistic titles for new works. The Watters, after all, came from the Scottish Highlands. And we still hold them dear!
Exploring Classical Mandolin (Berklee Press, 2015)
Progressive Melodies for Mandocello (KDP, 2019) (2nd ed. 2022)
New Solos for Classical Mandolin (Hal Leonard Press, 2020)
2021 guest artist, mandocello: Classical Mandolin Society of America
Bookmarks