Intelligencer Journal

GUITAR HEROES:
Georgia guitar quartet brings an eclectic program to Elizabethtown

by Rebecca J. Ritzel

Athens, Ga., is the sort of city where musicians spawn. It's the place where some guys and a girl got drunk at a Chinese restaurant one night in 1976 and dared to form the B-52s. The town where, four years later, an art student named Michael Stipe walked into a record store, met a clerk named Peter Buck and, after flipping through a dictionary, decided to call themselves REM.

Love Tractor. Pylon. Widespread Panic. The Modern Skirts. All these bands and more share a similar tale of meeting in Athens one night and making music the next. Yes, the town has a high ratio of rock stars to average citizens, but it's not just the length of this list that's so impressive; it's the variety of music coming out of a city otherwise known only for college football and kudzu.

If ever a quartet of classical musicians was destined to cross genre bounds, break the mold and make their music accessible to all, odds are, guitarists from Athens could do it.

The Georgia Guitar Quartet's story doesn't involve drunken revelry or serendipity. Instead, they were brought together in the mid 1990s by John Sutherland, a guitarist who studied with Spanish guitarist Andre Segovia and taught for decades at the University of Georgia in Athens.

"He was the reason that we went to UGA," guitarist Jason Solomon said. "He had it in his mind before we ever met that the four of us should form a quartet. He let us have a year to adapt to college life and sow our wild oats and then, in our second year, he started getting us together."

Sutherland calls the four men in the quartet - Solomon, Kyle Dawkins, Brian Smith and Phil Snyder - "one of the finest groups of young talent I have seen in my 30 years of teaching." He coached them individually and as an ensemble. And where Sutherland left off, the town took over.

"There are so many people in Athens that like so many different kinds of music," Solomon said. "What we tried to do was transcend stylistic boundaries and not get pigeonholed. Athens was the perfect town for us to accomplish that in, because there are so many open-minded artists and musicians - people who are just lovers of music."

One weekend the quartet would don tuxedos and perform at the recital hall on campus; the next Saturday they'd play at the 40-Watt Club. In a haze of cigarette smoke and interrupted by an occasional clanking beer bottle, they'd play the same music.

"It was equally well received, and that surprised us," Solomon said. "That inspired us to seek out a variety of styles and musical works that would translate well to four guitars. We primarily focus on arranging classical music, but we've also explored Celtic music and jazz and ragtime and bluegrass."

Solomon hopes the program Georgia Guitar Quartet will present Saturday at Gretna Music comes off like a smooth trajectory of styles rather than a disorganized hodgepodge. The concert will feature one work each by Dawkins, Smith and Solomon. Popular names like Grieg, Chopin, Bach and Ravel are on the program, as are a few Latin numbers and works by more obscure Baroque composers. Each half concludes with a diversion - "Linus and Lucy" by Vince Guaraldi and a traditional Irish tune.

"There's not a whole lot of music that's composed for four guitars," Solomon said. "That's been great, because it's given us the opportunity to arrange music that we were all passionate about."
They seek out music with rapidly moving lines and different kinds of textures that will translate to guitar. Samuel Barber's lush and languid Adagio for Strings would not work, but Bach toccatas and fugues do. And as they search, they avoid pieces already recorded by their better-known West Coast counterparts, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.

Naming an ensemble after a geographical location is a risky thing. As is often pointed out, only two current members of the Tokyo String Quartet are Japanese. To avoid that pitfall, the guitarists didn't simply dub themselves the Athens Quartet.

All four men are from Georgia originally and are committed to staying in the Peachtree State. Dawkins, Smith and Snyder teach guitar, Solomon is defending his dissertation and hoping to find a position of his own next year.

"We've been lucky," Solomon said. "Sutherland did more than pick four guitarists and put them together. He psychologically analyzed us and figured out that we would work well together."

So, today, the Georgia Guitar Quartet will meet somewhere in Georgia at a rest stop, pile in a van and drive north to their next gig. Just like your average Athens band.

March 23, 2007