A free concert by classical guitarist Peter Fletcher will be held at the Jackson County Agriculture Complex, 2741 Penn Avenue in Marianna, 7-8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 12.
The program is made possible by the Jackson County library system.
Fletcher will feature music from J.S. Bach, Francisco Tarrega, Mauro Giuliani, Manuel Ponce and piano pieces by Edvard Grieg that Fletcher transcribed for guitar. That will be a rare opportunity: Before his transcriptions, no one had ever played those Grieg pieces on guitar.
He’s working on a way to make the sheet music available through his website, but achieving that might be a challenge to fit into his busy schedule: Fletcher plays about 100 concerts a year.
Fletcher’s no snob about the venues. He’s played at Carnegie Hall in New York City and in modest church fellowship halls around the nation, so his gig at the ag center in Marianna is in keeping with his mission to increase the reach and appreciation of the classical guitar wherever he can.
He started playing strings at the age of 6, when he got a little baritone ukulele from his parents.
Fletcher took lessons on that instrument, learning countless traditional folk tunes that are still among his sentimental favorites. He practiced constantly, and wrote notes on his work in a journal he kept as a child. His interest in playing was clearly no passing phase, his parents realized.
But he longed for a “real guitar” and he got one for Christmas the year he turned 9. It was a full-size nylon-string classical. He’d been told to start on that type so it would be easier, later on, for his fingers to take the steel strings of the non-classical acoustic models that are far more commonly the instrument of choice for players.
But Fletcher fell in love with the classical guitar and all the nuance and complexity it allowed him to coax from the strings and body.
He studied with the greats — he counts one of his first teachers, the late John Sutherland from the University of Georgia, among those — and later on would teach others himself. He was at Emory University for six years and taught elsewhere in the country as well.
He won’t have time to set up lessons in connection with his show here — it was an add-on to his soon-ending current tour through Florida — but he will teach just a bit about the music he’s playing as his show progresses.
He’ll talk briefly as he goes along about the composers and pieces he’s chosen for the performance. He promises it will in no way resemble a lecture but will instead be quick strokes of grounding for any audience members that are not fully familiar with a particular work or artist.
This won’t be his first visit to Marianna. A former girlfriend that remains a friend grew up here. And he stayed here once during a very cold spell that iced bridges in the region and made it impossible to drive across them.
“I was on my way to Pensacola, so I stayed in Marianna for one or two days,” Fletcher said. “It’s a little bit of ‘old’ Florida, which I love. Lots of pine trees, critters, open space. My family visited Florida’s Atlantic side every summer when we lived in Atlanta, where I spent my formative years, but I also really like the Panhandle and the Gulf community. I have a cousin that lives in Destin and runs a business there, so I’m no stranger to this part of the country. I’ve seen the interstate signs for Marianna many, many times. I’ve been touring Florida since 2005 and the state is number one in my book, so it’s going to be a pleasure to stop again here and spend a little time playing for the people that make this seem like such a friendly place to be.”
Fletcher currently owns five guitars. He’s expecting to bring three of them here, although he’s still debating whether to bring the cedar along with two of his spruce tops made by luthier Darren Hippner.
He likes spruce for its clarity of tone and cedar for its warmth. The spruce guitars take years to “open up” to their fullest potential, while cedar‘s tone is pretty much set from the start. The spruce, he said, delivers sound like a rifle delivers a bullet, with focused directionality, while a cedar is more like a shotgun where the sound disperses in a more widespread delivery. He’ll be playing a spruce primarily. He says it’s the equivalent of a Steinway piano in terms of quality.
He no longer owns his first guitars. His parents, a nurse and an engineer, had to be frugal — the family brought their own popcorn to movies, for instance — and he was agreeable to trading in the old ones in for better as time passed and his skills improved.
He doesn’t imagine ever getting rid of these though, except for one that he’s thinking of donating to the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, which was co-founded by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea for underprivileged youth.
He has some other collections he has no intention of letting go — his music books from childhood, the models he put together as a youth, and the fountain pens he loves to use in writing his journal entries.
Looking back on his journals from childhood, he said he wishes more young people today would consider keeping them.
“I found one of my 5th grade journals recently, and it’s really interesting to read about the things I was thinking back then. I wrote a lot about the guitar — almost every entry has something about that — and I think it would be great if kids would keep a journal, just five minutes a day, and then go back and read those when they get a little older. I think it would be good to have, for everyone.”
“I taught kids at the European School of Music in Atlanta (for young people) for a while, and I watched kids mature and grow in music,” Fletcher continued.
“I’ve watched them grow up and I still stay in touch with some of them. That was a wonderful time in my life because I got to know whole families. I did that for about six years. It put food on the table but it did so much more for me, as well, in that I got to be part of kids’ growth and their learning about and feeling the beauty and poetry of music. I hope some of the local kids come in to hear the music.”
English (US)