PAUL
VERNON CHESTER
Manouche Maestro
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Manouche Maestro |
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John Wilson Duarte 1919~2004 - Obituaries
JOHN W DUARTE was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers for the guitar, but he was also an author, a music critic and a teacher. He instructed at summer schools, festivals and conservatories worldwide, as well as writing for all the major international guitar journals and many important music publications, including the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. His energy for creative activities and endless globetrotting remained seemingly inexhaustible right up to the last year of his life. Wherever in the world the leading classical guitarists and their students gathered, Duarte was a familiar presence. Duarte published more than 200 original works and arrangements, and his music was recorded by such recitalists as Andrés Segovia and John Williams. From the 1940s, he became a powerful and uncompromising writer on the classical guitar, establishing a new and vital critique of the instrument and its players in articles and correspondence columns.
Greatly in demand as a teacher of the guitar both privately
and at international summer schools, Duarte always acknowledged that in the
pedagogic field he was something of an anomaly, never having undertaken a formal
academic training in music nor possessing any aspirations of becoming a concert
player. Nonetheless, through close observation of many leading guitarists,
Duarte acquired a unique insight into the essentials of both technique and
interpretation. Thus he once described himself as “one who
does not pretend to any status as a performer, a mere observer whose findings
have been confirmed by sufficient virtuosi to set my conscience at rest”.
John William Duarte was born in Sheffield, but lived in
Manchester from the age of 6. After hearing a banjo and
becoming fascinated by fretted instruments, he acquired his first guitar (at the
cost of £1) in 1934. Initially he studied jazz guitar with the
though with no intention of becoming a professional musician. Instead, Duarte graduated in chemistry at Manchester
University, where during his student years he learnt trumpet and double
bass (playing the latter on occasion in the company of Coleman Hawkins
and Django Reinhardt). During the war he was employed as
chief chemist in a Ministry of Supply factory. When the war ended, Duarte, a
founder member of the Manchester Guitar Circle, was first
introduced to Andrés Segovia, who became a lifelong friend. From the 1950s
Duarte concentrated on the classical guitar, moving to London (though still
working as an industrial chemist) to teach at the Spanish Guitar Centre.
There, he increased his composing activities and establish creative links with a
number of great players. He steadily built up a formidable international
reputation and in 1973 he became a full-time composer, critic and teacher.
The Manchester Guitar Circle was founded in 1946 by John Duarte and Terry Usher
with the stated aim of - In 1977 Duarte was appointed director of the Cannington Summer School, which attracted students from all over the world, and he continued there until the 1990s. From 1978 until just a few months ago, he wrote regularly for Gramophone magazine, where his brief soon developed to cover not only the guitar but also the harpsichord, Baroque music and interviews with distinguished performers. Over the years his musical output proliferated until his works had been recorded by some 60 artists in more than 20 countries. His critical writing, a substantial contribution to British musical life, included about 250 compact disc liner notes, with a Grammy Award for his annotation to the reissue of Segovia’s early recordings. He became a familiar figure on international juries for guitar competitions and taught in more than 30 countries.
His 60th, 70th and 80th birthdays were celebrated by Wigmore Hall and Bolivar Hall recitals of his music, performed by artists from many countries. In 1990 he was presented with a Silver Medal by the Czech Ambassador for services to Anglo-Czech and Slovak cultural relations, and in 1999 he was honoured with the Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Guitar Foundation of America. In 2001 the notes of a Naxos recording of Duarte’s music provided his compositional credo: “As a composer I have never given much thought to what posterity might think of me — I will not be here to know it! My aim is to write primarily for the living and hopefully to give pleasure.” He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, whom he married in 1943, and by two sons and a daughter. John W Duarte, composer, writer
and teacher, was born on October 2, 1919. He died on December 23, 2004, aged 85. John W Duarte
John Duarte abandoned his career as an industrial chemist when he became
fascinated by the infinite possibilities of the guitar, particularly its
capacity for polyphony and harmony, and went on to become a prolific composer
for the instrument. John Wilson
Duarte, composer, teacher, writer and chemist: born Sheffield 2 October 1919;
married 1943 Dorothy Seddon (two sons, one daughter); died Barnet, Hertfordshire
23 December 2004.
John Duarte abandoned his career as an industrial chemist when he became
fascinated by the infinite possibilities of the guitar, particularly its
capacity for polyphony and harmony, and went on to become a prolific composer
for the instrument. Duarte's
background was not a musical one, nor did he ever study music formally. Contact
with music began as a child, with the banjo of an acquaintance. He progressed
through the ukulele to the guitar, which he studied with
Terry Usher. But science was his
main study, and, after gaining a BSc with honours from Manchester University, he
became Chief Chemist in a Ministry of Supply factory.
In the 1940s he began to write for BMG magazine,
which featured him on its cover in 1948. A year later he published a guitar
composition in the New York quarterly Guitar Review and
thus already had a considerable reputation when, during a visit to a music shop,
he met Len Williams, who was already
established as a leading teacher of the guitar. Williams, returning from
Australia in the early 1950s and seeking to enlarge the musical education of his
talented young son John, persuaded Duarte to give up his career in science and
move to London, which he did in the early
1950s.
By that time, Duarte had also given up the trumpet, with which he had once
publicly performed a trumpet concerto, and the double-bass, with which he had
played in sessions with Coleman Hawkins and
Django Reinhardt.
Duarte taught at the Spanish
Guitar Centre, which Williams senior had founded. John Williams, already
hailed as a young virtuoso of outstanding talent, acknowledged the early
influence of Duarte by including his transcriptions of Bach (two of the Cello
Suites) in his first recordings, along with
Variations on a Catalan Folk Song Op 25, one of the most enduring
and most recorded of Duarte's compositions.
The list of John Duarte's compositions (about 150 in all, most of them
published) shows an exceptionally wide range of styles. The variations form,
well suited to the guitar's capacity for colour and mood, features prominently,
but other challenges were met with an imaginative and professional skill. In
Dreams Op 91, written for the Amsterdam Guitar Trio, the language alternates
between aleatory, atonal and graphic, contained within a conventionally notated
framework and allowing spontaneous reaction between the performers. The work was
later performed by the Zagreb Guitar Trio, another high-powered ensemble with
the required brilliance of technique.
Much of his commissioned work was written with the performers' particular
circumstances in mind, including nationality. He would happily turn his hand to
a set of Greek dances or a collection of Moravian folk tunes, or grapple with
the cross-rhythms of a traditional Venezuelan waltz.
Like his
jazz-based pieces, the results
invariably revealed an unerring ear for the essence.
Works that included the flute and, notably, the human voice brought out a
lyric warmth that tended to take a back seat to harmony in the solo guitar
pieces. The songs contained humour too, and his settings of verses by
Spike Milligan, Hark Hark, the
Ark Op 103, revealed yet another facet of his nature.
His own sense of fun came to the fore in a tercentenary tribute to Henry
Purcell, Henry's Purple Parcel Op
118, written for six guitars and drums. The title is explained by the
treatment given to the name Purcell by two different but equally uninformed
computer ‘spell-check’ programs. This versatility puzzled some commentators, who
found difficulty in perceiving the true Duarte. But this was, in fact, the true
Duarte, never easy to categorise, always unpredictable, his agile and fertile
mind able and willing to leap without apparent effort from one area of music to
another. One of his last
commissions was for a set of variations for solo guitar on Purcell's Round O,
the theme that Britten used for his Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
It was performed in April 2004 at the International Guitar Festival of Rust,
Austria, which not only commissioned it, but also instituted the annual John
Duarte International Guitar Competition.
Duarte never held an appointment in a British music academy, but for many years
he directed a very successful summer school in Somerset. There were other
compensations, including a stream of invitations to teach and lecture abroad,
all accepted with enthusiasm. He produced several books, mainly about guitar
technique, and was a practising journalist throughout his musical career.
Last October - on his 85th birthday, as it happened - he was awarded the
prized Chitarra d'Oro (golden guitar) by the International Guitar Festival of
Alessandria, Italy, for "Una vita per la chitarra" ("A Life for the
Guitar"). He could not be present, but it was a good note on which to end a long
career spent in the service of music.
Colin Cooper
Remembering ‘Jack’ Duarte (1919-2004)
The British guitar composer, critic and teacher John W. Duarte (known to his friends and colleagues as ‘Jack’) died on 23 December last year, aged 85. While possibly best known for his English Suite, Op 31, written for Segovia, he wrote some 200 guitar works and was a prominent personality in the guitar world for several decades. Born in Sheffield in 1919, he grew up in Manchester where he studied jazz guitar with Terry Usher (his only formal music tuition) and later founded the Manchester Guitar Circle. Despite his early interest in the guitar he trained as a scientist and initially pursued a career as an industrial chemist. His early experience with jazz improvisation stood him in good stead for composing. He started writing for the classical guitar in 1939 and later taught at Len William’s Spanish Guitar Centre in London, however he was around fifty when he finally became a full time composer and teacher.
I first met him in London in the late seventies when,
fresh off a plane from Sydney, I
approached him about lessons. He
inquired whether I played any modern repertoire.
Yes, mostly modern, I replied enthusiastically, pulling out Spanish Dance
No 5. He
pointed out that Granados had been torpedoed in 1915 and I was sent away to
‘renovate’ my repertoire with some Frank Martin and Poulenc.
Since he liked to give two-hour lessons and had an encyclopaedic
knowledge of the guitar, I learnt a lot about the guitar world and about his
opinions. One thing I soon
discovered was that if after a guitar concert at
London’s Wigmore Hall he was headed
straight for a Ruddles at the local
rather than to the green room the performer could expect a negative write-up.
Certainly he was a harsh critic and his reviews could be caustic.
But he insisted plain speaking was in the interests of the guitar’s
future as a serious instrument since a situation in which the guitar was propped
up by uncritical tribal fervour was not a healthy one.
Concerned not only about musical and technical standards, but about poor
programming, he railed against the incessant regurgitation of ‘pot boilers’ (Sor
Op 9, Asturias, Recuerdos and Villa-Lobos preludes were all sources of
irritation) and he implored performers to explore new repertoire.
As well as being an advocate for contemporary music, he was passionate
about the baroque and the renaissance and also about jazz,
Wes Montgomery being a particular
favourite.
His own music was accessible, idiomatic and largely tonal though often peppered
with dissonance. Most of his works
were written with a particular performer in mind.
The popular Variations on a Catalan Folk Song, op 25, were written for
John Williams and are a formidable
test of virtuosity. Suite
Piemontese, op 46 was written for the Italian guitarist Angelo Gilardino and
Sonatinette, op 35 for the American guitarist Alice Artzt.
Toute on Ronde, Op 57, had its genesis in an eight bar sight reading test
he wrote for a Paris guitar competition and apparently the only contestant who
could make sense of it was placed fourth. A particular favourite of mine is the
Quartet Americana, op 96a which like Sua Cosa Op 52, has a strong
jazz flavour.
His own favourite was Variations on a French Nursery Song, op 32 for the
prominent French duo of Presti-Lagoya.
He venerated Ida Presti and
regarded her as the greatest of all guitarists.
Five Quiet Songs, op 37 were written in the wake of her tragically
premature death. In addition to
guitar solos, duets, trios and quartets, he also composed for guitar and other
instruments and published numerous arrangements and transcriptions.
He continued to compose into his seventies and eighties, with commissions
such as Musikones Op 107, 1991 for Eleftheria Kotzia.
That work can be heard along with other major solo works on a recent CD
from young Italian guitarist Antigoni Goni (Naxos 8.554554).In addition to his
composing activities Duarte was a prolific reviewer
Jack Duarte - A brief memoir.
As the guitar world laments the passing of one of its stalwarts, I would like to add a little of my own recollection to the record. Some 20 years ago when I was involved in the classical guitar scene in New Zealand, at both playing and organisational levels, there was a thriving community of classical guitar societies - sufficient of a community for there to be a national federation of these societies. Their main business was the organisation of an annual summer school, which for several years was residential, lasted at least a full week, was usually held in a camp location and these locations could be seriously remote. Ask John Mills sometime about Waiotapu Springs and its erstwhile prison camp in the forest, or Vladimir Mikulka about the experience of Gunn's Bush. At one point, in the mid eighties, the Federation was faced with a split in the guitar ranks, with a rebellion against the emphasis on imported talent, and without going into the minutiae of the struggle, the unthinkable occurred - 2 summer schools. Hardly something we would consider in our current circumstances in Australia, yet a reality in a little country with a population the size of Sydney's.
One group organised around Sue Court, now an important figure in music at the
University of Otago, who led the tutoring at the school held in Auckland.
The other, around one Edrick Banks, then a touring performer and teacher
at Taradale Community College in Hawkes Bay, who brought out the venerable
John Duarte to lead the tutoring at
the rival camp. I chose to attend
this summer school - I really felt I wouldn't get this opportunity often.
I listened while Duarte tapped his
pipe, chuckled and remembered at length this or that trip to
Caracas or some other place of
guitar pilgrimage, and practised my rear end off getting his arrangement of
Bach's first Cello Suite Prelude ready for what was a huge moment for me.
He politely listened while I played it through then blithely informed me
that he'd redone it and taken out all the slurs. I wasn't exactly crushed, and
he did go through several points in that class but to this day I still play it
with many of the slurs. That was my
brief encounter with Jack Duarte,
the poor guy who got caught up in a storm in a teacup ‘stoush’ in the South
Seas. - Bernard Hicke John (Jack) Duarte was
born in Sheffield on 2 October 1919. He is 100% English despite his name, his
father being Scottish and mother English. He was educated at the Manchester
Central High School (1931-35) and obtained an Honours Degree in Science at
Manchester University, Faculty of Technology (1936-40). He worked as a
professional scientist until 1969, when he abandoned science in favour of
full-time music. His formal musical education was 6 lessons with
Terence Usher (1934-36) in
jazz-guitar playing; the rest was by self-instruction. He also worked
professionally as a player of the
trumpet and double-bass in music of many kinds, and regularly as a jazz
musician until 1953. His many friendships with great artists have included one of
39 years with Andrés Segovia and a
shorter one with Ida Presti, who
died in 1967. Among those who have died, he can count as colleagues or
collaborators in various ways, many other prominent figures in the 20th-century
guitar scene: Laurindo Almeida,
Alexandre Lagoya, Antonio Ruiz-Pipó, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Alexandre
Tansman, and in the field of the lute, the great Diana Poulton. John Duarte has composed over 130 works for the guitar and
lute, many commissioned with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain
and other sources, private and official, both domestic and overseas. Most have
been published; 57 have been recorded, some several times, by 58 artists and
ensembles from 24 countries. He is also the author of many arrangements and
didactic works. He w a prolific writer, contributing to the American journal
Soundboard, specialist reviewer of baroque, early and plucked-string music for
Gramophone, reviewer for Music Teacher and contributor to
Classical Guitar. As an annotator he has written countless concert programme
notes and liner notes for over 250 recordings of music of many kinds, including
those for the reissue of Julian Bream’s
recordings with RCA (28 compact discs). In 1980 he received a Grammy Award for
his annotation of the reissue of
Segovia’s recordings made for EMI (1927-39). Other magazines for which he
has written regularly in the past include BMG, Music in Education, Guitar
Review, Guitar International, Guitar Player, Music & Musicians, Records &
Recording, Classical Music Fortnightly
and Performance. He is a contributor to the new edition of The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. As a teacher he has prepared many international students for
successful careers and he was Director of the
Cannington International Guitar
Summer School and Festival (1974-93). In 1994-95 he was Course Director of the
Bath International Guitar Festival
and since 1996 he has taught at the Oatridge International Guitar Summer School
and Festival (Edinburgh), for which he wrote a yearly guitar-orchestral work. In
addition he enjoyed teaching, lecturing and adjudicating in competitions in 29
countries outside Great Britain. In 1990 he received a decoration for his contributions to
Anglo-Czech and –Slovak cultural relations. On 20 February 1999 he was honoured
to receive a plaque, presented by the Fullerton campus of California State
University "In recognition of his extraordinary contribution to students
world-wide through his teaching, writing and composition."
On 20 August 1999 he was accorded a
virtuosic tribute concert at the VIIth International Guitar Festival in Brno
(Czech Republic), and at the Convention of the Guitar Foundation of America in
October 1999 he received an Award for Lifetime Achievement. John Duarte’s 60th and 70th birthdays were celebrated with
concerts of his music in London, played by artists from England, Czechoslovakia,
Croatia, Germany, the USA and Venezuela. That on his 80th birthday was given by
artists from Brazil, Croatia, England, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Scotland. |
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In
1947 Duarte had met Andrés Segovia,
the foremost pioneer of the guitar's 20th-century revival, and Segovia later
recorded the first English Suite Op 31
and
author of award winning sleeve and liner notes.
