Full Circle by Rob Rushing

The album's title refers to three kinds of circling:

1) The music begins in the Baroque, moves through the Classical era, and comes up to the modern day — but the final group of pieces, Duarte’s“English Suite,” sounds like Renaissance lute music — effectively, it draws on the era before the Baroque.

2) The album actually begins and ends with the same piece, Kellner’s “Campanella” (although the last version is quite different from the first).

3) Kellner appears to be the first music theorist to diagram the Circle of Fifths, arguably the most important idea in music theory.

DAVID KELLNER
Kellner lived at the same time as Bach (and was also German); he was and is highly regarded as a lute player, and you see five of his pieces here. I initially saw Bradford Werner play the "Rondeau" and discovered he had transcribed four of Kellner's works as a set, and I thought I could add a fifth as a kind of prelude and call it a suite (Kellner didn't write a suite per se, but this organization here is pretty typical of a Baroque suite). All of the pieces are in A major (although a few were in D major originally), and they are quite lovely, each very distinct in personality.

I taught myself a bit of Baroque lute tablature, and also made use of Ben Beuming's transcription of the "Campanella." For the second version of that piece, the one closes the album, I capo'd the guitar at the fourth fret (for a more lute-like pitch, as per Beuming's suggestion), and re-tuned the old Aria guitar to open string drone pitches (this somewhat approximates the sound of a Baroque lute, which had doubled drone note strings that were not fretted, but always played open).

FERNANDO SOR
Music of Fernando Sor (1778-1839), the Spanish guitarist and composer—or perhaps we might suggest that he was really Catalan, since his name is also recorded as Josep Ferran Sorts i Muntades, and he spent much of his career in France after taking the French side against Spain.

There are two sets of pieces here: the first are a collection of Sor's studies (all drawn from the famous Segovia collection), ranging from slow and stately (#1); fast and whimsical (#10); complex (#14); dense and difficult (but enjoyable to listen to—#20). These studies are followed by Sor's most famous guitar piece. At one time quite overplayed, tre piece is brilliant and quite fun. Consensus seems to be that variation No. 3 is the best and the most clever, while people are down on Variation No. 2 (the minor key version); but if you listen carefully, you'll hear that the intro (before the "theme") is in fact quite strongly related to that second variation. think the whole thing is worthwhile.

The recording quality here is somewhat variable; I transitioned from my old analog setup to all digital and sometimes it shows.

JOHN DUARTE
John (who went by “Jack”) Duarte (rhymes with “cart,” not with “party”) was by all accounts a difficult man, including how his name was pronounced. He was a chemist by training, but a serious jazz musician (he played with Django Reinhardt, for example), too, who later became a quite significant classical composer in a wide variety of styles.

He remains a rather polarizing figure in the classical guitar world, but regardless of the controversy, I think the English Suite is a really enjoyable piece of music; it manages to combine quite modern structures and tonalities (including some tasty jazz voicings) with a frequently Renaissance, folksy, ‘Olde Englande’ sort of feel. All three pieces are neatly tripartite, with the outer pieces (the Prelude and the Round Dance) structured Fast-Slow-Fast, while the inner piece (the Folk Song) is Slow-Fast-Slow. These simple structures hide a great deal of harmonic complexity, however.