L.A. Strings bring quirky instruments to Recital Hall
DANIEL TORRES, Correspondent
Issue date: 4/22/08 Section: Entertainment
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The Strings consists of three members: Jack Sanders, a soloist, chamber musician and teacher; Mark Menzies, a New Zealand-born, Grammy-nominated concerto soloist; and Jason Yoshida, a guitarist and pluck instrument expert.
The performance was co-developed by music professor Peter Yates and Sanders to introduce different string instruments to those who attended.
"I wanted the students to see this kind of early instrument
because a lot of people play guitar but don't realize its history goes back 1,000 years, and it has various versions of lute, theorbos and vihuela, instruments like this that go back to the 16th century," said Yates.
Sanders and Yoshida started the performance with a duet on the vihuelas to pieces by Spanish composers Luys de Naravez and Enriquez de Valderrabano.
The vihuela, a predecessor to the modern guitar, contains 12 strings instead of six strings and has a slightly different tuning.
Being about the size of a ukulele and a half, the plucking of the vihuelas strings kept the audience intrigued with the intricate sound it produced - not as deep as the sound of a regular guitar, but just as loud with a higher, faster pitch.
Members in the audience were awestruck by how such a small instrument could produce a powerful presence in the hall.
Sanders built a majority of the instruments featured in the performance.
"[I've been playing] basically since about 2000. I built the
guitars that I played tonight and in 2000 built a vihuela, which is the instrument I started the concert with," said Sanders.
An instrument that attracted the audience even more than the vihuela was the 6-foot tall theorbo, masterfully played by Yoshida.
Being part of the lute family, this eccentric instrument goes back to the medieval period.
"It was born out of the Renaissance in the transition time to the Baroque music period, and it was developed to kind of accompany the new style of music that was being developed, called monody," said Yoshida.
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