What makes it great?

Last week, Nicholas Goluses walked
into his studio, picked up his chocolate-colored, six-stringed guitar, and
played through his solo parts in Bill Dobbins’ new Guitar Concerto.

“It’s exuberant music,” he said.
“It has the joy of rhythm, the joy of dance.” He hugged the instrument to his
chest. “I’ve been waiting a long time for a great American guitar concerto like
this one.”

Proclaiming art “great” and
“American” risks sounding grandiose and nationalistic, but it reflects the
aspirations of serious artists since the country’s founding. Writers such as
Nathanial Hawthorne aspired to write a great American novel. Around 1920,
painter Georgia O’Keefe declared her intention to create a great American
painting. She sketched the skull of a bull. “They will not think it
great with the red stripes down the sides — red, white and blue — but they
will notice it,” she said.

Music students and their professors
sit around in coffee shops debating what qualifies symphonic music as
“American.” Aaron Copland comes up in the debate. So do George Gershwin,
Leonard Bernstein, and Duke Ellington. Critics have called Ray Harris’ 1939
Third Symphony, “The Great American.” (In 1982, C. Curtis-Smith actually stuck
that title on one of his own pieces, an act the late Rochester composer David
Diamond called “a happy impertinence.”)

The title “great American guitar
concerto” has had fewer contenders, mostly due to technological limitations. By
itself, the instrument is too quiet against a full orchestra. But new,
sophisticated amplification techniques have made the guitar-orchestra combo
more practical. In the past few years, more than a dozen American composers
have presented new concertos for classical guitar and orchestra: they include
Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Rouse, and Chinese American composer Tan Dun.

This week, an audience in Eastman
Theatre will hear the newest one.

Its composer, Bill Dobbins, was born
in Athens, Ohio, in 1947. Trained as a classical pianist, he’s performed solos
with symphony orchestras under conductors Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss, and Louis
Lane.

That’s news to those who think of
Dobbins as a strictly jazz guy. The soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair
has taught jazz at the Eastman School of Music for decades, and he possesses an
international reputation for his work with jazz ensembles and big bands in the
US and abroad.

When Dobbins received the commission
to write a guitar concerto from the School’s Hanson Institute for American
Music, he threw stereotypes out the window.

“I don’t make any distinction between
classical and jazz,” he says, adding, “but classical composers would write much
more interesting music if they let themselves be influenced by jazz.” With that
in mind, Dobbins employed the tonal, chromatic language of composers from Bach
to Shostakovich.

The work opens with a brief
introduction and lyrical theme from the guitar. The second movement begins with
a tender and melancholy solo that Dobbins wrote to eulogize a close friend of
his, a German music publisher named Hans Gruber. But the sorrow doesn’t last.
Dobbins shifts the mood in the last movement, accelerating to a frenzied
flamenco. The composer says he drew inspiration from a universe of
musical spheres, from Spanish and Brazilian composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos
to American songwriters such as Jerome Kern.

“It’s got all the goods,” raves
guitarist Nicholas Goluses, who’s been working on the solo part for several
months. “It’s a sustained climax for about eight minutes.”

Is it American?

Saxophonist Ray Ricker has no doubt.
Ricker, who directs the Institute for Music Leadership at Eastman, says that
when most people think of American symphonic music, they think of Aaron
Copland. “[Copland’s music] has a certain use of intervals and outdoorsy kind
of feel,” Ricker says. “But to me, the use of jazz contributes to that American
quality.” Jazz is the only indigenous American music. As a classical pianist and jazz musician, Bill Dobbins may be
the very person to write a great American guitar concerto. “As a composer, Bill
has tremendous chops,” Ricker says.

Is the new
guitar concerto great?

Christopher Seaman, who’s
conducting the premiere, is cautiously enthusiastic. “I really
can’t predict what is ‘great.’ That’s for history to decide,” he says. “But
this is really excellent and could well eventually be voted ‘great.'”

Members of a Rochester audience have
the chance to consider it when Goluses, conductor Christopher Seaman, and the
Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra perform the world premiere of Bill Dobbins’ Guitar Concerto in the Eastman Theatre.

The composer says he hopes listeners
walk into the hall with as few preconceptions as possible. Dobbins says, “I
just want them to have an emotional, physical, and sensuous musical experience
from beginning to end.”

Christopher
Seaman conducts the RPO in four
works: Rapture by Christopher Rouse, Guitar Concerto by Bill Dobbins (in its
world premiere with soloist Nicholas
Goluses); Pelléas et Mélisande by
Faure, and La Mer by Debussy.
Thursday, November 10, and Saturday, November 12, at 8 p.m. Pre-concert chat at
7 p.m. Eastman Theatre, 60 Gibbs Street. $22-$52. 454-2100, www.rpo.org. All
ages.