Michael Bester

Years ago, Derek Sivers wrote a wonderful post called Friends From Memory. It’s a project which encourages gratitude, and in it, he lists out the names of people who have had a positive influence on his life from memory. I think it’s a lovely idea and I’ve been wanting to do my own version of this list for a while now.

In roughly chronological order, these are people who’ve come into my life who have been left a positive mark on me, nudging me towards who I am today. Some I’ve only spent a few hours with, others I’ve known for years. There are friends, teachers, mentors, colleagues, and aquantainces here. Some may not remember me, but obviously, I remember them.

• David Luks
• Jeremy Hoffer
• Anthony Motta
• Paul San Gemino
• Mario Mihauchich
• Eric DiCarlo
• Roy Billiott
• Camille Motta
• Richard Kaval
• Jamie Riccardi
• Lou Albano
• Francis Leale
• Jim Hughes
• Nick Megdanis
• Luciano Meschino
• Victor Powell (R.I.P.)
• Catherine Livanis (R.I.P)
• Terry Livanis
• Arthur Cunningham (R.I.P.)
• Jessica Foster
• Renee Foster
• Carmen Rivera
• Jim Wagner
• Tommy Black
• Richard Black
• Travis Clemins
• Brian Carver
• George Loutfi
• Eugene Tang
• Brian Forbes
• Yarone Levy
• Quincas Moreira
• Andrew Manista
• Seth Horan
• Julianne Carmody
• Carmen Nemeth
• Jano Rix
• Jon Arkin
• Eric Gardner
• Kynch O’Kaine
• Peter Parente
• Matthew Hewlitt
• Matt Glassmeyer
• Randall Dolohon
• Neville Peter
• Ron Miller
• Bob Gower
• Lori Bingle
• Ian Herzog
• Ryuji Yamaguchi
• Jonathan Kriesberg
• Jes Bernhardt
• Bud Maltin
• Dean Imperial
• Isabel Arce
• John Ballesteros
• Michael (Miles) Miller
• Kate Gauthier
• Steve Bill
• Baird Styles
• Roberto Crepaldi
• Alex Coletta
• Subbarao Seethamsetty
• Gerald Scully
• Tim Sevener
• Sandor Risko
• Mark Anderson
• Charlotte DeLon
• Quartez Taylor
• Donna Brockett
• Eric Snowden
• Karen Stavisky
• Darwin Rodriguez
• Sanjay Sen
• Champ Bennett
• Michelle Kempner
• Yvette Pasqua
• Rob Sung
• David MacFarlane
• Chris Bray
• Omar Elsayed
• Chris Casciano
• Carlos Porto
• Joseph Jorgensen
• Christopher Reardon
• Bruce Hyslop
• Eoin Russell
• Marc Amos
• Kirby Turner
• Chris Traganos
• Mark Sarcione
• Lily Sarcione
• Juhan Sonin
• Urszula Clemins
• Dan Cederholm
• Johannes Booy
• Michael Witwicki
• Glenn Kennedy
• John Magnifico
• Matt Parmet
• Andres Martínez
• Aubryn Thompson
• Christine Pillsbury
• Scott Borg
• Frank Papineau
• Jerome Mouffe
• Donna Ricci
• Adrienne Smith
• Chris Ruth
• Michael Hurley
• Jason Yarrington
• Jennifer Donovan
• Alyssa Garber
• Robert Bekkers

If you found your way here because your name is on this list, please do send me a note and say hello! If you’re not here, and you feel you should be, my sincere apologies. Do say hello and let me know.

I’ve been a practicing musician for most of my life. The guitar is my instrument of choice. While I don’t make a living as a guitarist, I am always pushing myself to improve my playing.

After decades of playing rock and jazz, I shifted my musical focus towards the classical guitar about seven or eight years ago. Whole new worlds of music opened up before me. I discovered terrific performers and composers to which I was previously blind. As I dug deeper into this world and learned a lot of new and challenging music, I started to realize it was becoming difficult to retain command of the music I was learning over the long term.

For the past few years, I’ve been thinking about and tinkering with a new way to make better use of my practice time and gain more command over my repertoire. I also wanted another avenue to help me discover new music which I might like to learn, as well as a music-focused alternative to YouTube and Soundcloud on which I could publish recordings, both private and public. I’ve been building this platform, and I call it Repertoireist.

Are you a practicing musician? If so, I think you’ll find value in it, too. Take a few moments to read Introducing Repertoireist to learn more about this project. If it strikes your fancy, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks to YouTube’s recommendation engine, I came across something which just floored me. It’s a clip from a 1965 Italian TV special called Chitarra, Amore Mio (“Guitar, My Love”).

In it, we are introduced to a modest, soft spoken man named Vittorio Camardese. We learn that he’s a doctor—a radiologist—working in San Filippo Hospital in Rome. Because of his work, he says he doesn’t travel to play music, despite all the stickers on his guitar case. The host asks him about a “particular technique” he uses when playing the guitar, and Dr. Camardese sheepishly says yes, he always plays this way, and that he is self taught. After a brief explanation and demonstration with a major scale, the host says “Let’s hear a piece”. The good doctor suggests a Mambo.

Then he plays…

I hope you watched that through to the end. I quite literally gasped the first time I saw it. This hit me hard on multiple levels.

When I was a kid, hearing the otherworldly sounds that Eddie Van Halen was able to coax out of an electric guitar for the first time transported me. I didn’t know sounds like that existed, much less that people could make them. I needed to learn how to do what he was doing. I soon got my first electric guitar and quickly learned about tapping. For the uninitiated, it’s a technique guitar players use where they tap notes on the fretboard with their picking hand, allowing them to play quick, wide interval arpeggios and lines, as well as percussive sounds. Eddie Van Halen uses it extensively and is widely considered to be a pioneer of the technique. When the first Van Halen album was released in 1978, guitarists everywhere were blown away when they heard what EVH could do with tapping. Many guitarists adopted the technique and some, like Steve Vai, took it even further than Eddie did.

For me, seeing what the humble autodidact, Doctor Camardese, was doing on his classical guitar, well over a decade before Eddie Van Halen popularized the technique, upended what I thought I knew about how this way of playing evolved.

Now, I’m not suggesting that Eddie Van Halen got it from hearing Dr. Camardese—he probably didn’t. As far as I can tell, aside from a few appearances on Italian Television, Camardese never recorded any of his playing and was unknown outside of Italy. Plus, there were other guitarists in the ’60s and ’70s who used versions of the technique in their own playing, albeit to a more limited degree than what either Van Halen or Camardese did. What fascinates me about this is the multiple discovery aspect of it, where disparate people can independently develop similar ideas more or less simultaneously.

The other thing that hit me about the video is that it’s a strong reminder that there is talent all around us that we don’t know about, or perhaps choose not to see. Most of Doctor Camardese’s patients likely never knew that he was a guitarist, much less that he was a mad genius at it. Perhaps his coworkers didn’t even know.

Every person you encounter has a story, most of which you have no idea about. Remembering that idea fosters empathy. To me, it also means that plenty of people have skills and talents we just don’t know, and I find that idea endlessly fascinating. Look out the window, see someone, anyone, and wonder what his or her talent could be. Their stories, their skills, have the potential to transport you, if only you knew what they are.

Homenaje a Debussy (the full title of which is Homenaje sur Le Tombeau de Debussy, or Homage to the tomb of Debussy) was composed by Manuel de Falla in remembrance of the great impressionist composer, Claude Debussy in approximately 1920, or two years after Debussy’s passing.

As I read more about this piece, I’ve come to learn that the intentions of it are twofold. It is at once a dirge, funereal in feel, and it also should invoke the feel of a Habanera, which is a slow Cuban dance. On its face, the two sides of this dichotomy seem to be at odds with each other, as the feels of each are quite different. I mean, how do you play a solemn dance? I’m not sure I successfully invoked both in my interpretation here, but it is definitely food for thought as I explore this piece further.

Sakura (“Cherry Blossoms”) is a very well known Japanese folk song which evidently dates back about 400 years or so to the Edo period.

In his arrangement, Sakura Variations the Japanese guitarist and composer Yuquijiro Yocoh took the melody and set it against a counterpoint line. To that, he added 4 variations which are evidently intended to evoke the sound of a Koto by using playing techniques such plucked harmonics and tremolo. Certainly Yocoh’s best known work, Sakura Variations has earned its place as a popular piece in the classical guitar repertoire. I hope you enjoy my interpretation of it.