Late last month in Bothwell auditorium, guitarist David Burgess performed several pieces of Latin American music.
According to the biography handed out at the event, Burgess is a renowned guitarist with an established reputation and several accolades. He began to study guitar at the Estudio de Arte Guitarristico in Mexico City with distinguished Argentine guitarist Manuel Lopez Ramos, graduating with a Diploma di Merito. He then attended the Academia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, and earned a bachelor’s in Music from the University of Washington where he was also appointed as the guitar instructor. He held the same position at the Cornish Institute of Arts in Seattle. Burgess was the winner of the Mexico City Ponce International Competition, the Guitar ‘81 Competition in Toronto and the 31st International Music Competition in Munich.
The Blackburn show consisted of several pieces from different locations and guitarists in Latin America, including arrangements by Hector Ayala, a travelling Argentinian guitarist and folklorist, four pieces from Anibal Augusto Sardinha, as known as “El Garoto” (the Kid), three Cuban pieces from various artists and two pieces by Yamandu Costa.
After the show, Burgess was available to talk to members of the audience and several students flocked around him. When one asked the best advice he had for becoming a good guitarist he responded, “Find a good teacher.” When asked what he hoped audience members would take away, Burgess said, “I hope they learned something about the music and heard some different styles of music they hadn’t heard before. I hope people were able to expand their mind on listening to music. A lot of people don’t truly listen to music all that much. A lot of [what I played tonight] was written before they had recordings, so the only time you heard music was live and I think that when that was the case, people would hear music and they’d drop everything to listen because it was so unusual. But now, we’re bombarded with it – it’s a whole different sort of thing. People probably don’t listen to music as intently as they used to.”