In the early '80s, a new instrument was born. The brainchild of musician Peter Blanchette and the handiwork of luthier Walter Stanul, the archguitar has almost twice the number of strings of a standard guitar, and was inspired by Blanchette's need for a guitar with an expanded range.
The two musicians met in the late '70s at the Boston Conservatory of Music, where Blanchette was a composition major and Stanul a guitar professor.
"Walter exposed me to so much wonderful music, Bach most of all, but also recordings of all the existing guitarists at the time—his collection was enormous," Blanchette told the Advocate recently. "Walter also shared my deep love of Chicago-style blues (Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin' Wolf), and with his encouragement, I decided that I needed to learn more about how great music was written by playing great music."
One of the duo's major undertakings was trying to transcribe baroque keyboard music for guitar, with limited success. At the same time, Blanchette was also attempting to transcribe Renaissance lute music for the guitar, again with limited success. Then, in 1980, Blanchette and Stanul heard a rare recording of Sergio and Eduardo Abreu, a Brazilian guitar duo. Blanchette was blown away by the brothers' innovative style and the musical risks they took—Eduardo had tuned the sixth string of his guitar down to a fourth. Shortly thereafter, Blanchette commissioned Stanul to create a guitar with a greatly expanded range, with five additional strings.
"When I heard the Abreus' recordings of their arrangements of Scarlatti and Rameau, in which one of the brothers tuned the lowest string of his guitar radically lower," said Blanchette, "I felt that, with some innovations to the guitar's design, baroque keyboard music (by Bach, Scarlatti, Handel, Rameau, Couperin and others) was a limitless gold mine of new materials for guitar duos."
Armed with the archguitar, Blanchette expanded his repertoire significantly, playing and arranging pieces written for lute and keyboard.
Stanul's creation is derived from the Vihuela de Mano, a 16th-century six-string lute most commonly seen in Spain and Portugal. The major difference between the vihuela and the archguitar is the type of strings: the vihuela is strung with courses—groups of similarly tuned strings—while the archguitar has single strings.
The archguitar didn't receive its name until the late '80s, when a fellow musician, Eliott Gibbons, related musings of a 17th-century English writer who was describing the chittaronne, an expanded type of lute, to Blanchette. Among the terms the writer used was "archguitar."
"I thought the term archguitar was perfect to describe an expanded-range guitar," said Blanchette. "It stuck."
Blanchette's first archguitar, "Rock Steady," is the one he still plays, although he had an identical backup until recently.
"I had to sell it when I got divorced. Now I am flying without a net," Blanchette said. "Wish me luck."
Even though Blanchette is credited with the invention of the archguitar, he hasn't tried to convert guitar players to using it.
"I'm not an evangelist of the expanded-range guitar," said Blanchette. "I know about 10 people who've had an instrument made by Walter or someone else as a result of encountering my work."
Besides his original archguitar, Blanchette also has a few electric guitars at his disposal, but no regular nylon-strung guitars.
A week after the completion of "Rock Steady," Blanchette departed New England. For the next few years, alone and at times with Stanul and Blanchette's friend Peter Michelini, the archguitarist traversed the streets of Europe—the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Norway, Demark—as a street musician, often running afoul of the law.
While Michelini was in Europe, Blanchette convinced his childhood friend to give up the bass guitar in favor of the archguitar. The pair began working on music by Bach and Scarlatti arranged for duet by Blanchette. On the streets of Italy in 1983, the duo caught the eye of a Deutsche Grammofon record producer, Stephen Paul. Blanchette was invited to Hamburg to discuss a possible debut archguitar duo LP supported by a tour. But, much to Blanchette's dismay, the deal was scrapped.
"Unfortunately, it all failed when my duo partner, Peter Michelini, with whom I'd made music with since the age of 12 in precocious rock bands all the way up to duo archguitar playing Bach on the street in Europe, decided he didn't want a conventional career in music," said Blanchette.
In short, Michelini didn't want to tour. He liked recording, according to Blanchette, but he despised the concert atmosphere.
"We tried to play one concert for the Connecticut Guitar Society," said Blanchette. "We played at UConn or someplace like that. It was actually well attended. After the concert was over, we came off and I said to Peter, 'That wasn't bad,' and he replied, "I'm never doing that again.' I just accepted that, though it was disappointing, it was going to be like that forever, so I moved on."
Until 1994, when Blanchette settled in Shelburne Falls, he played on the streets of numerous European cities and in fairs both abroad and stateside, usually with Michelini or Stanul. He also produced three records of Renaissance and baroque music by himself and Michelini.
But Blanchette's time in Europe wasn't all Bach and roses. Over the years, he was deported and arrested for being an illegal alien. Once, for a good friend's wedding, he even sneaked into a country with a doctored passport.
"I lived about 11 years in Europe as a street musician, mostly in Denmark, Netherlands and Tuscany," said Blanchette. " I was deported from my adopted home of Denmark when a Danish music critic (Jørgen Falck) wrote a glowing review of my playing in Denmark's largest paper—he wrote about me as if he were reviewing a concert in the weekly arts section. He praised me in the article for my startlingly fluent Danish (a rarity for foreigners), and recommended listeners eschew the offerings at Tivoli concert hall that week and come instead to listen to me some evening on a particular bench in front of the Church of the Holy Spirit and have a chat with me. The following weekend, an infamously overzealous plainclothes immigration officer came undercover to the bench and chatted with me. When I asked him, slightly irritated at the strange personal questions he'd posed, if this was really his business, he replied that it was, showed me his badge, called the black van and they took me away to one of the most amazing experiences of my life."
After accompanying immigration officials to his apartment, only to watch them put all of his belongings, including several thousand dollars he'd earned busking, into bags, Blanchette met the captain of the immigration police. The captain, it turned out, had listened to Blanchette play while on evening strolls with his wife and kids, and was a big fan. That, coupled with oddities of Danish law, according to Blanchette, afforded him much more consideration than most illegal aliens receive.
"I was thrown out of the country by being given a free ticket to Florence, Italy, and a conciliatory bottle of Danish schnapps and my then-beloved Danish cigarettes," said Blanchette. "I was personally driven to the train in Germany by my new fan, the captain, and his silent, sulking underling, the arresting officer."
After his deportation, the same journalist who alerted the police to Blanchette's whereabouts wrote another story. This time he detailed what had transpired, making sure to point out how much money the Danish immigration police had spent on Blanchette, a simple musician playing Bach on a park bench, who just happened to be an illegal alien. This article created an uproar. Danish citizens bombarded town councilors and police with hundreds of letters. Shortly thereafter, the restrictions regarding busking were lightened considerably.
His deportation from Denmark is the subject of a piece Blanchette is currently working on for This American Life.
In the years following Blanchette's nomadic European lifestyle, he performed live on several NPR programs, including A Prairie Home Companion and All Things Considered. He has worked as a composer on HBO's Sex and the City and PBS' Inside the Tuscan Hills. Each year, Blanchette tries to create a CD of his own work, and produce one for another artist. And, of course, he still arranges many pieces for guitar and orchestra.
"I am composing a piece for archguitar and orchestra," said Blanchette. "It's not really an archguitar concerto, but something rather close to it. I hope to shop it around to regional orchestras in the hope of playing it live with an orchestra—a profound aspiration I have."
This week, in honor of Johann Sebastian Bach's 323rd birthday, Blanchette performs a J.S. Bach Birthday Concert in Northampton, as a tribute to the composer who is perhaps his favorite—whose music he's been playing and arranging since long before the invention of the archguitar.
"Bach's music seems genuinely perfect to me. I've been hooked since I was a teenager," said Blanchette. "When I first really listened to Bach, really got it, I was 18 and at my parents' house in Manchester, Mass. I was home from school for the weekend from Boston, getting free food and getting my laundry done. I listened to the Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo played by Sergiu Luca on my parents' stereo, through headphones, while I was on the couch.
"My mother was worried when on Monday morning, as she was leaving for work, she saw me lying on the couch with sores on my ears from more than 48 straight hours of listening to the music. Plus I was supposed to have left the night before. I think I was charging, for the first time, some kind of battery in me, the closest thing I have to a soul. I'll be playing that music at the concert. I'm more in love with it than ever."
During the concert, Blanchette will also premiere excerpts of a work-in-progress video, a collaboration with his Virtual Consort Ensemble (he's the only member) and local filmmakers Equilibrio Films.
"This is a video realization of my recording process: I overdub all the archguitar parts on my recordings, hence the name Virtual Consort," said Blanchette. "I am now working on a recording of Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Equilibrio films will film me playing all the parts and assemble them into four separate video tracks, which will be displayed on separate monitors while I play live to it in real time… So I'm trying to nail that last take—live."
The concert opens with WFCR's music director and classical music host John Montanari sharing his thoughts about the impact of Bach's solo cello and violin music in the classical music world.
