Northampton-based avant garde community ensemble Happy Valley Guitar Orchestra is the brainchild of Peter Blanchette, accomplished and acclaimed composer, musician and inventor of the beautiful-sounding arch guitar. He took some time out to explain the project and the documentary currently being made about the group.
Advocate: How did you create the HVGO?
Blanchette: About three years ago, after moving to Northampton, I realized that this is a town with a lot of amateur guitarists. The word “amateur” gets bad rap these days, and I believe that many musicians who don’t actually play for a living are still capable of making very good music. This view is not really anything new. In New England over a hundred years ago, there were fine concert bands and orchestras, among them even mandolin orchestras that regularly put on community concerts and nourished the musical life of thousands of amateur musicians.
Our culture has become so dominated by the guitar that we don’t have an orchestral tradition for those many people who in earlier times might have played clarinet or viola or whatever. Now we have folks who grow up playing in rock bands or writing songs, playing jazz, punk, bluegrass, blues, whatever. They grow up, they become busy with everyday life, and they no longer have a reason to play, to learn new music, to work at it, to collaborate with others, and ultimately, to enjoy it more.
I just thought: I have the understanding of musical arranging, repertoire, and guitar techniques from many styles, and, as an artist, I like to explore sounds—why not assemble a group of good local amateur players and create a repertoire of challenging music for them, conduct them in performances, and find out what 12 electric guitars sound like playing in unison, for example?
What’s the story behind the documentary?
If I remember correctly, [my wife] Maddy was looking to hire someone to film the HVGO Spring Concert event last May, and my neighbor Claudia Lefko, another artist, told her there was a Sundance Award-winning documentary filmmaker temporarily in town, Jesse Epstein, who might be interested in filming the concert.
When Jesse came to meet me and check out HVGO, she was quite inspired, and undertook to make a full-length documentary film about us. It’s been an exciting and surprisingly challenging experience for me, having someone follow me around asking about my work and my life, visiting the HVGO players at their homes and worksites, even following me and my family to my gigs in Spain this summer—yikes! Jesse and her colleague Paul Odgren have become friends too, but sometimes it is nerve-wracking—I have no artistic or conceptual control over the film. It is not my project—I am merely the subject.
What’s next for the group?
After the hugely successful venture last season into modern electric music where we added Billy Klock on drums, which was fantastic, I want to explore the Chicago blues of Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf in the modern popular department. In the more classical realm, I am trying out an arrangement of a Philip Glass Symphony (the energetic second movement of the Third Symphony for Strings). I am also at work writing a sort of Requiem for HVGO plus chorus and soloists, as a memorial for the thousands of lives lost in the world as a result of the wars and the sanctions our country has engaged in post-9/11.
For more, visit www.hvgo.org.
