Mark Delpriora (born 1959) is an American classical guitarist and composer.
The classical guitar is a member of the guitar family used in classical music. An acoustic wooden string instrument with strings made of gut or nylon, it is a precursor of the acoustic and electric guitars which use metal strings. Classical guitars are derived from the Spanish vihuela and gittern in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, which later evolved into the seventeenth and eighteenth century Baroque guitar and later the modern classical guitar in the mid nineteenth century.
Delpriora is currently Chair of the Guitar Department at the Manhattan School of Music, where he has been on the faculty since 1989. Mark is also on the faculty of The Juilliard School, where he teaches guitar studies. He studied guitar with Rolando Valdés-Blain and later with Manuel Barrueco. He studied theory/composition in his early teens with Roland Trogan and later with Giampaolo Bracali. Mr. Delpriora has recorded for Koch International Classics, Soundspells, Philips, Tzadik, and CRI. In addition, he has recorded 6 CDs with flutist Laurel Zucker on Cantilena Records.
Manhattan School of Music (MSM) is a private music conservatory in New York City. The school offers bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in the areas of classical and jazz performance and composition, as well as a bachelors in musical theatre.
Rolando Valdés-Blain was a Cuban classical guitarist, born in Havana, and immigrated to New York as a child. In the 1930s he and his brother Alberto had a weekly music show on WNYC radio. He served in Burma from 1942 to 1946 during World War II and afterwards studied at the Madrid Royal Conservatory, where he was awarded the Grand Prize for concert guitar playing by Joaquín Rodrigo. He toured worldwide under the management of impresario Sol Hurok and his United States tours as guitar soloist included Yale University, Carnegie Recital Hall, and the Spanish Ballet. He was one of the pioneering classical guitarists to perform as soloist together with a symphony orchestra, in 1955 with the Radio City Music Hall Symphony Orchestra and the Joffrey Ballet at the New York City Center. He appeared in Tennessee Williams's Broadway play Camino Real and he also composed the music for the play Bullfight. He was vice-president and adviser of Manuel Velazquez guitars and founder of the Guitar Department at the Manhattan School of Music. In 1968 he was invited to give a command performance at the White House. The New York Times called his performance "a musical gem…reflecting every baroque nuance of the music".
Roland Trogan was an American composer, teacher and author.
As a performer, the New York Times wrote after his debut: "The first notes of Mark Delpriora's guitar recital established him as a musician of authority. In a little Mozart transcription by Julian Bream he showed a rare feeling for the specific gravity of a Mozartean phrase, for the inevitability of its rise and fall. Delpriora is a guitarist to be reckoned with"
Julian Alexander Bream, CBE, is an English virtuoso classical guitarist and lutenist. One of the most distinguished classical guitarists of the 20th century, he played a significant role in improving the public perception of the classical guitar as a respectable instrument.
One of the few students chosen to participate in masterclasses by Andrés Segovia, Delpriora has performed and championed music written for, but rarely played by, Segovia, known as The Segovia Archives. The collection is published by Berben Edizioni Musicali and edited by Angelo Gilardino. Angelo Gilardino wrote after hearing Delpriora play this music: “His playing is very fluent, effortless, elegant and extremely refined, and his view of the music he performs is sophisticated, still direct and transparent".
Andrés Segovia Torres, 1st Marquis of Salobreña, known as Andrés Segovia, was a virtuoso Spanish classical guitarist from Linares, Spain. Many professional classical guitarists today were students of Segovia, or students of his students. Segovia's contribution to the modern-romantic repertoire not only included commissions but also his own transcriptions of classical or baroque works. He is remembered for his expressive performances: his wide palette of tone, and his distinctive musical personality, phrasing and style.
He has performed and taught master classes in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, Italy and the United States and has been recognized with many awards, including the inaugural Andrés Segovia Award for Outstanding Performance given by the Manhattan School of Music with Segovia in attendance, the Beard’s Fund Award, and the Artists International Distinguished Artist Award, and by grants, including a United Nations Travel Grant and grants from Meet the Composers and the Cooper Institute for the Arts and Humanities. In addition, he has performed at the Lake Placid Chamber Music Festival, Piccolo Spoleto, Stetson University Guitar Festival, Rutgers University Summerfest, Eastman Guitarfest and the Summit Music Festival; and with the New York Contemporary Music Band, New Music Consort, Joffrey Ballet Orchestra, and the Washington Bach Consort. More recently Mark Delpriora has been performing on the baroque guitar, giving his first all-baroque guitar recital at William Paterson University's 2007 Guitar Fest.
Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At 8.5 million square kilometers and with over 208 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area and the fifth most populous. Its capital is Brasília, and its most populated city is São Paulo. The federation is composed of the union of the 26 states, the Federal District, and the 5,570 municipalities. It is the largest country to have Portuguese as an official language and the only one in the Americas; it is also one of the most multicultural and ethnically diverse nations, due to over a century of mass immigration from around the world.
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres, making it the world's second-largest country by total area. Its southern border with the United States, stretching some 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world's longest bi-national land border. Canada's capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Covering almost 2,000,000 square kilometers (770,000 sq mi), the nation is the fifth largest country in the Americas by total area and the 13th largest independent state in the world. With an estimated population of over 129 million people, Mexico is the tenth most populous country and the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world, while being the second most populous nation in Latin America after Brazil. Mexico is a federation comprising 31 states plus Mexico City (CDMX), which is the capital city and its most populous city. Other metropolises in the country include Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, Toluca, Tijuana, and León.
His compositions have been published by Bèrben Edizioni Musicali (the 50-minute Sonata No.3, Sonata No.2, Elegia per Basil Keiser), Editions Orphée (Tango Caffè Carciofo, 10 Short Studies in Kaleidoscope,Creation Fugue, Variations on a Theme of Sor), and Guitar Arts Publishing (Four Images after a poem by e.e. cummings), MelBay (Tambu Fantasy). All of the above works, particularly the Sonatas, are contrapuntally complex, dramatically shaped and technically challenging. Sonata no.3 has become particularly renowned and is the subject of a chapter in Manuale di storia della chitarra. 2: La chitarra nel ventesimo secolo by Gianni Nuti.
Delpriora's most recent composition is the 35 minute set of variations on Fernando Sor's Opus 24, #1. The scope of this work is unprecedented in the guitar repertoire, at twice the length of Britten's Nocturnal the closest equivalent must be found in the piano repertoire e.g. Rzewski's variations The People United Will never be Defeated. Delpriora writes: "In the tradition of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 'Variations à travers les siècles', Astor Piazzola’s 'Histoire du Tango' and Argento’s song cycle 'Letters from Composers', I have taken an historical view of composition for my 'Variations on a Theme by Sor'. This new set of variations follows Sor’s little Menuet in c minor op. 24 N° 1 as it makes its epic journey across time and space through the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth century. During its travels, the theme meets and pays its respects to the godfathers of nineteenth century music and as a result is irrevocably transformed". In a sense, this work can be said to be a musical example of Metahistorical romance. The last page of the published work contains an imaginary interview between Delpriora and the nineteenth century musicologist François-Joseph Fétis.
Metahistorical Romance is a term describing postmodern historical fiction, defined by Amy J. Elias in Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction. Elias defines metahistorical romance as a form of historical fiction continuing the legacy of historical romance inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott but also having ties to contemporary postmodern historiography. In particular, in metahistorical romance, poststructuralist play invokes the "historical sublime" as defined in the work of Hayden White. Metahistorical romance--such as Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon--attempts to recuperate the sublime untouchability of the past, to reach History and know it, but paradoxically in the context of the political. As with the Kantian sublime, the postmodern historical sublime is not the grasp of the sublime object itself but a kind of ironic awareness of the inaccessibility of the sublime object. There is a yearning that resembles the yearning for mystical knowledge at the core of the search for the historical sublime, and thus the concept ties contemporary historical fiction to a literary history, a type of historiography, and a spiritual questing. Elias argues that the postmodern imagination confronts the historical sublime rather than represses it; confronts it as repetition and deferral; seeks sublime History but simultaneously has lost faith in the storytelling needed to do so; and consequently has ties to, but reverses the dominant of, the traditional Anglo-American historical novel. The term "metahistorical romance" also builds upon work by Linda Hutcheon, whose term "historiographic metafiction" described the ironic stance of contemporary historical fiction.
François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian musicologist, composer, teacher, and one of the most influential music critics of the 19th century. His enormous compilation of biographical data in the Biographie universelle des musiciens remains an important source of information today.
Two of the variations (12 and 14) served as the set piece for the 2011 GFA competition.
His Elegia and several of his 10 Short Studies, the seventh of which is 9 seconds in duration, demonstrate a particular interest in very short forms with an accompanying intimate emotional sensitivity.
Mark and his family live in Brooklyn, New York.
