The composer Zac Fick-Cambria has created a musical homage for two guitars to one of Maryland’s most mind-boggling enigmas. And no, his piece has nothing to do with who — or what — keeps cursing the Ravens’ and Orioles’ playoff chances.
Instead, Fick-Cambria, who is studying for his doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, has crafted a seven- to 10-minute meditation on a secretive force roiling just beneath the surface, a force as powerful as it is hidden, a force that with one well-timed blow could upend the lives of unsuspecting state residents.
“I wanted to write a piece about a dark, mysterious, shadowy monster,” said Fick-Cambria “I wanted to write a piece about Chessie.”
His “Frew Tape, 1982” tackling the legend of the Maryland sea snake is among the four short pieces of music celebrating Baltimore’s heritage from Penn Station to its urban landscapes. The pieces were commissioned for the Baltimore Classical Guitar Society’s annual contest for up-and-composing composers and will debut during “Made in Baltimore,” a concert Sunday at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
“There have been reports of a sea monster in the Chesapeake Bay going back to the 1930s,” Fick-Cambria said. “I’m fascinated by how folklore can indirectly express a culture’s values and fears.”
Over the years, the Guitar Society, which was founded in 1987 and has an annual budget of nearly $250,000, has become what the Society’s president Asgerdur Sigurdardottir describes as “most likely the leading classical guitar society in North America.”
The Society has a dual mission: It stages five concerts a year, including “Made in Baltimore,” for an audience of about 4,000.
It also has an educational branch that among other things provides free guitar lessons to selected students, operates lullaby-writing workshops for teenage mothers and helps blind veterans communicate their experiences through music.
“We worked with a woman who has Alzheimer’s disease who couldn’t remember her kids,” Sigurdardottir said.
“But she could remember playing on the street where she grew up in the Bronx. She could remember her old phone number and what she ate for lunch on a certain day. We helped her put all that in a song so her children and grandchildren can enjoy those memories in perpetuity.”
The composition contest began in 2006, the inspiration of Manuel Barrueco, an internationally renowned guitarist and the Society’s artistic director.
This year’s winners were selected from a list of about 20 candidates nominated by experts in the field to receive a token commission of $500. The real reward is the chance to fine-tune their work for a year with their mentors and the student performers before it is unveiled to the public — a process invaluable for both melody writers and bow users.
Sunday’s concert will be the first public performance of any of composer Zhishu Chang’s pieces. She said she found the intensive workshopping “a mutual study process” that included a freewheeling exchange of ideas about texture and timbre.
“I definitely feel like winning the contest validates my work,” she said.
In 2009, a piece originally commissioned by the Guitar Society, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Inca Dances,” won a Latin Grammy Award for best classical contemporary composition.
“To bring classical guitar into the future, we need new music,” Sigurdardottir said. “Can you imagine if Mozart hadn’t been commissioned for new work that pushed the envelope?”
Below are snapshots of the four winning envelope-pushers:
For “Frew Tape, 1982” Fick-Cambria, 30 of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, pored over video footage shot by Robert Frew on a clear Memorial Day nearly 43 years ago. When Frew saw a 30-foot-long serpentine creature with a football-shaped head that he couldn’t identify swimming about 100 feet off the bulkhead of his Kent Island home, he grabbed his camera.
Investigations over the next several years by the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of Natural History and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory never conclusively identified exactly what Frew’s camera had recorded.
“The film is so grainy and noisy that you can’t really make out what you’re seeing,” Fick-Cambria said. “That gave me so much to work with musically. I put tinfoil on the guitar strings to try to capture the essence of that shadowy, blurry quality. By the end, you get to see this majestic and frightening sea monster emerge.”
Chang, 26, of China wrote “As Dawn Takes Rosy Steps” for two guitars to capture the at-times competing, at-times complementary impetuses that shape city life. Her piece takes place as night turns into morning.
“One guitar represents traditional Baltimore,” Chang said, “and the other one is more evolutionary and experimental and represents the push towards modernism.”
Though she had previous experience composing for string instruments as different as the Chinese pipa and the central European zither, Chang said she didn’t pick up her first guitar until relatively recently.
“Now I’m totally in love with it,” she said.
“I want to write more music for the guitar. The beauty of this instrument is that sound can’t be sustained, but fades away slowly and very naturally.”
Jack McGrath, 27, of Towson, recently graduated from UMBC and hopes to make his career as a film composer. He wrote “Smalltimore” for two guitars to reproduce the daily chance encounters and coincidences that can make a big city like Baltimore feel like a small town.
In his piece, the guitars become two characters. “They joke around a little,” McGrath said. “There is a lot of playful repetition and gestures. In the middle of the piece, one guitar kind of leaves the other one hanging.”
McGrath has played folk guitar for most of his life and said that he responds to the instrument’s inherent soulfulness.
“Instruments like the piano or the horns can feel so grand sometimes and larger than life,” he said. “But the guitar has a very hands-on, intimate feel.”
Antonio Sanz Escallón, 23, of Houston wrote “City Fragments” for three guitars to pay tribute to a trio of iconic Baltimore sights.
The first movement conveys the hustle and bustle of travelers at Penn Station; the second, quieter movement evokes the feeling of the peaceful Inner Harbor at night with its gently lapping waves, while the explosive third movement elicits the joyful excitement of Independence Day fireworks.
“When I wrote this piece, I mixed the sounds that people are used to on the guitar with more experimental things, especially in the third movement,” Escallón said.
Concert attendees may catch the performers balling their hands into fists and knocking on the body of their guitars, or engaging in some “Bartok pizzicato” in which the guitar string is plucked so forcefully that it snaps back to strike the fingerboard.
As the composer put it: “I really enjoy stretching and pushing what people can do on the guitar.”
If You Go:
“Made in Baltimore” will be performed at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 2 in UMBC’s Linehan Concert Hall, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Catonsville. Tickets cost $15-$20. Call 443-296-2247 or visit bcgs.org.
Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at [email protected] and 410-332-6704.
