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Paul Gambill talked to me in the summer of 2000 about composing a piece for the NCO. He asked that I take two divergent musical traditions, each with a common thread, and combine them in a new work. Those traditions were classical and bluegrass, and the common thread between the two was the use of the mandolin. Concertino for Two Mandolins, Guitar, and Strings is the resulting work.
As I prepared to start writing, one choice to be made was whether or not to include guitar in the instrumentation. The premise of the piece obviously centered on the mandolin but I chose to use guitar because of its kinship to the mandolin in bluegrass music (even though I didn¹t use it in the work that way) and for the additional instrumental textures it offered. A benefit that I didn¹t totally foresee was the ability of the guitar to act as a sort of glue at times throughout the piece, both rhythmically and harmonically. This ability allowed me an even greater variety of textures to work with, and I was able to go further in simplifying instrumental parts and paring down instrumentation in certain sections.
While composing this piece I had hoped to get the chance to actually superimpose the two previously mentioned styles on one another, but the opportunity never seemed to present itself. Concertino, as a whole, is classical in nature, and certain sections are derived from either the classical or the bluegrass tradition, as opposed to being replicas of an existing style.
- Don Hart
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