Southern Exposure Series: FretX

Southern Exposure kicks off its 2016-17 season by stretching the limits of sonic possibility in each of four contrasting instrument groups – strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion – with the virtuoso, genre-bending guitar duo FretX.

The free concert takes place on Thursday, September 8 at 7:30 p.m. in the USC School of Music Recital Hall (813 Assembly Street). Early arrival is encouraged as seats fill to capacity for this popular series.

Both members of the duo are renowned soloists in their own right: Slovenian Mak Grgi? has been called a “gifted young guitarist” and praised for his “imaginative, expressive playing” by The New York Times; Dan Lippel, resident guitarist for the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) since 2005, has been hailed as an “exciting soloist” by The New York Times, and a “modern guitar polymath” by Guitar Review.  Southern Exposure is proud to be one of the first venues to present these two modern guitar masters in their new collaboration as a duo.

FretX’s Southern Exposure program, which includes both duets and solo pieces, is a smorgasbord of guitar styles with short works by 12 different composers, showcasing the wide variety of effects and sounds the instrument is capable of producing.

Works range from groove-based minimalism / post-minimalism – Marc Mellits’ 8 Etudes; David Crowell’s Pacific Coast Highway; a new transcription of icon Steve Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas for two guitars – to American and European modernism with pieces by Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, Per Norgard and Gyorgy Ligeti, the latter arrangements of the Hungarian composer’s famously difficult Etudes for Piano – to the microtonal wanderings of Jeffrey Holmes’ Five Microtonal Studies to jazz and blues-influenced works including Lippel’s Unsettled Matter.

FretX will also perform the world premiere of at the edge of the world, by Columbia’s own guitarist-composer and School of Music alumnus, George Fetner.