Italian-born guitarist and musicologist Giacomo Fiore has premiered more than two dozen new works for justly-tuned, electric, and classical guitars, and released several recordings for Populist, Cold Blue, Pinna, Spectropol, Paper Garden Records, and his own impressum. As a scholar his research focuses on U.S. experimental music, intonation, and performance; he has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the Society for the American Music, and TEMPO, and writes occasionally for Classical Guitar and SFCV. He teaches a wide range of historical and practical music courses at the University of San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz.
Giacomo is a member of Ninth Planet New Music (the chamber group formerly known as Wild Rumpus), and an occasional performer for New Music Works, sfSound, and other Bay Area organizations. He has served as a curator for the Center for New Music since 2019, and as the vice-president of the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society from 2015 to 2019.
Turntable Drawings is an ongoing series of numbered works by composer Danny Clay and printmaker Jon Fischer based on a growing collection of hand-molded, playable records. Turntable Drawing No. 16 combines three turntables playing locked-groove records with a score for electric guitar featuring looped chordal fragments.
The records are encoded with various sounds: some noisy, some melodic, all pretty low in fidelity. After its premiere in June 2017, the work evolved into several distinct versions. Presented here are Danny’s “studio” rendition, consisting of collaged material recorded between September 2018 and April 2020, and Giacomo’s “live” performance, which uses an ad-hoc modular synthesizer patch that loops and processes both record sounds and guitar in real time. Together they offer a pair of perspectives emerging from the same musical framework.
