Classical guitarist Jason Vieaux has a lot of accomplishments to his name.
He was the youngest ever winner of the Guitar Foundation of America International Guitar Competition, he was the first classical musician to appear on NPR’s Tiny Desk and he won a Grammy for his 2015 album "Play."
He recently visited IPR's Studio A and gave a performance and interview in front of a live audience.
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An edited transcript of the interview is available below. Content has been edited for length and clarity.
On becoming the first classical musician on NPR’s Tiny Desk
I was a 2002 Young Artist in Residence [for “Performance Today”]. This is when it was in Washington, D.C., and Fred Child was there as well. Fast-forward seven years, I was playing the [Joaquin] Rodrigo Aranjuez Concerto in Annapolis, and Fred and the [Tiny Desk] producer, Bob Boilen, got wind of that, and he [Fred] said, ‘Hey, could you come down? We're doing this new thing called Tiny Desk. You would be the first classical musician to do it.
They said they had a strict policy of one time only, but Yolanda Kondonassis and I broke that rule a few years later. She hadn't been on Tiny Desk, and in 2014, we made an album called “Together” and they had us on. I'm probably one of the only classical musicians that was on twice.
How his collaborations are formed
In the case of Yolanda, I would say this would've been around 2010. She just stopped me in the hallway at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM} when we were both teaching and said, "You know, we should do a duo sometime or play something together, like at a faculty recital." So that's how it started. We played the Alan Hovhaness piece "Spirit of Trees," which is on our record.
Then we commissioned Keith Fitch, who's a terrific composer on the faculty at CIM. A couple years ago, he won three incredible [composition] awards. He wrote this terrific piece for us, and we made a record. We played together for about 10 years until the pandemic. We got the band back together last year, and we've got four new things that are written for us, so that is something that's in the works.
I've been really fortunate because I haven't really had to do a lot of asking about it. They always come about. Same thing with Sasha Cooke. So I'm in a lot of bands, like, probably too many. I've probably got, like, eight collaborators. Escher String Quartet, Anne Akiko Meyers, Zuill Bailey. I just played with Zuill Bailey in Anchorage a few nights ago at the Sitka Fall Festival, the installment in Anchorage.
Composing and heavy metal
Composing is a really recent thing. When my wife and I got married, she noticed that I would improvise a lot. She said, “The stuff you're playing there, some of that's not your repertoire. That's you. You should write that down.” And I brushed it off. I was like, “Well, I mean, there's no time.” There honestly wasn't until 2020, and then she reminded me of it again.
I started taking all these bits and pieces I had on my iPhone, like voice memos. I started looking at all the junk piles and the pieces, and then in a couple hours I'd have the framework of a piece. One was a riff that actually came from an arrangement I did of “Limelight” by Rush for a donor who gave $5 million to CIM. The first time I played at his house I was going to play Astor Piazzolla and Capricho árabe and stuff like that. The donor is a big metal fan and he asked if I could play any heavy metal stuff. So I arranged “Changes” by Black Sabbath and a Judas Priest medley.
On another visit there, [he said], “How about Rush?” I was like, “Oh, Rush will be hard.” “Tom Sawyer” is not going to sound that great because what are you going to do for the big Neil [Peart] drum solo and all that? “Limelight” actually has a nice melody, and I was not going to try to recreate “Limelight” exactly, so I wrote my own riff, and then slowly you realize that it's “Limelight.” That was on a voice memo, and my bits and pieces to put "Limelight" together are on there, so I used them [to create the original piece "Tidal Pools"].
The role of household object in his playing
When I was on “Performance Today” in 2002 [as a young arist], I didn't really have a very interesting backstory, so they had me make one of my ping pong ball nails on the air, and they put some kind of funny cartoon music behind it. My [right] thumbnail is always a ping pong ball that's Krazy Glued to my thumb. As a classical guitarist, our nails are our plectrum, so I use the ping pong ball since my real thumbnail grows like a corkscrew.
[Editor's note: Vieaux places squares of shelf liner on his lap to hold his guitar in place] The shelf liner was [inspired by] my good friend Mitch Weverka. He suggested I check out using a shelf liner. I did, and I was amazed. You can never go back after that. David Russell, the great Scottish guitarist, had something like that on the side of his guitar, but it was glued on or somehow put on. But when it gets worn, you can get more, and you just cut out new pieces that are nice and grippy. When I didn't use a shelf liner, I was using my arm to hold [the guitar]. I was using muscles that I now did not need to use to keep the guitar from sliding off my lap. It's free now.
Questions from the Studio A audience
Audience Question: When you are teaching music that you play, how do you approach things like where a student is in their development and how fixed is your interpretation versus a type of interpretation that, say, maybe a young student might be bringing to the conversation?
Vieaux: As far as repertoire that I play versus stuff that I may not happen to play, it's pretty much the same approach. I try to be a score-based kind of interpreter. The feeling that I have is that I'm an interpreter. I'm trying to read what's on there or try to do what the composer wants as much as possible. I don't actively try to inject what I think might sound good- it just happens. There's a lot of fear sometimes, especially with the competition scene, that if I follow the instructions on the score and everyone else is doing that, it's going to sound like everyone else. I continually remind young players that you could have 100 guitarists follow a Leo Brouwer score to the letter, dynamics, articulation, and everything, you're going to get 100 different interpretations because we're all human. I start from there, and I address things on a technical level from my vantage point as far as what they should work on and how they can work on it within the piece. I think actually my strongest thing as a teacher is practicing, how to practice and how to break things down into smaller pieces and then Lego them back together.
Audience Question: You mentioned for one of the pieces you played that you had learned different styles of playing, for some of the elements in that piece, and I was wondering if that was something that you found yourself doing often, where you were learning from folk music or different styles, or like how many differences are there in the ways you can play the guitar?
Vieaux: I think classical musicians don't get enough credit, honestly, for the new things they have to learn from piece to piece, not just in core repertoire. I've premiered dozens and dozens of new works over the years, and so composers are always trying to find new sounds, new textures, new kinds of things. That's part of the job is figuring out how to do it. With technology and phones, it's a lot easier because again, you can send a voice memo [to the composer], and I go, "Is that what you're looking for?" And they just text you back. That's a regular part of the job, is figuring out how to do stuff that you're not familiar with.
Audience Question: I just had a question about maybe inspirations from prog[ressive] rock and metal and all that stuff. You mentioned "Limelight," which is my favorite song by my favorite band. Do you have any other major inspirations from that genre, metal, prog rock, or even just classic rock?
Vieaux: I grew up in a pretty blue-collar family, factory workers, and my cousins were all much older than me at the time. They were listening to Bruce Springsteen, and I had that one cousin that listened to The Cure. Then my older brother got way into The Smiths and Depeche Mode. We weren't really steeped in classical music. My dad's record collection was all modern jazz. So I had that sound in the ear from when I was three. And the reason I'm playing guitar today is my mother bought me a kid size classical guitar. We wouldn't have known who Segovia was or anything like that when I was five she bought it for me.
My mother's record collection was all stuff you could dance to. All Motown, Stax, soul, soul music, James Brown, and then these British Invasion and Bay Area bands like The Beatles, The Animals. She had a lot of 45 singles by The Stones, the Mamas & The Papas and The Lovin' Spoonful and stuff like that. That was what I had to listen to. There were no classical music records in the house.
I was born in 1973, so 10 is a very tender age when you receive things through the radio. And Van Halen was the biggest [when I was 10].. Van Halen and The Police were the two biggest bands on the planet. The Police had “Synchronicity” with the number one song of the summer, "Every Breath You Take." Van Halen had the song of the winter with “Jump” which was their first number one. But also, “Shout at the Devil" by Mötley Crüe was played in the back of the bus where all the cool kids sat, and I was like, "Wow, that sounds pretty awesome." Run-DMC's first album came out in '83, and that blew our minds. The sound of that was intoxicating. “Purple Rain” was the biggest number one album, number one single, number one movie the next year in '84. So I remember all this stuff going on. You're definitely shaped in some way by those influences.
Music performed in Studio A:
"Tidal Pools" by Jason Vieaux
"Evocación y Joropo" from Suite del Recuerdo by José Luis Merlin
Michael Culler engineered this edition of Studio A. Emma Stadelmann and Siggy Ehrlich edited the digital content.
Thanks to Karin Willman and Matthew Cochran for additional support.
