Prester John cracks me up in his sheer brilliance. There is no need to review Shawn Persinger is Prester John without why I am even reviewing it. I am about completely bored with classical guitar CD, music and all of its pretensions. So is Kevin Gallagher although I don't know if he is completely bored with it as I am.

Post-Modernism has hit our humble and retarded instrument and we, as classical guitar people respond by lauding, yet a new recording of old music. I've done it and I slap my forehead.

Maybe, in the most general sense, postmodernism has not hit the classical guitar. It has obviously only hit at the periphery while the center has remained as it has been for 50 years or so.

In the periphery are those things that have been an annoyance to flat lined classical guitar enthusiast, those loyal and hardily unimpressionable Prince Valiant types that think that the classical guitar is the last bastion of chivalry. The same bunch that has thrown eggs at all that has been dynamic in music for hundreds of years.

When these egg throwing crotchety old, mostly men, have passes it is debatable what audience is left for common practice classical guitar. As I've seen, audiences are dependent on what music is played. The old, "Three Hundred Years of Guitar" type program leave the old egg throwers happy and the rest in questionable responsive mode. "I like this, I didn't like that and I won't come to another classical guitar recital."

When I was at California Institute of the Arts there was an ongoing discussion about the nature of "new" music in the classical world. The term "sound world" as opposed to "music" was imbedded in our discussions.

You might boil this down into two archetypes; common practice and atonal/serial/electronic. The grandfathers were Mozart and Varese maybe. Bach and Webern, Beethoven/Cage, there are so many dichotomous duos.

The postmodernist condition exists in the dichotomy. Can be music/sound world but is not always reduced to this. Can be ancient/modern as in Arvo Part.

Now that I've drank two beers I want to tell you about Shawn Persinger a.k.a. Prester John.

Actually I have no stock in traditional guitar in any way. The guitars themselves maybe but the music, hell, I'm a living composer. I may teach some of the literature but as a composer and performer, shoot, there ain't much left for me and parchment music and people walking around with their butts in their rear ends.

Shawn Persinger is a bit of a classical music know-not-much. When I told him about his affinity with Anton Webern, he said that he has heard of Webern but was unfamiliar with the works. Anton Webern is the father of classical music past 1945.

Shawn's affinity with Webern is mostly in the a-periodicity and the miniature. Shawn's sound world is compressed, not serial but atonal and culls from the musical universe a bit of everything.

There are no epic guitar pieces here in-so-far as the maximum length of any piece on "The Art of Modern/Primitive Guitar," the CD he fortunately sent me, is four minutes. Also epics, in music, tend to be less self reflective as a prism is not a painting.

Epics are more than four minutes even on our lowly guitar. The average length of a piece on the CD is around 1:30. Not Homeresque, not Larry Cooperman.

I am not sure that Shawn even realizes what he is doing in relationship to the rest of the guitar world. I especially think he is rather clueless to what the contemporary classical guitar is. I'm sure he is not a classical music enthusiast but that is no matter. Mozart wasn't a classical music enthusiast, it was just the music of the day that he did. This is debatable. Beethoven was the first rock star and trashed hotel rooms.

Had Shawn in the case of some of the music on this CD, been a classical guitarist he would be somewhat of a person of interest in the classical guitar. Of course he would have eggs thrown at him for the traditionalist Prince Valiant type, with their goatee dandruff pileups along the neck heel of their guitars, while composers of guitar music would be carefully looking at the music and some would shake their heads at the plethora of weird tunings and in the cracks techniques.

The Art of Modern/Primitive Guitar

What Shawn has to say about Modern/Primitive is this:

"Modern/Primitive Guitar is a style of guitar music that is the aural equivalent of the visual Modern/Primitive art form explored and developed by such painters as: Jean DuBuffet, Joan Miro?, Pablo Picasso, William Henry Johnson, Paul Klee and Karl Appel. All of these artists were highly skilled yet worked with a more visceral approach, technique and vision. The same attitude and ideas are found in the Modern/Primitive Guitar style."

"Sonically M/P Guitar combines the radical musical styles of avant-garde musicians such as Eugene Chadbourne, Fred Frith and John Zorn with the more traditional leanings of guitarists such as Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges and Larry Coryell. The vocabulary and form found in the music of such "concert works" composers as Leonard Bernstein, Astor Piazolla and Igor Stravinsky also play a role in the M/P sound."

M/P Guitar derives its name from both the Modern/Primitive visual arts (also known as Outsider Art and L'Art Brute) and as an evolution f the American Primitive Guitar sound developed by musician John Fahey."

"Interestingly enough when specific, audiences are presented with a workshop on M/P Guitar what is "modern" and what is "primitive" can have altered meaning. What is new and unusual in one genre of music is often viewed as standard repertoire in another and vice versa. When giving a talk and demonstration at an academic based composers conference in Washington D.C. I found that audience members thought the idea of extended technique to be conventional in the world of "concert" music. Whereas in the world of the mainstream music listener extended technique is often a new and eye opening concept. By contrast what most 20th century composers consider to be standard "modern" musical vocabulary i.e.: the use of dissonance and pantonatlity (or atonality as it is more commonly known) and extreme rhythmic syncopation, is still very foreign, shocking and "primitive" sounding to commercial audiences. It is the unification of these two distinct worlds of music I am interested in."

This last paragraph is the crux of the stew. Shawn has been "informed" that the whole concept is an upside down thing of opinion, judgment and perception.

One thing left out is the concept of postmodernism which is the condition, among other conditions, of using disparate items of historical styles and combining them into a unified whole.

Either seamlessly or with a bloody forehead from hitting a wall, the use of disparate musical objects is a key feature to his sound world.

Listening to M/P CD again, I fail to see any Stravinsky in it. It is possible that Stravinsky post 1951 serial work that Igor did, as he waited until Schoenberg died before addressing his contemporary's ideas as handled by Webern.

This seems to me to be the basic idea that Shawn is a classical music neophyte. Often times a brilliant musician as Shawn is will have a bit of trouble attaching their brilliance to some starting point. I will say right here, right now, that unless you're teaching, there is absolutely no need to be accurate on your departure point and associations.

What I can say about his CD is that it is brilliant! As time goes on I could care less about shoving a work into some box except I like to put it somewhere in the continuum of Popular (product)/Science (serious art). His work goes towards the serious side.

Can humor be serious? Yes, in the case of Shawn. I have found great humor in the wild juxtapositions of intense seriousness and doofus folksy picker's mottos. It really cracks me up what he does!

I'm not going to give you a blow by blow description of the CD. All of the pieces exhibit a stew of modern and primitive which make it to me, postmodern music.

The technical gives way to the music, I don't notice that Shawn can play very well. This is foremost in brilliance. You take a ride but you don't know how hard the road is.

I have and will ask Shawn some questions and place them within the article. I have asked him some questions but I realize now that they aren't so to the point so hang on, go out and get his CD.

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