Draw the Strings Tight

Draw the Strings Tight pulls together a range of new music composed for the acoustic guitar. It features premieres of newly commissioned musical discourses on love, reflections on the nature of memory, the search for truth in the many voices of reality, and meditations on sense and enjoyment. The album title is also an evocative phrase that reflects the challenges facing a composer, performer, instrument, and listener, as they work together to realize something of substance, meaning, beauty, and truth.

In addition to the premiere recordings of music by Kevin Ernste (whose work also includes the recorded voice of poet Pablo Neruda), Edie Hill, Jesse Jones, James Piorkowski and Nicolas Scherzinger, this album also features the Drei Tentos (1958) of Hans Werner Henze. According to Henze, these “three sketches” set to the writings of Friederich Hölderlin are, “…the vision of a poet who has clouds of madness around his head, and who stammers in fragments, with beautiful, seemingly dislocated, phrases.”

As Kenneth Meyer writes, “The Drei Tentos are included here as an homage to Julian Bream and the memory of how captivated I was the first time I heard his recording of these pieces. It opened my ears to the intimate language of my beloved instrument and placed a seed in my musical conscious.”

Kenneth Meyer, the national first-prize winner at the Music Teacher’s National Association Collegiate Artist Competition, is regarded by the Washington Post as, “A thinking man’s guitarist – who focuses on the inner structure of a piece…and plays with impressive gravity and power.”   The Buffalo News has called him, “Impeccably articulate with superb technique.”