Andreas Paolo Perger (*1970 Munich, Germany) is a contemporary Austrian/ German/ Italian guitarist, improviser, and composer. His work, autobiographical in nature, is drawing from a variety of traditional and contemporary musical influences like contemporary Jazz, New Music, Improvised Music, and Electronic Music.
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His music, a contemporary pluralistic position, balances narrative and abstract moments with their relationships to the composed and/ or improvised overall texture. Some works are made of, or include, interactive and/ or room-related elements (Cinema Series, Orchestra Series).
His playing style is adapted from classical guitar, using right hand technique to express complex harmonic structures and quick jazz-inspired melodic lines while sustaining impulsive strumming in the manner of the Spanish rasgueado, a typical colour in flamenco, and enhanced with playing techniques between tone and noise. He also uses hand symbols, the electronic sounds of the guitar amplifier, and various materials like wood, metal, and paper.
The music of Andreas Paolo Perger ranges from solo pieces for classical guitar and electric guitar, concert pieces for guitar and cello or string quartet, compositions for jazz-rock trio and quartet, to room-related interactive group improvisations and room-related compositions for video, electronics and guitar, based on lo-fi electronic sounds and found footage material, reflecting the guitar in a contemporary new media context. His composing technique emphasizes improvisation. As part of a more comprehensively notated composition, or even as central source for real-time composing of any extent. He also works with modular playing, improvising, and composing concepts (Concert for 5.1 surround guitar).
His instrument, an electric concert guitar, is the result of several years of development in cooperation with Stevens Custom Guitars and Huber Amps. Though similar in size to a classical concert guitar, it is made to sound like a warm electric guitar, but with a broader spectrum of harmonics at higher frequencies. It also offers the option to create real 5.1 surround sound.
The 5.1 surround guitar is a hybrid between classical concert guitar and electric guitar. It follows the idea of combining subjectively appreciated aspects of the guitar, and offers various musical possibilities. It makes it possible to send each string of its six strings to one separate channel of an amplifier, and further, to six separate loudspeakers in a room. It is played with finger technique on medium steel strings and sounds like an electric guitar. The instrument was developed by contemporary guitarist, improviser, and composer Andreas Paolo Perger, and built by Stevens Custom Guitars in 1998. The instrument was presented at the Frankfurt music fair in 1999. The first radio live transmission (surround > stereo),[1] and the first surround live concert took place in Munich 2002.[2] After several more years of technical and musical development, the Huber preamplification was added in 2007. Surround guitar concerts in Vienna 2007, Prague 2008, Munich, Hamburg, Münster, Lüneburg, Meaford/ Ontario/ Canada, and Berlin 2009, followed.
The solo guitar album Relief, recorded 2011 at "Studio am Fernsehturm" in Berlin, represents ten improvised compositions on the instrument in CD quality. The title refers to the acoustic relief arising, while listening to the music with stereo headphones.
After receiving piano lessons at the age of three, he got classical guitar lessons at the age of seven and jazz guitar lessons at the age of eleven. Writing songs and forming bands was the only thing he did between the age of eleven and the age of seventeen. Then he got out of school and went to a music school, where he had classical guitar and electric guitar lessons beside music theory and band workshops. He started to give guitar lessons, played in several bands and did solo performances with improvisations on the classical guitar. At the age of twenty, he did studies of the jazz guitar at the Berklee College in Boston. After that, he studied five years classical guitar with Prof. Barbara Probst-Polášek, master student of Andrés Segovia, at the Munich Conservatory. In this years he additionally studied jazz guitar on his own and went to master classes and lessons with John Scofield, John McLaughlin, Joe Pass, and Mike Stern. Prof. Barbara Probst-Polášek helped him to adapt his modern jazz related compositions to the classical concert guitar and encouraged him to write a concert for guitar and string quartet, which later was recorded as a studio project with the musicians of the Modern String Quartet. Concerning the adaptation of modern jazz related compositions to the classical guitar, he also studied with Leo Brouwer during an improvisation master class at the Music Academy Marktoberdorf in Southern Germany. The music for the CD Big City, a solo album with original compositions for the electric guitar, was written during a work in residence in New York in 1996. After its publishing in 1999 it was reviewed as "highly recommendable".[3] Concerning the questions of free musical speech and how to combine and balance improvisation and composition, Andreas Paolo Perger studied with Evan Parker, Frederic Rzewski and the late Wolfgang Stryi during a master class with the title "to compose - to improvise - to interpret" of the Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt. Additionally he did free studies of video art and electronic music and had influencing and inspiring encounters in the fields of music, art, and science. His experience with room-related compositions finally led to his form of contemporary guitar and guitar music, which is identified by bringing together the sound of the electric guitar and the diversity of timbres of the classical guitar, while using vintage electronic with its warm and dynamic sound of the vacuum tube to open up an additional spacial layer. In 1997 he was awarded "Newcomer of the year" of the German newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung".[4] He also works as studio guitarist for cinema and television and did soundtracks for art-videos.
Andreas Paolo Perger performed his music in Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland, and Canada at numerous venues and festivals for classical music, experimental music, contemporary jazz, and in the context of contemporary art and sound art. Performances of his music occurred a.o. at the Musicacademy in Wroclaw/ Poland, the Transart in Bolzano/ Italy, the Bach Night at Zeche Zollverein in Essen/ Germany, the Tonspur_live in Vienna, the international festival Jazz an der Donau/ Germany, the 4th Electric Eclectics Festival/ Canada, and the Institut Intermédií in Prague/ Czech Republic.
From 1993 until 1999 he played and recorded modern jazz orientated guitar music with his own groups, the Andreas Perger trio and quartet. CD's like Heart Pop and Ethnomorphocology arose. The late saxophonist Monty Waters was featured on the CD Happiness is a warm gun and joined the band a few times for live concerts. With the saxophonist Johannes Enders, he played some duo concerts. Starting from his work with the concert guitar, he played solo concerts with his improvisations an compositions for the electric guitar. In this context he played one of his compositions together with the classical "Leipziger Streichquartett" at the Bach Night at Zeche Zollverein in Essen/ Germany, where he was invited to perform his solo pieces and improvisations. Another collaboration in this context took place with classical cellist Adrian Brendel. More and more he focused on the elaboration of the 5.1 surround guitar and works, based on an extended interdisciplinary idea of composition. Room-related and/ or interactive works, and room-related works for video, electronic soundtracks, and contemporary instrumental improvisations arose. Concerts with contemporary improvisers such as Franz Hautzinger, Sebastiano Tramontana, Christofer Varner, and the ICI Ensemble followed.
"...everything other than all too familiar classic jazz reeking of commercialism, instead a truly interesting, individual and new focus on the merging of these basically entirely different music styles. Top class!" [5]
"A discovery - once again a guitar player, a real guitarero melting with his instrument, so that the listener does not know if he the guitar - or the guitar plays him. Very individual, very original and very visionary - full of atmospheric mood. A real guitarero, who has no other choice than playing."[6]
"Perger 's success is by no means coincidental; he manages to balance on the narrow tightrope between jazz and classic. He relies on the one hand on set compositions, but also creates his own sound language using improvisation and his own compositions."[7]
"Against that, in front of a lot more listeners, the highly reputed guitarist Andreas Paolo Perger turned out to be a stylistical black crosser with own works on his poppy-green acoustic-electric instrument, not fitting in any kind of current drawers."[8]
For me, he explains his mammoth project, "it is an obligation to know and learn to understand the various styles living within the guitar, to work with them and pursue them up to a certain point and, when I feel I have learned enough about them, to let them go again. These CDs are a form of pool, a rucksack with everything I have at the moment and what I have focused on."[9]
"The Munich-born musician, Andreas Paolo Perger, has become a trump card of European jazz."[10]
"With his Concert for 5.1 surround guitar he creates a new space sound, whilst every guitar string gets depicted on a single loudspeaker."[11]
Perger 's music is not only going to be performed in a room, but it generates a spacial structure itself, almost "folding" the given room. This by sound unfolded room therefore not only causes an acoustic experience, but also a physically perceptible shift of the position of the apprehending subject.[12]
"The man, who invented the 5.1 surround guitar, gives a completely new space feeling."[13]