Member Spotlight: Kari Conroy

In this month’s Classical Guitar Academy Member Spotlight we’d like to feature a relatively new member at CGC, Kari Conroy. Kari has been a very active member of CGC Academy for about six months now. She has kept and updated a progress journal where she lists goals and keeps herself accountable to the goals she sets (and has done so diligently!). For one of her goals in 2018 Kari has set out to organize a small get together for friends to play five songs, as well as to play a duet with her husband, who plays the piano.  Kari is currently working on the Level 2 Certificate Course at CGC Academy and has made great strides thus far to completing the course (which she hopes to do by the fall). In the video below Kari offers a wonderful performance of Gaspar Sanz’s “Espanoleta,” one of the pieces from the Level 2 Repertoire at CGC Academy.

Please offer congratulations to Kari on a job well done and wish her well to meet all her 2018 goals at CGC and beyond!

Gaspar Sanz, “Espanoleta”

Gaspar Sanz, whose baptismal name was Francisco Bartolomé Sanz Celma (born in 1640), was a Spanish Baroque guitarist, organist, and priest in the lower Aragon region of Spain during the seventeenth century. His most important contribution to the baroque guitar (a five-string instrument very similar to our modern instrument) was his pedagogical Instruccion Musica sobre la Guitarra Espanola, written in three books over the course of two decades. All of his surviving works for guitar are contained in this majestic work.

There are actually two different versions of “Espanoleta” in Sanz’s Instruccion Musica sobre la Guitarra Espanola. The arrangement Kari plays (from the level 2 repertoire at CGC–pick up your copy here) is from book 2, De Cifras sobre la Guitarra Espanola, and there carries the title “Espanoletas.” The piece is an excellent introduction to dotted rhythms as well as the anacrusis.