Guitar Festival

Enjoy listening to a video of the 2022 PLU Guitar Festival orchestra!

A specialist in standard classical guitar as well as various early guitars and lutes, Elizabeth C. D. Brown is a very active performer throughout the Pacific Northwest, giving an average of 50 concerts a year. Highlights from recent seasons included solo lute and baroque guitar recitals at Early Music Festivals in Berkeley and Cleveland, performing as the soloist in Vivaldi’s “Concerto in D,” and a 10 performance run of Monteverdi’s Ulysses in Seattle and San Francisco. Elizabeth’s first solo recording, La Folia de España: Dances for Guitar, features works for baroque, 19th century, and modern guitars. Also active as an ensemble musician, she is a member of Baroque Northwest, La Lira, the Puget Sound Consort and Ayres and Graces, and has appeared in the Early Music Guild’s three baroque opera productions and with various other ensembles. An enthusiastic advocate for the guitar and lute, Elizabeth has given numerous outreach performances at schools, senior centers, and community centers for the Seattle Classic Guitar Society and the Early Music Guild, as well as by arrangement while on tour. She is head of the Guitar and Lute program at Pacific Lutheran University, and has taught at Seattle Pacific University and the Accademia d’Amore (baroque opera workshop, Seattle). See her on YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/ElizabethCDBrown or for more information visit: www.elizabethcdbrown.com

Co-director of the PLU Guitar Festival and Lecturer of jazz guitar, Dr. Stephen Howland joined the PLU faculty in 2008. He has taught jazz and classical guitar, ear training, and jazz history at PLU. Howland and his colleague Elizabeth Brown started the festival in 2011. They have played together as a classical guitar duo most years at both the festival and the annual Seattle Classic Guitar Society Holiday Concert. Howland has written and arranged much music for the guitar over the last 30 years. Programing for the duo led to new arrangements of pieces by Albéniz, Bach, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, and Turina. Howland has taught many jazz clinics at PLU, including “The Popular Jazz Form of Rhythm Changes” (2013), “Jazz Rhythm Guitar Styles” (2014), “The Guitar Style of Charlie Christian” (2015), “The Guitar Style of Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto” (2016), and “Playing Modal Jazz” (2017). Most years Howland has also written and premiered new original solo and ensemble pieces for improvisation. In 2017 Howland began directing the PLU Guitar Festival Orchestra in a jazz piece to promote hands-on jazz education and appreciation in the community. He has arranged works by Jeff Beck, John Coltrane, Angelo Debarre, Duke Ellington, and Artie Shaw. Howland teaches both online and at Seattle’s Rosewood Guitar and plays private and public gigs as a soloist, bandleader, and sideman. He has played with Clipper Anderson, Marco De Carvalho, Jared Hall, Mark Ivestor, Adam Kessler, Kate Olson, Nate Omdal, Jason Parker, Gordy Ryan, Melyssa Stone, and Cassio Vianna, among others.