Information for the 2024 Guitar Festival is still being updated. Check back soon for more details!

PLU Guitar Festival

March 2, 2024

Mary Baker Russell Music Center | Elizabeth C.D. Brown, Director

The festival will feature hands on Classical and Jazz guitar workshops, lectures and concerts with PLU guitar faculty members Elizabeth CD Brown and Dr. Stephen Howland alongside guests Naeim Rahmani and Daniel Pinilla.  Festival participants will have the opportunity to rehearse and perform in the Festival Guitar Orchestras, with music available in advance. All events take place at Pacific Lutheran University, in the Mary Baker Russell Music Center, with rehearsals and concerts held in the exquisite Lagerquist Concert Hall. The 2023 PLU Guitar Festival is supported in part by the Seattle Classic Guitar Society the Seattle Jazz Guitar Society, and the Rosewood Guitar.

Festival Registration: $60 (General), $50 (Senior), $30 (Students, Grade 6 through undergraduate student) and $10 (PLU Students)

Registration:

Festival Registration: $60 (General), $50 (Senior), $30 (Students, Grade 6 and older), $10 (PLU Students)  $10 registration discount for Seattle Classic Guitar Society the Seattle Jazz Guitar Society members. Click the button below for the online registration form! Please note, registration is done only through the online form, we are NOT able to take registration or payments at that festival.

Performing in Guitar Orchestras:

All registrants are strongly encouraged to participate in the Festival Guitar Orchestras, from beginning students to professionals. This is a great opportunity to have fun, meet fellow guitarists and enjoy the camaraderie that is such an enduring element of the PLU Guitar Festival.  Scores, parts and play along recordings are all posted below! 

The 2023 jazz piece for the Festival Guitar Orchestra will celebrate the jazz-rock fusion of Jeff Beck, who passed this January. The arrangement is for classical, acoustic, and electric guitars. There are three parts.  Each part has alternative, simplified options written out. The bass-guitar part 3b is the easiest part. Participants will have the optional opportunity to improvise for 2, 4, 8, or 16 bars over a single chord vamp.

We will also be playing two traditional pieces from South America, arranged for 4 part Guitar Orchestra.  In these arrangements the guitar 1 and 2 parts are the most melodic, and especially guitar 1 goes into higher positions up the neck. Guitar 3 parts are broken arpeggios and the thickest parts. Guitar 4 parts are the easiest, as a friendly, slow moving bass line.

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

GUEST FACULTY

Naeim Rahmani is a classical guitarist based in Seattle, Washington. Born in Iran, he immigrated to the United States as a refugee and has since made a name for himself as an accomplished performer, both nationally and internationally. His talent and dedication to his craft have earned him numerous accolades, including a 2022 Goethe-Institut Residency Award, and a 2023 CityArtist Award from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, recognizing his contributions to the city’s cultural landscape.

In addition to his solo performance career, Naeim is also the artistic director of the Seattle-Isfahan Project. This collaborative venture brings together musicians from Seattle, WA and Iran to create a shared workspace where performers and composers can come together to create new works for the guitar repertoire. This project has been recognized by awards and grants from Artist Trust, 4Culture, Bellevue Arts Program, and the Goethe-Institue. He has also commissioned works from notable composers such as Huck Hodge and Anahita Abbasi, and is currently collaborating on a solo guitar piece with Farzia Fallah.

As an advocate for new music, Naeim is dedicated to promoting and encouraging new compositions for the classical guitar. Outside of his performance career, he teaches at Bellevue College and is a board member of both Artist Trust and the Seattle Classic Guitar Society.

Dr. Daniel Pinilla is the guitar professor at the Lionel Hampton School of Music-University of Idaho. He has released two albums under his name Intuiciones (FLD, 2011) and Atrás (2011), and has participated as composer, arranger, and guitarist in many other musical productions. His original work received different critics and reviews, including the December 2012 number of the NYC Jazz Record.

Pinilla has more than ten years of performance, recording, and teaching activity in the US and Latin America. His touring experience includes performing with the Colombian National Symphony, the seven-time Grammy-nominated UNT. One O’Clock Lab Band, the #1 in the Latin American Billboard Charts singer Carlos Rivera, and the Daniel Pinilla Quartet, among others. His original music material is available on all streaming platforms.

Pinilla’s collaborative composition, alongside trumpeter and composer Juan Chaves’ Not Even a Portrait, which combines string quartet, double bass, and guitar, was awarded the Student Award for Best Small Ensemble Composition by DownBeat Magazine in its 40th anniversary.

Moreover, Pinilla leads a social impact project in his home country, using music education as a social groundwork. In 2014 he founded You Art Important, a non-profit organization in Colombia. This project was awarded 1st prize in the Sherman/Barsanti Inspiration Award at UNT for developing a series of music workshops for children in rural Colombia during the Colombian post-conflict. This project was awarded the first $10,000 prize in the Sherman Barsanti Inspiration Award at the University of North Texas in 2017.

In 2013, Pinilla was awarded the Jóvenes Talentos del ICETEX scholarship from the Colombian government to pursue a master’s degree in jazz studies at UNT, where he performed, toured, and recorded with the prestigious seven-time Grammy-nominated UNT One O’Clock Lab Band, where he had the opportunity to perform with guests artists such as Christian McBride, Jimmy Heath, Doc Severinsen, Marcus Miller, Chris Potter, Sean Jones, and Rashawn Ross, among many others.

Before moving to the United States, Pinilla taught in different schools and universities in Bogotá, Colombia. From Fall 2015 to Spring 2019, he had a teaching fellowship at UNT, where he completed his master’s and doctoral degrees in jazz studies performance.

Pinilla has presented his scholarly work at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, The University of Idaho, the Jazz Education Network Conference (JEN), the University of North Texas Introduction to Jazz Research Class, and the International Seminar Art and Culture for the Social Transformation. Bogotá, Colombia, the First International Seminar: Theories and practices of music education. Universidad Central. Bogotá, Colombia.

PLU FACULTY ARTISTS & FESTIVAL DIRECTORS

Elizabeth C. D. Brown - Senior Lecturer

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

Steve Howland

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.

For Questions:

Elizabeth C.D. Brown, Guitar Lecturer
School of Music, Theatre & Dance; Pacific Lutheran University
(253) 535-7602 e-mail: brownec@plu.edu

Abby Deskins, Coordinator of Educational Outreach Programs
College of Professional Studies; Pacific Lutheran University
(253) 535-7877 e-mail: adeskins@plu.edu