Andrew York - Monday Memories Video Series

For our Monday Memories offering this week, we have the movement “i” from “The Equations of Beauty”. This movement, “i”, represents an imaginary number, the square root of negative one. This number helps mathematicians move out of our reality into other dimensions, which is a cool concept no matter how you think about it. What I love about this piece is the energy and repetition of ideas that morph continually. What I love about the video is Annie's very creative and colorful experimental graphics!

For our Monday Memory this week, we revisit an older piece called Letting Go. This is one of the first pieces I composed with a short vocal 'accompaniment' in one section (no words, only syllables) that accentuated the emotive intensity in just the right way.

This video goes back a few years, as my younger visage testifies. Filming took place during a concert for a documentary series called Primal Twang, which included guitar luminaries Eric Johnson, Doc Watson, Mason Williams, Albert Lee and more. Quite a cast to share a stage with. The concert was scripted and narrated by Dan Crary, and it’s a joy to relive some of those moments through this video.

For this week's Monday Memory we look back to a piece I wrote and recorded in 2021, titled "Lullaby for Caroline". I was commissioned to write this piece to honor a new baby into a family, and in writing it I tried to create a lullaby that blends the mystical edge between awake and dreaming, seeking the kind of captivating beauty that seems to seep in from a greater reality . . . we hope you enjoy revisiting "Lullaby for Caroline".

For this week's Monday Memory I’m very happy to offer “Annie's Song”, a piece for my wonderful wife, who helps me so much in everything I do. Together we create all the videos for Andrew's Den, for youtube, as well as run our publishing business, while trying to keep our garden from getting too wild. Filmed in 2021, this video is a sweet memory. We hope you enjoy “Annie’s Song”.

For this week's Monday Memory we offer you “Little One”. I composed this piece, perhaps surprisingly, in the style of the great Chet Atkins. I love guitar of all styles, and have become deeply immersed in many of them throughout my life, in addition to classical. This piece is to celebrate a new member to the family of a dear friend of mine.

For this week's Monday Memory we look back to "Song for Susan", written for an old friend. An early video from our Den, filmed late at night, lit only by candlelight - this is the proper magical space Annie and I were trying to evoke with this expansive, resonant composition. Guitar is in my 'Yamour' tuning as I call it, D A D F# B D. We hope you enjoy "Song for Susan".

For this week's Monday Memory we revisit “Eichenau”, a student piece I composed in the town of the same name, outside of Munich in Germany. “Eichenau” has an open texture with a haunting melody, and there is a hint of medieval in there, not so much in the harmony but in the overall character. This video is four years old, from when I was still in my ‘hat’ period. “Eichenau” is one of my favorite easy pieces, and Annie and I hope it starts your week off in an enchanting way.

Tour of Japan 2024 - For our Monday Memory this week, we have a documentary for you! While touring Japan in 2004 with Japanese guitar stars Dai Kimura and Kotaro Oshio, Annie filmed everything behind the scenes, and edited together this beautiful and very personal glimpse of our lives on tour - backstage at concerts, meeting with old friends, and visiting fascinating events and stunningly beautiful places. I've known Dai Kimura since he was thirteen, and we have done many tours together and I love him like a brother. During the tour we also got to meet with my long-time Japanese manager (now retired) Takao Kasahara in Kyoto, and the wonderful pianist Mitsuko Kado with whom I have also toured with several times. Ah, I love Japan, and Annie and I hope you enjoy this rare footage of 'life on the road' in this beautiful and compelling land.

For this week’s Monday Memory we have a brand new composition and video, “Lachrimae”. This is a major work, drawing from my entire life’s experience, in an attempt to distill the sweetness, joy and sorrow that befalls us in a lifetime. “Lachrimae” is latin for ‘tears’, and many guitarists will recognize this title from English lutenist John Dowland’s composition of the same name, written in the year 1604. British composers Henry Purcell, Benjamin Britten, and Peter Warlock also wrote their own pieces titled “Lachrimae”. This is my contribution to the works arrayed down the centuries bearing this name. In D minor, a wonderful key for the guitar, I strove for haunting melodies that all relate intimately to the first three-note motif that begins the piece. The video that Annie filmed is in stark film noir style to complement and augment the mood of the composition. Annie and I hope you enjoy “Lachrimae”.

For this week’s Monday Memory, and in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we set sail to Ireland, to a town on the east coast named “Skerries”. I really love Irish music, and a visit to Skerries inspired me to write a piece with a bit of Irish folk influence. This piece goes very well with a pint of Guinness. Annie and I hope you enjoy "Skerries".

For this week’s Monday Memory we offer another brand new video and composition! “Bedtime Story" is a sweet and gentle melody with a compelling quality that led me to give it this title, calling up memories of reading to my daughter when she was little before she went to sleep. The composition itself I wrote for a friend in Japan, who asked me to write a piece for him and his family. Annie and I hope you enjoy "Bedtime Story".

For this week’s Monday Memory we revisit "Yamour”. This animated piece emulates the sound of a band on one guitar, with a hint of jazz and a glimmer of Brazil. It’s one of my favorite works, and was a milestone for me compositionally to surmount the formidable challenge of composing with authority in what is now called ‘Yamour’ tuning, DADF#BD. I wrote Yamour for my friend and colleague, the fine Italian guitarist Andrea Vettoretti.

For this week's Monday Memory we have another very vintage piece, “I Yam What I Yam” - I wrote this in my twenties, and it's a fun little romp that always brought to mind Popeye (remember those cartoons?), and that's where the title came from. It's been unreleased and unpublished until now, but after waiting almost forty years, I thought it was time to finally record this piece! We hope the video Annie and a created of "I Yam What I Yam" makes you dance just a little bit.

For this week's Monday Memory we have "Broken Sky", a duet composed together with the wonderful Agustín Amigó during the pandemic. Agustín sent me a lovely sketch track from Germany, and I added a melody on top. Together we created what is one of the most healing pieces of music I've ever heard. As for the video, there isn't one! It's just a still picture, a lovely CD cover created by Annie. Thanks to Agustín for the beautiful collaboration, and we hope Broken Sky starts your week off with a measure of serenity.

For our Monday Memory this week, we have another brand new composition and video for you, titled ‘falling from a cloudless sky”. “Falling” is a swirling impressionistic journey through the sky with rain sweeping down, laced with sunlight. A hypnotically relentless experience, Annie and I hope you enjoy ‘falling from a cloudless sky”, from the suite “Haiku”.

For our Monday Memory this week, we head out into the Pacific to the Hawaiian islands, with my piece "Night on Maui". I've had unforgettable times on that beautiful island, and this video gives a glimmer of being there in paradise, with some photos and videos taken by Annie. We hope "Night on Maui" gives you a moment of peaceful island getaway to start off your week.

This week we have a very special new video for our Monday Memory. Annie and I just filmed one of my oldest and most iconic pieces, "Andecy". I'm playing it on the original guitar I improvised and wrote it on in 1986. This long-lost guitar just re-entered my life after a twenty year absence, and it is bringing to life many of my earliest pieces that we created together.
"Andecy" was a milestone in my life and career, so I hope you enjoy revisiting with me the formative and shining early days, when music was innocent and the promise of the future held no limitations.

For our Monday Memory we have another new piece and video for you, “Spheres of Liquid Light.” Also from the suite “Haiku”, Spheres is the last movement of the suite, and gives me the impression of luminescent orbs of water cascading from the sky, a mingled poetry of raindrops, sky and sunlight in close rapport. We hope you enjoy “Spheres of Liquid Light.”

For our Monday Memory this week, I’d like to revisit Numina. To me, Numina is like a river of notes flowing by in a joyful, relentless current, a style steeped in centuries-old counterpoint, but with a freshness that still leaves me moved when I hear it. Numina is the last movement of my “Numen Suite”, and I hope riding the cascade of notes gives the start of your week a lift!

We have a brand new piece and video for you this week for our Monday Memory offering. “a moment of rain” is the first movement of a new suite called “Haiku”. It’s very impressionistic, this suite, and I wanted to give a poetic description of a rainstorm. But not in the obvious programmatic way, where notes try to mimic patterns of raindrops (too many pieces like that), but instead to give the feeling of rain, as one might experience it internally while watching the mystery of rainfall. “a moment of rain” is a slow tremolo melody that puts me in mind of the infrequent and special rainstorms in Southern California.

For this week's Monday Memory we look back to Deepening, the piece that began our Monday Memory Series almost three years ago. Deepening is a very personal piece to me, and has been one of my favorites to play in my concerts in the last few years. In Deepening I feel I captured something of the arc of life, woven with its joys and sorrows, yet with an enduring optimism that underlies it all. Strong description indeed, but to me music is supremely capable of expressing such depth - hence the title.

I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing By" is a new video of the well-known Christmas carol. It's an odd piece in that it has no chorus or refrain, only a melody that repeats over and over. In this arrangement I made nine statements of the melody, each with a different character. I wasn’t intending to make it such an extensive piece but I got carried away with the creative possibilities. Merry Merry!

I’m haunted with Hampstead Heath in the north of London, and have walked its fields, forests and hedgerows for years in my many visits to England. For this Monday Memory we share “Heath”, a student piece I wrote in 1993 in fond recollection of this magical place.

For a spooky Monday Memory, in keeping with the season, here is Skeleton featuring Charles, our resident skeleton. He even scratches my back during the video, which creeped me out. I love this season.

This week we look back for our Monday Memory to the late 1980s, with “Hejira”, a short piece in a fast gigue tempo. This is a video Annie and I did in 2022, and playing Hejira rekindles much earlier times, composing in my apartment in Los Angeles, and connecting my life musically from then to now. From the collection Eight Dreamscapes.

For this week’s Monday Memory we revisit “Inkling”, which I recorded on Just Intonated guitar. I’m using the just intonation in an unusual way, by not playing in the key for which the guitar was fretted. I was seeking a spicier, unusual sound and I achieved it with intervals that don’t exist in our standard scales. But this piece can still be played on standard fretted guitar and sound pretty cool, just a little less spicy!

For this week’s Monday Memory we offer “Whirlpool”, yet another student work from the collection “Pretty Easy Pieces times Seven”. An incisive and rhythmically insistent short piece in odd meter, I wanted to compose a piece for the book that was cut from a little different cloth than most student compositions. To me, “Whirlpool” evokes an image of an eccentric swirling dance.

“So the Sun Says” - This week we have another new piece, and new video! Annie and I just filmed “So the Sun Says”, an uplifting piece in E major with a hint of fiddle music, maybe at barn dance, mixed with streaming sunshine! This takes me back to childhood family events with long evenings of music making. I look back more and more to those nostalgic days and realize how joyful and formative they were for me, as a composer and player. I’m happy to share “So the Sun Says” with you.

I’m more and more drawn to music as a very real gateway to another time, especially times with a slower pace, more open spaces, times that are less filled with relentless distractions - let’s ignore for the moment any negatives and focus instead on what magical potential of actually experiencing another time would bring to us . . . I think music is one of the portals through which we can actually make the psychological journey to earlier ages in a very real way. That’s what I often try to do with my compositions when crafting them in earlier styles. With “The Candlemaker” I get the feeling of visiting the workshop of a long-ago candlemaker, when the daily darkness of the world was only illuminated by wick and flame. Enjoy “The Candlemaker”.

"Spanning Rivers, Bridging Time" is another new video we are premiering this week. A longer work, approaching seven minutes, "Spanning Rivers, Bridging Time" is an epic journey for solo guitar, an emotional statement in multiple unbroken sections. In Memory of Paul Adler.

This week we have a new video for you - It's time for “Fancy Pants Dance"! To me, the vibe is joyfully renaissance, and I can envision a jaunty and ebullient dance to go with it, which I will not be doing in the video. What I love about music is that it can help you time travel and feel the spirit of another era. Annie and I hope you enjoy “Fancy Pants Dance”. From the collection "Pretty Easy Pieces times Seven" for solo guitar.

For this weeks “Monday Memory” we are revisiting Roasted Green Tea. In this composition I experimented with a groove that makes you want to move. The title refers to hojicha, the delicious roasted green tea in Japan, and it was during a cup of this during my tour in Japan with Dai Kimura in 2019 that I improvised the essence of this groove, and only later in 2021 did I create a composition from those tea-inspired ideas. Who said classical guitar can't be both multilayered and fun?

Written first for piano, I wrote “Canticle” in London in 1991. The piano version has been recorded by Japanese classical pianist Mitsuko Kado, and the guitar version was recorded by Stephen Robinson. However, I never played the piece myself until now. So today we offer a new video of “Canticle”, and Annie and I hope you enjoy it.

“The Current” - Looking way back now. Here is me, long hair and all, playing “The Current” at the Ambassador Auditorium in 1991 for their Gold Medal Series. I had my new (then) Sahlin guitar, playing in front of a packed concert hall of 1,200 people. Blurry video to be sure (transferred from VHS!), but what a glorious memory.

“The Wizard’s Tale” is our next Monday Memory, and is a brand new video fresh from the Den. From my newest collection “Pretty Easy Pieces times Seven”, the Wizard’s Tale is one of my favorites in the book, eliciting a feeling of magic and passing through the portal to another realm.

“Not alone” - This week we look back five years to the heart of the pandemic, with a rare example of me singing and playing ukulele. My desire was to create an inspirational and uplifting piece during lockdown, and I hope “Not alone” will bring a little light into your Monday!

For our Monday Memory this week we revisit “Shadows Only Come From Light”. This is a composition I wrote for a friend’s birthday two years ago. “Shadows Only Come From Light” is in the poignant, mysterious style that I like so much to explore. Though we filmed and released this video two years ago on YouTube, we finally just released the audio track on Spotify as well. We hope you enjoy “Shadows Only Come From Light”.

For this week's Monday Memory we have a new video. "The Old Gardener" is a stately piece that brought an image to my mind of a man, so in tune with his garden and nature, that he reaches a state akin to zen enlightenment. This piece also inspired a short story of the same name.

“Ride” is the first movement of my suite “Glimmerings”. All the movements in this suite are in lute tuning and capoed on the second fret, giving a lighter and higher sonority to the instrument. “Ride” has a compelling groove that calls to mind a swift twilight journey with a hint of danger.

"Rainwalk" is from the collection "Pretty Easy Pieces times Seven" for solo guitar. Students have a hunger for playable works in an accessible, non-dated style, and "Pretty Easy Pieces times Seven" is my most recent offering to fill this need.