Benjamin Verdery

Benjamin Verdery (born 1955) is an American classical guitarist, composer and teacher.

Verdery has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall, Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, and Wigmore Hall (London).

He has played and recorded with a wide range of classical and other musicians, including guitarists William Coulter, Leo Kottke, Paco Peña, Andy Summers and John Williams, vocalist Hermann Prey, composer Anthony Newman, and his wife, flutist Rie Schmidt.

New York Times classical music critic Allan Kozinn described Verdery as "one of the guitar’s grand individualists" and "an iconoclastic player," known as much for his devotion to new music and transcriptions of Jimi Hendrix songs as for inventive interpretations of Bach.

As of 2021, Verdery had released 19 albums and been featured on several others.

Benjamin Verdery was born in 1955 in Danbury, Connecticut, to John Duane Verdery, an Episcopalian minister and headmaster of the Wooster School, and Suzanne Aldrich Verdery.

He became interested in music after hearing The Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" in 1963.

In his senior year at Wooster School, Verdery began formal lessons with classical guitarist Phillip De Fremery.

After learning four pieces in order to audition for conservatory, he was accepted at SUNY Purchase in 1974, where he studied with composer-organist Anthony Newman and guitarist-composer Frederic Hand, and earned the school's first BFA in guitar in 1978.

During that time, he also took master classes with the classical guitarist-composers Leo Brouwer and Alirio Díaz; since then he has studied with pianist-composer Seymour Bernstein.

Verdery's early recordings focused on classical works; his first was "Variations and Grand Contrapunctus" (1978), a sweeping piece written for him by Anthony Newman.

While at SUNY, Verdery met flutist Rie Schmidt, who he formed the Schmidt/Verdery Duo with and married in 1979; since debuting in New York City at Merkin Hall in 1980, they have released two albums and continue to perform.

Early in his career, Verdery was recognized in magazines such as Classical Guitar, Guitar Player and Billboard among "a new breed of classical guitarists" and "advocates of new guitar music" stretching the instrument through inventive transcriptions, new compositions, and diverse influences, performance contexts and programs.

In Verdery's case, writers cited an open-mindedness and lack of affectation that allowed him to synthesize tonal nuances, techniques and expressive sensibilities from rock, blues, jazz and other influences, including Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Dinu Lipatti, Julian Bream, David Oistrakh, Bill Connors, John Williams, John McLaughlin, Miles Davis, and others.

While the earliest part of Verdery's career centered on the classical repertoire, by the late-1980s he looked towards more contemporary material, mixing Anthony Newman, Lou Harrison and Steve Reich compositions alongside Jimi Hendrix tunes in recitals, which stood him apart from most classical guitarists.

The New York Times review of his 1980 New York debut described his interpretations of Bach as "rhythmically secure and musically precise" with a riveting concentration augmented by "flamboyant gestures."

After beginning with classical arrangements in the 1980s, he started—without formal training—to compose works for himself, such as the three-movement solo "In Memory," the largely solo and duo pieces comprising his album Some Towns and Cities (1991), "Eleven Etudes," and the Dalai Lama-dedicated "Be Kind All the Time."

His first two albums, Bach: Transcriptions for Guitar (1983) and Two Generations of Bach (1985), were noted for their fluent, intuitive playing and modern arrangements; Guitar's John W. Duarte described the former as "intensely musical, expressive but not archaically romantic, splendidly embellished, breathtaking in its sureness and cleanness in even the fastest passages."

He has taught at the Yale School of Music since 1985.

In 1991, Guitar Extra characterized his approach as a "dichotomous marriage of absolute virtuosic bravura and a commanding—and sometimes comedic—stage presence."

His later performances have been described as open, democratic and original, freely mixing styles and elements such as altered guitars and digital delay to create new sonic environments.

Verdery has composed works for classical and non-classical guitar for solo and duo performance, guitar quartets, chamber groups and orchestras, for himself and others, including Sérgio and Odair Assad, David Russell, David Tanenbaum, Scott Tennant, and John Williams and John Etheridge.

With two 1991 recordings, Verdery turned to contemporary American music.

Ride the Wind Horse (1991) featured a title piece by Newman, works by Lou Harrison, David Leisner and Roberto Sierra, arrangements of Hendrix's Little Wing and Purple Haze, and Verdery's own first recorded compositions.

Los Angeles Times critic John Henken called the album "an important recording distinguished by fluent, evocative playing of strong, characterful repertory."

Some Towns and Cities featured fifteen original Verdery compositions inspired by American cities, seen in terms of guitar—the product of Verdery's travels as a performer in the Affiliate Artist Program to factories, hospitals, schools and prisons, as well as concert halls.

Reviews described the album as "strikingly American" and groundbreaking, with touches of blues, jazz, Spanish/Mexican and fingerpicking styles and evocative onomatopoeic references.

In 1996, Verdery accompanied the German baritone Hermann Prey in a performance of Schubert's "Fruhlingsglaube" described in the New York Times as bringing "an affecting sweetness and intimacy to [the] gently lyrical music."

He has also written chamber music for his group Ufonia and for a work commissioned by the New Jersey Chamber Music Society, titled "Soul Force" (1996, for guitar, cello, flute and percussion).

The piece's title lifts a frequently used Martin Luther King term, while the score is based on one of his speeches, with the cello loosely imitating the rhythms of his voice and the guitar imitating its pitch.

Verdery's compositions and arrangements are published by Alfred Music and Doberman-Yppan (Canada).

Several composers have written for Verdery, including Daniel Asia, Sérgio Assad, Martin Bresnick, Elizabeth Brown, Frederic Hand, Aaron Kernis, Ezra Laderman, Hannah Lash, David Leisner, John Anthony Lennon, Ingram Marshall, Anthony Newman, Roberto Sierra, Jack Vees, and his former student Bryce Dessner, of The National.

As a recording artist, Verdery has released albums of original and arranged material, of his own, in collaborative duos with guitarists and other instrumentalists, and as a member of Latitude and the ensemble Ufonia.

Verdery's compositions for larger guitar ensembles include: Scenes from Ellis Island (1999), a version of which (titled Ellis Island) was written for and recorded by the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet; Pick and Roll (for multiple guitars, saxophone, violin and basketball player), which premiered at Santa Cruz Contemporary Festival in 2000; and Give (for eight guitars), commissioned by Thomas Offermann and premiered in Rostock, Germany in 2009.

In the 2000s, he continued to integrate old, new and more diverse works into his programs, blurring boundaries between genres.

In 2005, Verdery and Andy Summers debuted Ingram Marshall's "Dark Florescence Variations for Two Guitars and Orchestra" at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra; Classical Guitar wrote that the performance's modern sensibility "exult[ed] in a dazzling interplay" between classical and electric guitars and orchestra.

Throughout his career, Verdery's recitals have been noted for lyricism, invention, complexity, dynamism and eclecticism.

In 2020, Acoustic Guitar's Mark Small wrote, "Among the virtuosi of the Baby Boomer generation, it's not hard to make a case that Verdery has explored the most diverse terrain," noting a recorded repertoire that includes Bach, Strauss and Mozart, adventurous contemporary classical composers (including himself), arrangements of Prince, traditional folk tunes and hymns, Eastern influences and "all manner of guitars."

Verdery has performed internationally, at venues including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Concertgebouw, the Metropolitan Opera, Wigmore Hall, and guitar festivals around the world.

He has played with guitarists William Coulter, Frederic Hand, Leo Kottke, Paco Peña, Nano Stern and John Williams, and vocalist Jessye Norman, among others.