Guest Artist Series: Mark Baum, tenor and Jennifer Trowbridge, guitar

Please join the Cal Poly Humboldt Department of Music, faculty guitarist Jennifer Trowbridge, and her special guest collaborator, Bay Area singer Mark Baum, as they share their penchant and passion for the music of Latin America on Saturday, September 28th at 8:00 p.m. in Fulkerson Recital Hall.  Trowbridge will perform 1920s era music from South America composed for solo guitar, including works by Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos and Paraguayan Agustin Barrios. Then she will accompany tenor Mark Baum as they perform his original compositions in the style of Columbian bambucas and danzas, weaving together infectious rhythms and gripping harmonies with themes of love, water, trees, and light.  $15 General, $5 Child, $5 for Humboldt students with ID.

"I see many parallels between this music and the popular music of the United States, with similar indigenous, African, and European roots. I love the repertoire for its direct harmonic language with occasionally unexpected chords, its profound poetry, and its sophisticated polymetric syncopations from Africa. And I'm delighted to collaborate with Dr. Trowbridge on this program and excited to see where our collaboration will lead."  Mark Baum

The story of this musical partnership begins with Trowbridge's move from the East Bay to Arcata to accept her new position at Humboldt last year, and is anchored by a catastrophic loss on one end, and a magic lamp on the other.  After packing her U-Haul truck for the long drive up to Humboldt the next morning, someone stole the whole truck and everything in it, including many of her most precious belongings - furniture, art work, journals, photos, and fifteen musical instruments.  She was devastated, but had to start teaching a week later, so she jumped right into her new job while also trying to put a big part of her life back together again.

"I met Mark when I was looking on Craigslist for a lamp because all my lamps had been stolen. I asked him if he was interested in bartering for the lamp, and offered to give him music lessons. He wrote back that he was preparing for a recording in Colombia with a guitarist, and would appreciate having me play the guitar arrangements he made, as a preparatory rehearsal. We met. We played music, and he gave me a lamp. Our artistic sensibilities were a great match, and we continued to meet when I came down to the Bay Area to teach workshops and lessons," Trowbridge explains.

At Humboldt, Trowbridge teaches three sections of beginner and intermediate class guitar, History of Western Music: Antiquity to 1750, Career Skills for Musicians, Chamber Guitar Ensemble, and Studio Guitar (private lessons for 16 students, most of them music majors). "I am very proud to teach at a Hispanic Serving Institution, a special status that Humboldt holds, and one of Humboldt's cultural strengths. Last spring, I decided to plan a faculty recital with my new friend and collaborator Mark to celebrate the beginning of a new year at Humboldt, and to share our collaboration with my new home and community."

Jennifer Trowbridge has enjoyed a career in guitar performance spanning classical music, jazz, world music, and a range of popular styles which has put her on stages from New York City to San Francisco. At Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, CA, she leads the guitar program and teaches music history and career skills for musicians. Over the past 25 years, she has performed as a soloist as well as collaborating with singers, dancers, actors, puppeteers, filmmakers, and musicians from all over the world.  She also composed music for the award-winning documentary film, The Pantanal: Brazil's Forgotten Wilderness, televised on PBS.

Performance, teaching, and scholarship have long been intertwined in her music career. She earned a bachelor’s degree in music at the University of Chicago and master’s and doctoral degrees in guitar performance with Anne Waller at Northwestern University. Her other primary instructors include Sérgio Assad and Denis Azabagic with additional instruction from Sharon Isbin, Michael Lorimer, David Russell, Oscar Ghiglia,, Jorge Caballero, and Antigoni Goni. Her education about the guitar was deepened by luthiers Richard Bruné, Randall Angella, and Richard Schneider. Her doctoral research focused on avant-garde composers and performers who used Beatles songs to promote "serious" music in the 1960s and 1970s.

Trowbridge has worked passionately to make classical guitar more accessible to students and audiences. In Chicago, she founded and ran The Trowbridge Guitar Studio, a neighborhood music school, for almost 20 years and produced over 100 guitar concerts and events. In 2016, she founded a similar music program, Trowbridge Music, in Oakland, CA, and initiated educational outreach programs in local elementary and middle schools. She is the new educational director of San Francisco’s Omni Foundation, whose mission is to bring the world’s finest guitarists to concert in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tenor Mark Baum originally studied composition of Western art music at Oberlin Conservatory and UC Santa Barbara, but only recently has come to writing songs inspired by South American traditional forms such as bambucos, pasillos, valses criollos, and tonderos. He has pursued his passion for Latin American music since first studying with baritone Hugo Barreira in Mexico in the late 1990’s. His ongoing studies in the field have included work with soprano Cecilia Engelhart, Colombian tenor and tiplista Miguel Ángel Urrea Mejía, Colombian composer and tiplista Oriol Caro, Cuban bolerista José Miguel Baeza Mérida, and Chilean folklorist Rafael Manríquez. Every year, he dedicates a month to study and collaboration in Bogota, Colombia, and plans to start working there part-time within the next several years.

His wide-ranging interdisciplinary performing career has included acting, movement theater, performance art, storytelling, and ritual drag, as well as art song, cabaret, jazz improvisation, English-language folk music, and Latin-American popular song. Over the past eight years, he has released three recordings of Latin-American music and original compositions:  "Árboles y Amores" with guitarist and folklorist Rafael Manríquez, "Diamantes en la Grama" with the Florecer Ensemble, and "Felipe & Mark" with guitarist and composer Felipe Gomez.