![\"Celebrating](\"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/images\/Celebrating-Howard-Heitmeyer.jpg\")
Celebrating Howard Heitmeyer<\/p><\/div>\n
Howard Heitmeyer (b.1922) is a genius at arranging and composing for classical guitar. Classical guitar teachers generally do not have any experience with jazz or popular music, but Howard is an exception with no equals. He spent years mastering jazz guitar with a plectrum [pick]. Then he mastered classical guitar and settled down to a life of teaching hundreds of students, for whom he arranged well over 600 works. Today, at 94 years old, Howard deserves major recognition even though the majority of his work is not commercially available to the public.<\/p>\n
This unsung genius of the classical guitar has been a major influence for me. I first met Howard in 1964 when I visited the guitar maker Jose Oribe at his shop in Inglewood, California. Howard was teaching there, and very kindly gave me an arrangement he had made of Lu\u00eds Bonf\u00e1’s Manha de Carnaval, the theme song from the movie Black Orpheus, which I was keen to take home and try out. Several years earlier I had purchased an LP of Bonf\u00e1 playing numerous bossa nova tunes, and I was intrigued. But where to get an arrangement of his music for solo guitar? At that time there was nothing. So I treasured the handwritten manuscript Howard gave me, which provided a starting point for unlocking the secrets of bossa nova.<\/p>\n
During the late ’60s and early ’70s Howard was a busy teacher, with students ranging from beginners to advanced. He made arrangements upon request for these students, taking into account the level of a student’s technical capabilities. Consequently, he has created arrangements and compositions for all levels of player. The total number of arrangements that Howard has done to date (because he’s still going at 94!) totals over 600.<\/p>\n
Yet despite Howard’s amazing output, there has never been a book of his arrangements. Why? The simple answer is that publishing was never really important to Howard. The complex answer is that many of the arrangements are of copyrighted music that require paying a licensing fee to publish, and this blocked producing a book of standards. But he did publish some public domain arrangements over the years, along with quite a few original compositions, which are available as solo guitar sheet music.<\/p>\n
Howard mixes the two currents of his jazz and classical guitar mastery together in his creations. He also utilizes open strings as much as possible in the “guitar keys” in which his solo arrangements are made: C, D, E, F, G, A and B major and the minor keys of a, b, c#, d, and e. The arrangements he has made cover a spectrum from very simple to complex, so his contribution is great for players of all levels. I look forward to discussing and demonstrating some of them on June 24 at 9 a.m. at the 2017 GFA at California State University Fullerton. <\/p>\n
Editor’s note: Videos of three of Heitmeyer’s compositions, performed by Strings By Mail sponsored artist Gohar Vardanyan, are available on our website: “A Little Waltz<\/a>,” “A Little Love Song<\/a>,” and \u201cAura Lee (Love Me Tender)<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Strings By Mail offers many works by Heitmeyer:<\/p>\n We at Strings By Mail have long been fans of Howard Heitmeyer’s arrangements and compositions and carry a number of his works. When we recently heard that Rico Stover will be presenting a celebration and analysis of his work at the Guitar Foundation of America International Convention & Competition, we asked him to share some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[30,31],"class_list":["post-2908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-howard-heitmeyer","tag-rico-stover"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Celebrating-Howard-Heitmeyer.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2908"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3169,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2908\/revisions\/3169"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}