Andreas Paolo Perger - Biography

Biography

After receiving piano lessons at the age of three, he got classical guitar lessons at the age of seven and jazz guitar lessons at the age of eleven. Writing songs and forming bands was the only thing he did between the age of eleven and the age of seventeen. Then he got out of school and went to a music school, where he had classical guitar and electric guitar lessons beside music theory and band workshops. He started to give guitar lessons, played in several bands and did solo performances with improvisations on the classical guitar. At the age of twenty, he did studies of the jazz guitar at the Berklee College in Boston. After that, he studied five years classical guitar with Prof. Barbara Probst-Polášek, master student of Andrés Segovia, at the Munich Conservatory. In this years he additionally studied jazz guitar on his own and went to master classes and lessons with John Scofield, John McLaughlin, Joe Pass, and Mike Stern. Prof. Barbara Probst-Polášek helped him to adapt his modern jazz related compositions to the classical concert guitar and encouraged him to write a concert for guitar and string quartet, which later was recorded as a studio project with the musicians of the Modern String Quartet. Concerning the adaptation of modern jazz related compositions to the classical guitar, he also studied with Leo Brouwer during an improvisation master class at the Music Academy Marktoberdorf in Southern Germany. The music for the CD Big City, a solo album with original compositions for the electric guitar, was written during a work in residence in New York in 1996. After its publishing in 1999 it was reviewed as "highly recommendable". Concerning the questions of free musical speech and how to combine and balance improvisation and composition, Andreas Paolo Perger studied with Evan Parker, Frederic Rzewski and the late Wolfgang Stryi during a master class with the title "to compose - to improvise - to interpret" of the Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt. Additionally he did free studies of video art and electronic music and had influencing and inspiring encounters in the fields of music, art, and science. His experience with room-related compositions finally led to his form of contemporary guitar and guitar music, which is identified by bringing together the sound of the electric guitar and the diversity of timbres of the classical guitar, while using vintage electronic with its warm and dynamic sound of the vacuum tube to open up an additional spacial layer. In 1997 he was awarded "Newcomer of the year" of the German newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung". He also works as studio guitarist for cinema and television and did soundtracks for art-videos.