Roland Dyens was born in 1955 in Tunisia and moved to Paris a few years later, where he would spend the entirety of his life. He began playing the guitar at age nine and at thirteen he started taking lessons with the Spanish guitarist Alberto Ponce at the l’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. The eight years that he spent at this school make up the bulk of his traditional musical training, both as a guitarist, with Ponce, and as a composer/arranger, with the composer and conductor Désiré Dondeyne. After graduating, Dyens won multiple top prizes at composition competitions and was named a Yehudi Menuhin Foundation Laureate at the age of 25. A few years later, at the age of 33, he was named one of the 100 Best Living Guitarists of any style by …show more content…
According to Sean Beavers, “To Dyens, composition and performance are linked. He views himself in the tradition of guitarist-composers such as Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani. Dyens excels among guitarist-composers living at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century”. Dyens’ works fall into a number of categories and genres (concerti, chamber music, French folksong, jazz, neoclassical, homages, and more) but always have a distinctly “Dyens” feel to them. As Mark Greenburg writes, “Everything Dyens touches turns pretty much to Dyens. Barrios, Sor, Villa-Lobos all end up more-or-less assimilated into Dyens/Barrios, Dyens/Sor and …show more content…
Of those ten, this study will investigate three of them: “A night in Tunisia” by Dizzy Gillespie, “Over the Rainbow” by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, and “Take the A Train” by Billy Strayhorn. These three were chosen over the other seven works on the CD due to their popularity, making them the most likely to be performed, and ensuring that this study be of use to as many guitarists as possible. The works on this album also include a fascinating backstory, as Guilherme Vincens tells