Meet Melissa Carter

Melissa, Howard and the Guitarras Doradas in The Christmas Revels, Andalusian Treasures
Melissa, Howard and the Guitarras Doradas in The Christmas Revels, Andalusian Treasures. Photo by Sheppard Ferguson.

Melissa has been my assistant music director for The Christmas Revels for many years, but this year I have finally gotten her back on stage … playing guitar!   Because of the theme of the 2011 Andalusian Treasures show, we decided to form a large group of guitarists to play on several of the Spanish pieces.  Melissa expressed her interest in being on stage, the fabulous costume folks found her a gorgeous costume, and voila!  The group is called “Guitarras Doradas” and includes Melissa, Howard Bass, Bobby Gravitz, Jake Hendren, and William G.M. Hoffman (you can also catch Bobby and Bill in the mummer’s play).  Melissa brings her background of both guitar and early music to the show (she is a graduate from the College of Music at Florida State University with a degree in musicology with focus on Early Music).

So, to learn more about Melissa, here are some fun facts:

  1. She grew up in a haunted house (not sure where that was, so you will have to ask her).
  2. She has lived in Ankara, Turkey for three years as a child, and then near Catania, Sicily for three years when she was in her early 20’s.
  3. Her mother was Spanish — the family was from Oviedo in Asturias.  Her father is Welsh and English – and her branch of the Carter family is part of the Carters who were one of the “First Families of Virginia.”
  4. She has always been involved in the arts — she danced ballet for 8 years in childhood and adolescence and played the viola starting at age 9.  She began guitar at 10, and then switched from viola to violin!
  5. Over the years, she has had a love/hate relationship with the guitar.  Melissa says, “At age 11 I put my guitar under my bed for a year, certain I would never be able to REALLY play because I couldn’t make the chord changes in ‘Yesterday’ fast enough.  I pulled it back out at 12 and tried again.  I got it by the time I was 13.”
  6. By age 15, it was decided… she would learn classical guitar in time to pass an audition to college.
  7. Melissa also sang with various choirs in college, and had the thrill of singing Beethoven’s 9th with the Atlanta Symphony conducted by Robert Shaw.  However, after getting nodes on my vocal chords, she joined the Collegium Musicum and learned to play baroque recorder and krumhorn (and she still loves playing the krumhorn to this day).

Don’t miss this year’s fabulous guitarists… only five more performances remain.

Meet Howard Bass

Howard Bass playing some flamenco guitar in this year's Christmas Revels
Howard Bass playing some flamenco guitar in this year's Christmas Revels. Photo by Elizabeth Fulford Miller.

Howard plays lute and guitar and is part of Trio Sefardi–one of our specialist groups for this year’s Christmas Revels.  Howard has studied guitar in Cleveland, Ohio, Washington, DC and Alicante, Spain!  (he even played for the King and Queen of Spain at the Smithsonian Institute in 1976 and at the White House in 1978).  Howard is not new to Sephardic music (although Trio Sefardi is actually a fairly new group); he was a founding member of La Rondinella, which has three recordings on the Dorian Discovery label, with a new retrospective recording just released this November — Sephardic Songs: An Anthology.  For many years, Howard has also worked extensively with Sephardic singer/composer Flory Jagoda (whom he accompanied on her latest recording, Arvolika) and early music singer Barbara Hollinshead, with whom he recorded an album of Elizabethan lute songs and solos entitled Loves Lost… and Found; their new recording of 16th and 17th century French songs and lute solos will be released in early 2012.

In this year’s Christmas Revels, Howard will be playing both lute and guitar, and will be playing everything from Renaissance and Sephardic music to some Flamenco (for our Sevillanas dancers).

Learn more about Sephardic music and the history of the Sephardic Jews on the new La Rondinella Web site.