"House Music is a tart yet mellow piece for solo guitar, given a masterful performance by Dan Lippel, whose work as a Vigeland interpreter landed him on the Top 25 in 2018." - Jeremy Shatan, An Earful, March 2025
During the pandemic lockdown when public gatherings ceased and the sharing of music in concert stopped, I thought of my musician friends at home playing for an audience of one. Practicing, usually a solitary occupation, became synonymous with performing. However, through the wonders of Zoom, people started making music together via the internet. This seemed to me to be a new form of house music (in the 19th Century sense of parlor music) and deserving of some new repertoire and what better than for that most intimate instrument - the guitar. These three pieces are my contribution to the genre, dedicated to Dan Lippel, who first played them for me on a Zoom call. - Nils Vigeland, March 2025
On House Music, Nils Vigeland brings his acute sensitivity to instrumental resonance, intricate counterpoint, textural delineation, and poignant lyricism to his seventh work for guitar. Vigeland pays special attention to how harmonics create an extra timbral dimension, both when they are woven in melodically with fretted notes as well as when they establish a textural context of their own. Over the course of its three movements (heard here in one track, with the second movement starting at 2:30 and the third at 6:38), the piece explores a broad range of contrasting characters; lush over-ringing sonorities, restless implied contrapuntal fortspinnung, skittering asides, and wistfully nostalgic chordal sections combine to form a work that inhabits a large expressive footprint, despite, or perhaps because of, its intimacy. I would be forever grateful to Nils Vigeland for composing this piece regardless of the circumstances, but receiving the first draft of House Music in June of 2020 amidst an isolating lockdown in New York City injected my days with much appreciated hope and joy. It was my close companion for several months afterwards, has remained so ever since, and is a powerful reminder for me of how I am the beneficiary, as an interpretive performer, of the gift of human connection that naturally occurs through the process of learning and absorbing a score. - Dan Lippel, March 2025