Electric guitarist and composer D. J. Sparr, who Gramophone recently hailed as “exemplary,” is one of America’s preeminent composer-performers. He has caught the attention of critics with his eclectic style, described as “pop-Romantic . . . iridescent and wondrous” (The Mercury News) and “suits the boundary erasing spirit of today’s new-music world” (The New York Times). The Los Angeles Times praises him as “an excellent soloist,” and the Santa Cruz Sentinel says that he “wowed an enthusiastic audience . . . Sparr’s guitar sang in a near-human voice.”

He was the electric guitar concerto soloist on the 2018 Grammy Award-winning, all-Kenneth Fuchs recording with JoAnn Falletta and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2011, Sparr was named one of NPR listener’s favorite 100 composers under the age 40. He has composed for and performed with renowned ensembles such as the Houston Grand Opera, Cabrillo Festival, New World Symphony, Washington National Opera, and Eighth Blackbird. His music has received awards from BMI, New Music USA, and the League of Composers/ISCM. Sparr is a faculty member at the famed Walden School’s Creative Musicians Retreat in Dublin, New Hampshire. His works and guitar performances appear on Naxos, Innova Recordings and Centaur Records.

Sparr lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife Kimberly, son Harris, Nannette the hound dog, and Bundini the boxer. His music is published by Bill Holab Music.

From Caitlin Vincent about Ella Que Llora: Ella Que Llora was loosely inspired by the myth of La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman. According to folklore from Central and South America, La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who drowned her children and now wanders along the banks of a river, looking for them and weeping. While the figure is often framed as an antagonist in popular culture, Ella Que Llora leaves it to the audience to decide whether the woman’s actions were accidental or not. The work shifts between vignettes from the woman’s past and present, while the sound of the river remains omnipresent, expressed through musical references to rushing waves and historical works about water embedded in the orchestration. Ella Que Llora was written specifically for soprano Lindsay Kesselman and commissioned by a consortium of wind ensembles led by Kevin Geraldi at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and Sarah McKoin at Texas Tech University. There are two companion pieces to the work: Nullipara, which follows a modern woman’s struggle with fertility issues, and Pitch Past Pitch of Grief, an intoned chant for four female voices that draws the soul of a child to its parents.