"The Living Guitar: Conversations with William Cumpiano" - Film Screening & Conversation

About this event

Join us for a screening of "The Living Guitar: Conversations with William Cumpiano" (43 minutes), a film by Stan Sherer and Marjorie Senechal.

Following the screening, master guitar maker William Cumpiano, his granddaughter Arianna Vaccaro, and his son Atticus Wolf will be present to discuss the craft of guitar making and answer questions.

About the film:

"You can actually make these things? They don't just appear full-blown in a music store?" William Cumpiano, a young Pratt-Institute-certified furniture designer working on Park Avenue in New York City, had been teaching himself to play the guitar. His pursuit of this question redirected his career; he is now one of the leading guitar-makers in the world. He also redirected the long, rich, history of the tiple and cuatro beyond his native Puerto Rico.

Through interviews, film, and music, "The Living Guitar" takes you out of the mass-market music store and into Cumpiano's modest studio in Northampton, Massachusetts. There, together with his son Atticus Wolf, his granddaughter Ari Vaccaro (his successor-in-training), and several professional guitar players, Bill queries the interlocking worlds of wood and sound.

About the speakers:

Since completing his apprenticeship in 1972, William Cumpiano has created hundreds of individually-crafted guitars and other stringed instruments in the European, North American and Latin American traditions; has taught the instrument-maker's craft to scores of aspiring makers; co-authored the world-recognized standard guitar-making textbook; and has lectured, written and consulted in his field around the world.

Stan Sherer is an independent photographer, fine art digital printmaker, and filmmaker in Northampton. He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. He has exhibited across the United States as well as in Europe and China, and has published seven books of photographs, including The Life and Death of Northampton State Hospital (with J. Michael Moore), Founding Farms: Profiles of Five Massachusetts Family Farms (with Michael Gery), and Long Life to Your Children: A Portrait of High Albania (with Marjorie Senechal). His films focus on local history and geography. Previous films include "The Mill River," "The Gilded Cage: Northampton's Last Water-Powered Elevator," "The Brush Shop," and others.

Marjorie Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science at Smith College. Convinced that a liberal arts education should be grounded in the study of Great Problems, she co-proposed the Louise B. and Edmund J. Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith and served as its founding director. She also hatched and guided the multi-year, multi-disciplinary gown-town Northampton Silk Project, which brought a foundational but forgotten chapter of local history to light. Her books include Shaping Space, I Died for Beauty (a biography of the mathematician Dorothy Wrinch), Northampton's Century of Silk, and Long Life to Your Children (with Stan Sherer).