MARY LORD
Mary Lord has been playing guitar since age 10 and lute since age 19. She comes from a musical and very religious family that includes many decorated Polish war heroes. Mary first studied guitar and Renaissance lute with Barbara Polasek at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich, Germany, and then went on to the Royal Academy of Music in London to study guitar with Hector Quine and Michael Lewin and Renaissance lute with Robert Spencer. Besides getting Division V With Merit on the guitar and Division V With Distinction on the Renaissance lute, she made it a point to take and pass the highest examinations in Harmony and Aural Training in an endeavor to do away with the misconception that guitarists know nothing about music apart from their repertoire. For this same reason, she also took phenomenology of music courses held by the famous Rumanian conductor, Sergiu Celibidache. She has taken many masterclasses with such people as Oscar Caceres, Betho Davezac, David Russell, William Kanengiser, Benjamin Verdery, Phil de Fremery, Pat O'Brien, Roland Dyens and Eliot Fisk on the guitar, Paul O'Dette, Hopkinson Smith, and Jakob Lindberg on the renaissance lute and Toyohiko Satoh on the baroque lute. Mary teaches and performs on guitar and lute in the Seattle area and has arranged many pieces for guitar ensembles. Edition Margaux in Berlin has published her arrangement of Golliwogg's Cake-Walk by Claude Debussy for a guitar quartet. She will be featured in a Mel Bay publication entitled Arranging Concepts for Classic and Fingerstyle Guitar, to appear later this year. She is under contract to publish A Scots Tune - arrangements for guitar of Scottish pieces from the Margaret Wemyss Lute Book with Mel Bay in 2004.