Performing in the 2014 Green Show Wednesday, July 30.
This is his third season in the OSF Green Show.
International award winning classical guitarist from Ashland, OR.
A promising and prodigious classical guitarist on the rise, Tye Austin first came to critical attention after making his solo debut opening for Juilliard Faculty member Sharon Isbin and the Britt Orchestra (2011) at the Britt Classical Festival in Jacksonville, OR. Within merely two years Tye made his Carnegie Hall debut (2013) after winning his first international music competition. Meanwhile he has performed solo at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Green Show, the Rogue Valley Manor, the Medford Craterian Theatre, and he has been featured on Jefferson Public Radio’s Siskiyou Music Hall and NBC-5 News. He has recently been invited to open for fifteen time Grammy Award-winning banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck and the Britt Orchestra on August 8th, 2014. Medford Oregon’s Mail Tribune has praised the way Tye, “...approaches his instrument as a priest might approach his altar,” and NBC-5 has said, “he plays classical guitar like a veteran twice his age.”
Born in Oregon, USA in 1989, Tye started playing classical guitar at age 17 after hearing the instrument in concert for the first time. Simultaneously finding his passion, purpose, and best friend, he decided at that moment to dedicate the rest of his life to the mastery and advocacy of the guitar without any prior music training. At age 18, he successfully applied for the Music Performance Major at Southern Oregon University and he graduated magna cum laude with his BA degree in Guitar Performance and Music Composition in June 2013. Within merely six years of formal guitar studies, Tye has successfully applied for a scholarship to attend the New England Conservatory in Boston this Fall 2014 for his Master of Music degree in Guitar Performance under the tutelage of Eliot Fisk, the last student of the great Andres Segovia. With several commissions to his name, Tye is also an accomplished composer with practice in the arts of transcription/transposition, orchestration, and arrangement. He uses D’Addario high-tension strings and plays a 2008 Antonio Loriente guitar (spruce-top), hand-crafted in Spain. In his spare time, Tye enjoys philosophy, hiking, and practicing Yoga/Tai-Chi/Meditation.
Tye Austin on Community: My community involves all things guitar. The guitar is the most common household instrument in the world, which means that more people can relate with the guitar than any other instrument. My mission is to bring the guitar's charming and intimate voice to the masses by blurring the boundaries and sewing the seams between classical and mainstream music. The guitar is easily the most versatile crossover instrument that can comfortably straddle multiple genres and musical contexts. In a way my community is a global community because the guitar is a prominent figure in all walks of life. I intend to travel the world and share my love and advocacy for the instrument with as many people as I can.
www.tyeaustin.com