DUMIGAN Chris

Born in 1951, in Urmston, Manchester, music has always been a part of his life from a very early age. Chris, who began playing guitar at 11 in an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Hank Marvin of the Shadows, like so many of his generation, also learned classical guitar at the same time. Because the Shadows’ music was not at that time available, he began taking the music off the records, armed with a good ear and his recently learned knowledge of the structure of musical harmony

He was always composing music, albeit firstly pseudo-Shadows instrumentals, and then singer –songwriter material when he became part of that tradition in his early 20s. He has nearly 200 songs and two musicals of that ilk to his credit, the latter of which achieved considerable success in their day, albeit in an amateur capacity, via Genesis Theatre, a local group who revelled in performing rock musicals which had never previously been attempted.

Playing and writing for classical guitar has always gone on in between the other music, but really took off in the early 80s when the theatre group split up and the singer songwriter idea lost its appeal for him. He then reverted to writing and arranging for classical guitar. It was at this time that he had the idea of transcribing the recorded works of Barrios who made nearly sixty 78rpm recordings, but never managed to write many of them down himself. It took Chris three years of his spare time to write them all down, and they  eventually saw the light of day as ‘The Barrios Anniversary Edition’. This was the first edition to publish the complete transcriptions of Barrios.

So for the last 40 years, he has carried on composing a large number of works for classical guitar, which all remained unplayed in a professional capacity until 1996 when Paul Gregory came to play in Manchester and asked Chris for a set of pieces that quoted folk-songs as their basis. The end result was ‘A Garland of Grainger’ which Paul Gregory gave the premiere of the following spring at the Brighton Festival, and which continues to be in his repertoire today After that, several collaborations occurred and Paul, being a lover of chamber works involving the guitar asked Chris each time for works of different combinations of instruments with the guitar. Since then other players, including Craig Ogden, Shuko Shibata, Galina Vale, Valerie Hartzell, Duo Flamas, TrioConBrio Scott Bradley, Karin Schaupp and Neil Smith have played his works.

Chris then started receiving compositional commissions, and has written a number of works for the Cambridge Guitar Orchestra under the direction of Valerie Hartzell, and the annual Dillington Festival for the assembled students to play in their end – of – festival guitar orchestra recital.

If this was not enough, he spent 25 years reviewing for the Classical Guitar magazine, until it stopped printing at the end of 2019, and played in an acoustic instrumental cross over group called Acoustic Moods for 15 years, for which he was the prime composer and arranger, and is still in considerable demand as a transcriber. As such he is regularly asked to transfer to manuscript, recorded guitar works which have never been printed by a growing number of players. Recently Chris has started up a website called www.allclassicalguitar.co.uk, where he reviews classical guitar sheet music, and recordings, and has so far got more than 800 items on the site, and had hits from more than 15 000 people.

His other musical activities include a large batch of teaching the guitar and playing classical guitar at various functions, something he has been doing for more than three decades now. Moreover he has more than 12 hours of material to use on such occasions, including over 138 popular songs arranged by him for classical guitar, three CDs of which have been recorded by him. Other arrangements he has produced include works by Debussy, Ravel, Berkeley, Faure, Borodin and the complete 10 books of Lyric Pieces by Grieg. He has over 60 volumes of his guitar works in print by publishers such as Berben, Lathkill, Daminus and d’OZ, and has been married for 41 years to Heather, with whom he has four children, Alexander 39, Kyle 37, Jessica 33, and Felicity 22.