Sam Guarnaccia

Samuel Guarnaccia, a Vermont native, studied classical guitar in Spain and has performed throughout parts of Europe and North America. He has taught and instituted programs at the University of Denver, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont, as Spanish scholar, player/performer, and composer with deep ties to the history, struggle, traditions, art and spirituality of ancient and contemporary Indigenous peoples.

His cycle of nine Peace songs has been incorporated into a Peace education curriculum. His previous major work, A Celtic Mass for Peace, Songs for the Earth, has been performed all over the United States, Iona and Edinburgh, Scotland, and was featured in a major Peace celebration on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2011, in New York, and in Vermont. His recent composition, the Emergent Universe Oratorio, is an hour and half long choral and chamber orchestra composition conceived in response to the current unfolding scientific cosmology as presented in the 2011 documentary Journey of the Universe, www.journeyoftheuniverse.org.  The music, lyrics, and art will express this new story, evoking reverence and responsibility. At its root, the Emergent Universe Oratorio is a call to inspire humanity to participate in Earth’s transition from a genetically determined to a culturally determined story, reversing our present perilous course to embrace a mutually enhancing Earth-human relationship. This is a profoundly spiritual, as well as cultural, psychic, evolutionary process.