Sheer Pluck is comprised of young guitarists from Queens, NYC, under the direction of guitarist William Anderson, who runs the guitar program at Queens College. The ensemble performs music from the Renaissance through to the present. David Loeb's aesthetic is a rare example, in music, of that space where the spaghetti western intersects with the samurai flick, all recently brought back to our attention by Quentin Tarantino. Loeb: gestures from Japanese traditional music, manipulated by an arsenal of modal tricks that we can trace back to Bartok. Loeb was doing his form of World music decades before World Music displaced the International Style as the predominant paradigm. for this track: Diego Andrade, soloist William Anderson, conductor with Valentina Savu, Elizabeth Hogg, Jonathan Altman, Christopher Rispoli, Jeffrey Starace, Zeke Bardash Other Sheer Pluck performances Oct. 16, 2013 at the Italian Academy at Columbia University (performing Robert Martin's Diary of a Seducer, No. 31), and on March 7, 2014 at Carnegie Hall (Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint). The group's name is also the title of a short story by Horatio Alger.