Acclaimed Classical Guitarist Emma Rush Continues Her Mission To Honour Catharina Pratten With New EP, Home Sweet Home
Acclaimed classical guitarist Emma Rush, widely regarded as one of Canada’s premier classical guitarists (Vivascene Magazine), returns with her new EP ‘Home Sweet Home,’ available now on 7″ vinyl and through Bandcamp. The Hamilton-based virtuoso has built a remarkable career bringing forgotten music to light, and this release continues that mission with warmth, curiosity, and a deep sense of place. Recorded on a historic instrument and paired with a trio of striking videos, the project finds Rush at her most personal and inviting.
The EP draws entirely on the music of Catharina Pratten, a towering figure of 19th-century guitar whose accomplishments stretched across most of the century. Pratten was a virtuosic performer, a prolific composer, and the most celebrated guitar teacher in Victorian England. “Catharina Pratten was such a huge figure in 19th century guitar but she’s been largely overlooked,” Rush says. “Her music is passionate and colourful, and incredibly expressive.” Rush has spent years immersed in Pratten’s catalogue, and two of the tunes here mark their first-ever recordings, a responsibility she relishes with every interpretation.
‘Home Sweet Home’ follows Rush’s celebrated 2025 album ‘The Life and Times of Catharina Pratten,’ the first-ever album dedicated to the composer and a CBC In Concert Record of the Week. That release brought Pratten’s music into public view through extensive library research and rare archival discoveries, featuring several previously unrecorded works performed on historically significant guitars linked to the composer. The new EP extends that deep dive, carrying Rush’s advocacy for Pratten into fresh territory with an even more intimate, place-rooted lens.
The collection began as a video project grounded in Rush’s hometown. “I feel like coming from Hamilton has really influenced me as a musician and I wanted to find a way to connect that sense of place with what I do,” she shares. “I loved the idea of playing this beautiful Victorian music on a historic guitar and pairing it with some of Hamilton’s most stunning Victorian buildings.” She filmed the title track at Dundurn Castle, a celebrated Hamilton landmark she loved to visit as a child, lending the project a personal resonance that runs deep.
At the heart of the EP sits an instrument with its own extraordinary story. Rush recorded the music on an 1859 Pratten model guitar built by Boosey and Sons, complete with Pratten’s signature inside and the date and serial number in her own hand. “It’s like playing a time machine,” Rush says. The pairing of composer and instrument gives the recording a rare authenticity, connecting listener and performer directly to the world Pratten inhabited.
The song selection carries its own intimate logic. “Treue liebe” (True Love) is one of the dreamy, romantic pieces Pratten wrote so beautifully, while “Valse Espagnole” brings a lively, dancing spirit to the set. The title track held special meaning for Rush. “Home Sweet Home was the perfect tune,” she explains. “Not only did the title fit the concept of the project, but it’s based on a song my grandparents used to sing.” That thread of family and memory gives the EP its tender, homespun heart.
Rush filmed the accompanying videos across Hamilton’s architectural gems, including the Workers Arts Heritage Centre in the former Customs House and the Pring House, the city’s backpackers’ hostel with its remarkable three-storey staircase. Her choice to release the music on vinyl, with downloads and streaming available through Bandcamp, reflects a thoughtful commitment to her craft and her listeners. “I’ve had loads of requests for vinyl and I’m constantly buying new records myself,” she says. “When I realized the tunes for this project would fit on a 7″ record I didn’t think twice.”
Rush’s international reputation continues to flourish. Her touring highlights include the Altamira Shanghai International Guitar Festival in China, the Festival de Guitarras Lagos de Moreno in Mexico, Future Echoes Festival in Sweden, and a cross-country tour aboard The Canadian. A 2026 recipient of a Chalmers Fellowship and a three-time City of Hamilton Arts Award winner, she completed graduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold in Germany and holds a Bachelor of Music from Dalhousie University. A sought-after lecturer and festival director, Rush serves as Co-Director of GuitarFest West in Calgary, Director of Hamilton Guitar Day in Ontario and the Nelson Guitar Festival in British Columbia and collaborates with the Wakefield Guitar Festival in Quebec.
With ‘Home Sweet Home,’ Rush extends her ongoing work of recovering hidden voices and sharing them with new audiences. The EP, produced and engineered by Kirk Starkey, stands as a heartfelt celebration of a composer whose music deserves to be heard, performed by an artist with the dedication and brilliance to bring it fully alive.
Hi, Emma! Good to see you again! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
I’m a classical guitarist based in Hamilton, Ontario. I tour throughout Canada and the guitar has taken me to Mexico, Europe, China, and more. I love finding new music to share with my audiences, whether it’s historical music that I can revive from the past or tunes that have been written just for me by modern composers. One of the areas I’m especially passionate about is music written by women in the 1800s – there is a huge amount of excellent music that has been left out of guitar history books that is waiting to be played!
Catharina Pratten was one of the most famous guitarists and teachers of the 19th century, yet most people have never heard of her. Why do you think someone so influential disappeared from the musical conversation, and what has it taken to bring her back?
The short answer is that she was a women! We’ve seen this over and over in classical (and other) music. Even when women were quite famous, and Pratten certainly was, their music and their legacy started being erased as soon as they died. In the Victorian period, anyone interested in the guitar in the UK would have known about Catharina Pratten. In addition to being a performer and composer, she was also a prolific teacher and her three guitar method books were reprinted many times in her lifetime. For me, the most important thing is to keep playing the music and keep telling her story. In the last few years more and more people are playing her music. I think this is partly because there is increased interest in women composers and also because the music is just so good! A few years ago, when I started looking into Pratten there were hardly any recordings or videos to check out. There are many more now, and it’s so great to see that.
You’ve now devoted years of your career to Pratten’s music. At what point did this stop being a research project and become something much more personal?
I think it became personal because Pratten’s music is so personal! She’s one of these composers where you can really feel their personality leaping off the page and on to the strings. Her music really speaks to me and really suits how I play. The more I learn about Pratten, the more interesting she becomes… she was an entrepreneur who ran her own publishing company, the first signature series guitar was a Pratten model in the 1850s, she invented all kinds of musical notation, and the list goes on. She has such a compelling story and I love sharing it with my audiences – it sets the stage for the music itself. I also know that Pratten’s story impacts young guitarists who come to my concerts and it’s really wonderful when they let me know how inspired they were by hearing it. The guitar world is still very male-dominated and girls need to see that there is a place for them in that world – and that women have been there since the beginning!
Two of the pieces on Home Sweet Home are being recorded for the very first time. What’s it like knowing you’re creating the version that future guitarists may hear first and measure themselves against?
I’ve done quite a few first recodings and it’s always thrilling. And, sometimes a little frightening! But really it’s a job that I really relish. It feels very special and important to take a piece of music that no one has heard for more than a century and bring it back to life. I try to approach it really thoughtfully and record it in a way that I hope reflects the composers intentions.
You chose to release this on a 7-inch vinyl and Bandcamp instead of emphasizing the major streaming platforms. What does that decision say about the kind of relationship you want to have with your audience and your music?
I guess there are two answers here… the first is that the way Spotify and the other big streaming platforms treat artists is shameful. Unless you are a huge artist there is no way to make streaming profitable. So I wanted to have a release that exists outside of that system. The second answer is that I wanted to have something really cool available for guitar fans! I love collecting vinyl myself so I went with a limited edition 7-inch record for this project – each one is hand-numbered. There is also a download available on bandcamp. If anyone can’t afford to buy it they can still listen for free there and I put out a video for each tune on the EP which are on my YouTube channel. So the music is still available for everyone. I hope this release does a little bit to raise awareness that the best thing anyone can do to support artists is support them directly: buy records, cds, and downloads, buy concert tickets, buy the t-shirt… any of those actions have way more impact than listening a thousand times on Spotify.
Upcoming Shows:
July 23: Guitarnival, St. John’s NL
July 30: Iserlohn Guitar Symposium, Germany
August 11: GuitarFest West, Calgary
Connect with Emma Rush:
Website
Bandcamp
Facebook
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