There is a fantastic feature on the emotional and existential challenges of recording classical music in the February 6th issue of The New Yorker (you will need a paid subscription to read it). The author is Jeremy Denk, pianist and über-gifted music writer, who recounts his trials confronting Ives’ Concord Sonata in the recording studio.
Rather than give you a blow-by-blow of what I consider one of the finest pieces of writing about music I’ve come across in recent times (I am not alone in this assessment), I thought I would use Denk’s essay as a platform for some of my own musings about recording. (Hint: If you decide to read the New Yorker essay, you will find much of what follows articulated in a more elegant and articulate way).
First, a basic yet dangerous dichotomy. Recording creates commodities that are meant to be sold, or, in the alternative, post-Napster music industry we live in, to help performers generate revenue through booking better gigs, securing academic positions, and so forth. On the flipside, recordings are also documents of who we are as performers at any given time—a snapshot of sorts, a frozen moment in the life of an artist. These two elements are intrinsically at odds—the commodity side implies some kind of permanence (see for instance the listener’s quest for a “definitive” interpretation), while the documentary nature of the process necessarily hints at the transitory and ephemeral.
The other “problem” with recordings lies in the technical/technological realm. I have yet to meet a classical recording artist who would deny their extensive reliance on editing. As artists take advantage of the possibility to produce an immaculate (if doctored) performance, contemporary audiences have also come to expect the same level of “perfection” from live performances (often because they are blissfully unaware of how much editing has been done in the process). In a sort of vicious circle, performers end up taking fewer chances on stage, aiming for a technically sound rendition rather than an interpretively adventurous one.
Denk touches on both of these points and then some, but my favorite part of the piece was his analysis of what went through his mind during the actual process of recording. In my own (much more limited) experience, I have encountered some of the same feelings—the alienation when confronted with a familiar passage that has suddenly and inexplicably become elusive; the maddening efforts to replicate an “almost perfect” take; the voice in my head quipping that every tiny interpretive choice I am making is being documented and engraved in secula seculorum, Amen.
All of these inner difficulties make the recording process a completely different ball game than live performance—and perhaps one for which traditional musical education does not really prepare us.
At the end of the essay, Denk paints a picture of himself, secretly (and perhaps ashamedly) listening to the finished recording. I have found it can be extremely difficult to silence the inner critic and just enjoy the playback of the little bit of noise that I made. Beyond the mere production of a commodity or the safekeeping of a historical moment, recording is a privilege—it holds the possibility to create and curate something to be cherished as well as shared. All of the narcissism and self-doubt notwithstanding, it remains a worthwhile endeavor not just from a pragmatic and professional standpoint, but also from an artistic and emotional one.
As you cross from Sonoma into Mendocino County, the landscape goes through an almost instantaneous kind of change. The terrain becomes rougher, the hills more stark, with clusters of Serpentine rocks piercing the ground. The grey sky above and the almost complete lack of traffic were the perfect complement to my morning drive. I was heading to visit the workshop of Greg Byers — someone I instinctively think of as a “Bay Area builder” until it’s actually time to go visit him.
Once you reach the town of Willits—some 150 miles North of San Francisco—you have to make a right turn and prepare to leave the beaten path for a while. Cell reception drops almost immediately as you reach the hills. The road narrows, then becomes unpaved. Climbing up and down the hilly ranges you are rewarded with some truly breath-taking views. After about fifteen miles, just when you start to wonder if you’ve made a wrong turn, you finally come into sight of Greg’s house and annexed workshop, sitting in a quiet and picturesque clearing.
Greg had sent me an email the previous week to tell me he had both a cedar and a spruce guitar strung up in the shop. Since my own build was scheduled to commence soon, and I remained undecided in the great spruce/cedar dilemma, it seemed to me that the three hour drive was a small price to pay to be able to indulge in a detailed comparison.
Alas, such comparisons are often nothing more than glorified fool’s errands. Greg had not two but three finished guitars in the shop—one had come back for a repair. However, there were some subtle construction differences between this guitar and the two newer ones, so we decided to eliminate from our comparison. Still, the cedar-topped one was about forty-eight hours old, whereas the spruce had been assembled for close to a month.
For close to two hours I went back and forth, changing guitars (and my mind) every five minutes. Greg sat patiently working on the frets of a fourth guitar, chiming in from time to time with a comment or a request. He is a gracious and welcoming host, but he’s also good at “staying out of the way,” so to speak, as I was trying to figure out what I was hearing.
The differences were subtle, but still significant. Hard to attribute them to the top wood alone—back and sides were also different, in addition to the afore-mentioned age. In the end, I decided for the spruce, partially reassured by the fact that, in all honesty, I could be perfectly happy playing either guitar.
We spent another half hour or so going through sets of woods and discussing more trivial ordering details. Conversation kept drifting to other subjects—Greg is a Renaissance man, and I’m a blabber: we make a pretty dangerous pair. Eventually I forced myself to leave—the rental car had to be returned by evening, and I had a long drive ahead.
As I reached Willits on my way back, its distinctive blend of Far West and Hippie traits struck me as positively frantic, rather than just quaint. I had left the wilderness and was back into the faster-paced world that I’ve known for all my life.
Greg Byers
Chances are you live within driving distance of a skilled luthier. See if you can schedule a visit to the workshop, meet the artist, and play a guitar or two. You don’t have to be a customer, but you may soon be…
With Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–57), a massive piece for three orchestras and three conductors, the electric guitar began spreading from rock and roll dance halls and smoky jazz clubs to the classical concert stage. Ever since, an increasing number of composers have been featuring the instrument, with some actually making it the centerpiece of their musical aesthetics. I’m a firm believer in guitar equality—all instruments in the plucked strings family have the right to be employed on the concert stage for so-called “serious-” or Art-music. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of my favorite composers working with electric guitars. All of the works I mention are available online at either iTunes or Amazon.com.
If you say “classical music for electric guitar” most people immediately think of Steven Mackey. Mackey—who teaches composition at Princeton, just to establish his street cred—channels the garage rock sound of his youth in a lot of his writing for the instrumentment. Notable pieces are the concerto Tuck and Roll, string quartet and guitar pieces Lost and Found and Troubadour Songs (both written for Kronos), and the mixed guitar ensemble Measures of Turbulence.
Another composer whose work is founded on the guitar is Glenn Branca. A proponent of Just Intonation (the tuning of musical pitches according to pure, whole-number ratios), his favorite ensemble is the electric guitar orchestra (often very large and VERY LOUD ones). His music is monolithic, glacial, impassible, gigantic. Check out Harmonic Series Chords, any of his Symphonies, and Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses.
Lois V Vierk hasn’t composed for guitar as much as either Branca or Mackey, but her writing for the instrument is a joy to hear (and to play, despite the fact that it’s extremely challenging). Her three pieces featuring guitars (Go Guitars, Io, and Red Shift) are very different yet incredibly coherent from a musical and stylistic point of view. Go Guitars makes a great introduction to her oeuvre: it features five microtonally tuned guitars (six Es with various quarter-tone inflections), to be played either by five players or most often by a soloist plus tape. The music is hard to describe—thick textures, subtle progressive changes, and incredible sequences of staggered glissandos.
I’m especially fond of the work of Larry Polansky, a composer, guitarist, improviser, computer music programmer, and overall polymath. Polansky teaches at Dartmouth and he’s currently a visiting professor at my own institution, UC Santa Cruz. He’s written dozens of pieces for guitar—classical, steel string, and electric—with or without electronics, and using a variety of just and tempered tunings. Some of his pieces (like the collection Songs and Toods) require the guitarist to play and sing complex independent parts (often in different keys, in a nod to Charles Ives); others are simple, quiet, and utterly beautiful. Most of his music, programs, and writings are available on his website; a large number of his guitar works were recently recorded on New World Records (NWR 80700).
Finally, a truly remarkable piece is Morton Feldman’s The Possibility of a New Work For Electric Guitar, written for Christian Wolff in 1966. The only copy of the piece was lost when the guitar case in which Wolff had left the manuscript was stolen from his car; Wolff went on to recreate a version from memory (Another Possibility) in 2004, but more recently a recording of a 1967 performance was found in the archives of KPFA radio in Berkeley, and transcribed for publication (which I believe is still forthcoming) by guitarist Seth Josel. Here is an account of the story (PDF), and here is a video of Larry Polansky performing Wolff’s alternative version.
When you include the many composers I have failed to mention (such as big names John Zorn, Fausto Romitelli, George Crumb, and Tristan Murail, in addition to scores of younger and emerging composers), you will see that the contemporary guitar repertoire is augmented by many rich and evocative works. If you have some experience with electric guitars, consider expanding your current practice regimen to bring your touch back up to speed—you never know when the local new music ensemble will need an electric guitarist who can follow a conductor!
Choosing the fingering for a passage of music is an extremely personal process—what comes off easy for one player might prove a stumbling block for another. Granted, there are some general guidelines and principles that can be applied to everyone as a starting point, but that still leaves a critical amount of discretion to the individual player, who usually ends up choosing fingerings in accordance to the bias in his or her hands.
My personal preference is for easy fingerings. Somewhat along the lines of the Buddhist mantra “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional,” I find playing classical guitar to be a challenging enough endeavor without the need to make it even harder. If there’s a way to employ open strings for shifting, or to arrange a chord in a more “ergonomical” position, I always consider these possibilities very carefully. On the other hand the musicality of any given fingering comes into play quite heavily as well. Is it musically acceptable to use an open string to help with a shift in a given passage? More often than not, I’ve found that the easier fingering is also the more musical one—presumably because I can play it in a more relaxed, flowing fashion.
Sometimes, a slight adjustment to your plucking hand can also come to the rescue. An old assumption is that, by moving fingerings “upstairs” to a thicker string/further up on the fretboard, the player would gain in tone color and expressivity. A good right hand exercise is to try and homogenize your sound as much as possible, so that if needed you could “smuggle” a note or passage on the high E string as sounding fuller and darker, as if you had played it on the B. This way you might end up unlocking an easier way to finger an entire phrase.
A Brief Case Study
Perhaps the most important concept regarding fingerings is that they should never be considered engraved in stone. Case in point: Earlier this afternoon I was practicing a couple of passages from the Villa-Lobos Concerto that have been bothering me for months. Sure, I could play them, but as I approached these measures I kept feeling as if I was putting my success in the hands of some fickle deity. Today I decided to backtrack a bit and reconsider what I had chosen as the “best” fingering for one of the phrases.
It occured to me that the fingering in question had two significant problems:
To fret the F#, I am moving from fifth to fourth position for a split second. This shift is against the direction of the phrase, since I have to hit a high C, D, and E immediately after. That’s not a very economical approach, to put it mildly.
Because of this “mini-shift” to fourth position, I was fretting the high C with my pinky, then basically sliding it up all the way to a high G in the space of a few (and rapid!) beats. I felt this “sequential shifting” was likely the culprit of my difficulties with the passage (especially considering I was lifting the pinky a bit to avoid sounding a series of portamentos)
Within a couple of minutes I had already found a viable substitute. Fingering #2 is better in pretty much all aspects: I am shifting in the direction of the phrase, and I am giving my pinky a modicum of relief by using 2 to fret the high D. Although it’s early to tell, I feel much more confident when practicing the phrase—a feeling that helps making the ensuing measures easier to pull off as well.
Some readers may be wondering why I didn’t choose the best fingering in the first place. The honest answer is that I thought the first fingering was just fine, and I just needed to practice it more. The lesson in this? Sometimes we’re the ones building the walls that we end up hitting. If you feel stuck with a phrase or passage, try breaking it down in its essential parts and reconsidering the way you approach it. You might end up slapping your forehead and wondering why on earth you didn’t think of this other solution sooner.
The approaching New Year gives us a chance to assess where we are as well as where we want to go. Although any day is just as good a day for making things better, there is an undeniable psychological boost to starting anew together with the calendar. Here’s a few music-related resolutions to make the most of 2012.
Practice More Technique
To a lot of people—myself included—strict technical work can get old fast. On the other hand, the benefits of consistent and determined technical development to one’s playing are self-evident. A great resolution for those who don’t work on technical aspects regularly would be to incorporate one twenty-minute segment into their daily regimen. Whether you work on right-hand string crossings, rasgueados, or scales, you will find that your increased technical confidence will make your overall playing much more secure.
Keep a Practice Log
Keeping track of what you practice, how much time you spend doing things, and how quickly (or slowly) you meet your goals can be a truly powerful tools. Lack of focus and time managment skills are perhaps the most tangible dangers to a guitarist’s progress: Conversely, making the most of whatever time you can dedicate to practicing will yield surprising results. Consider breaking up your time into shorter segments with frequent breaks, and working on one thing, and one thing only, for the duration of each slot. You’ll accomplish more and the variety will help you keep a fresh perspective.
Perform More
During the first year of my Ph.D. I had a hard time keeping my performance schedule up. I was overwhelmed with readings, seminars, and papers, felt like I had not enough time to practice, and didn’t dedicate enough energy to finding more and better gigs. Eventually I realized that this lack of performance was actually impacting my overall well-being, and vowed to make gigging a priority once again—with supremely satisfying results. While you don’t have to be in such an extreme situation, anyone but the most over-worked concert performer can use more stage time. If you’re dealing with stage-fright, booking a monthly or weekly performance can work wonders in easing your nerves. Check out local hospices, convalescent homes, pre-schools, and churches for an opportunity to share your passion. You’ll find the audience to be extremely appreciative of your time, and it will be a very rewarding experience for yourself as well. You don’t have to present full programs—two to four pieces with a few introductory words will easily make for a twenty-minute mini-recital.
Expand Your Knowledge of the Repertoire
I don’t mean the guitar repertoire (although that would be a worthwhile and noble effort), but rather that you spend some time exploring some other music, classical or not. You could start from the canonic works described in every anthology, and then focus on whatever vein or sub-genre strikes your fancy. You can be a comlpetist, getting to know as many of Sibelius’s or Davidovky’s works as you can find, or you could focus on the non-guitar works of composers you already like. Especially if you have access to a library and its databases, this resolution can be a free one: use services such as the Naxos Music Library, the IMSLP, and borrow study scores from your local branch.
Exercise More
I don’t think you are actually allowed to have a New Year’s resolution list without this item. Let me come clean and confess that I am guilty as charged, but in all honesty there is no excuse for a musician to not give his or her body the care it deserves. You don’t have to turn into a competitive body builder (although it did work for Scott Tennant), simply choose an activity that fits your needs and inclination and stick with it three-four times a week. Being in better shape can help you avoid injuries and keep your mind in focus. You can also use the time you spend running or working out in the gym to do visualization exercises, listening to a recorded practice session, or checking out new repertoire. Some activities like Yoga and martial arts can also help you get the best of performance anxiety. For obvious reason, be careful with your hands and nails—basketball and rock-climbing are probably not the best choices.
Editors note: I’m a huge fan of lifting weights. Lifting is, in my opinion, one of the best physical activities anyone can do. That said, there is more to it than throwing a few plates on a bar and benching. Train smart. This article is a good place to start: it’s about “computer guys”, but we classical guitars are very similar (hours sitting, etc). -CD
Jon Mendle is a young classical guitarist who performs on seven- and eleven-string guitars. A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory, he has recently released an album of 18th century German music by C.P.E. Bach, Flanckenhagen, and Weiss, entiled L’Infidele and available through In A Circle Records. In this interview Jon talks about his approach to extended-range guitars, his experience performing with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, and more.
ClassicalGuitar.org: What was the path that led you to the classical guitar? Were you taking formal lesson as a child, or did you start out playing in a different genre, as is the case with many present-day players?
Jon Mendle: I started out playing electric guitar when I was twelve. I actually picked up the guitar kind of on a whim—a friend of mine got one as a birthday present one year and I thought it was really cool. I asked for one for Christmas the same year and Santa came through for me. At first I wanted to learn stuff like Metallica and Rage Against the Machine, then I became interested in shred guitar—got into Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Marty Friedman, Yngwie Malmsteen, and so forth. That’s how I got interested in finding out what the guitar can really do technically and musically.
A couple of things got me into classical guitar—my first teacher, Matthew Grasso, is an accomplished classical player and he would show me some classical stuff from time to time that would blow my mind. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, of whom I was a huge fan, always spoke very highly of classical composers like Bach and Paganini, so I started to think that classical music could have more to offer me than rock music.
Hearing Bach on the guitar sealed the deal for me—I knew I had to play classical. The recording that sold me was Segovia playing the Gigue from BWV 997. I fell in love with that piece and worked parts of it out on electric guitar before I had a classical. I got my first classical when I was 15 and haven’t looked back since.
CG.org: You play on extended range instruments, like the 7- and 11-string guitar. How do you approach them?
Jon: I started playing 7 string guitar in 2004, Matt Grasso had been playing one for a while and I became really interested in what the extra range could add to the guitar. I also played an 11 string for the first time that year, but had to wait until I had one built for me in 2007 before I could focus entirely on that instrument.
My approach to the extended range is to utilize it as much as possible, but not in a forced way. I don’t play much 6 string repertoire, because I feel like most music written for guitar is complete as is, and changing or adding basses isn’t always tasteful. And playing that music as-is on an extended range guitar doesn’t do the guitar many favors. I seek out my own repertoire and play mostly my own transcriptions. Almost all of my repertoire is 16th-19th century music. I do play some 20th century music on every concert that I give, though again it’s not the usual fare—pieces by Aaron Jay Kernis, Matt Grasso, or something I’ve written myself. I’ve also played music by the great 11-string guitarist James Kline, who introduced me to the instrument, and I’m currently working on Philip Rosheger’s beautiful “Serenade,” which works great on my guitar. I’m in the process of seeking out new music from living composers for my instrument, and I have at least one piece on the way, so it will be exciting to see where that goes.
CG.org: Earlier in 2011 you released a recording of 18th-century German music, L’Infidele, featuring works by C.P.E. Bach, Falckenhagen, and Weiss, all played on your 11-string archguitar. Tell me about how you went adapting this music to the instrument—two of the works are originally for 13-course lute, and the Bach is a keyboard piece.
Jon: I arranged the music on this album with my guitar in hand—the archguitar has the same range as the 13 course baroque lute, so what was challenging was finding the right fingerings and articulations to do the music justice. Much of it is very idiomatic on the lute but not so much on the guitar, as the instruments have very different tunings. The first 6 strings of my guitar are in standard tuning, whereas the baroque lute’s first 6 courses were tuned to an open d-minor chord. So my approach was to keep the slurring and phrasing style of baroque lute music in mind, but come up with solutions that felt as natural to guitar as the ear allowed.
As for the C.P.E. Bach piece, there are a few licks in there that are ridiculously hard! Again, it was a process of trial and error. I fell in love with the first movement and wanted to see if it would work on my guitar. When it did, I went on to the other two. I took the standard approach of preserving melody and bass first, and then keeping as much of the inner voices as I could.
CG.org: In the summer of 2010 you joined Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble—a musical group that aims to draw a connection between Western and Eastern musical styles. Could you describe your experience performing with the ensemble?
Jon: Playing with the Silk Road Ensemble was an amazing experience. The Ensemble really feels like a big family, and everyone is really nice, very supportive, and a great musician to boot. Yo-Yo Ma is one of the kindest people you could imagine—he really has a passion for people, and giving back through music is a huge part of his artistic vision. The Ensemble’s outreach programs and his commitment to helping young musicians such as myself are amazing testaments to this.
My biggest take-away from the experience was how the Ensemble works together and rehearses—Yo-Yo motivates through encouragement. I never felt like I was playing with an authority figure, rather he made it feel more like playing with a friend. One might think that this could foster a lack of serious effort, in that he is always very kind in how he gives advice and rehearses, but I don’t think so. I (amazingly) didn’t feel any added pressure working with him—he was very encouraging when things improved or when he liked something. But I know that this wasn’t because it couldn’t be better. Instead, it made me want to give more, to reach the next level in the piece we were working on, rather than stay where I was with it.
The other thing is that Yo-Yo is always trying to learn from the musicians he works with. If he liked something that someone played during a warm-up or rehearsal, he was always curious about it, and would often ask them to teach it to him. The whole group learns form each other in that way, and so it’s “fusion” in every sense of the word.
CG.org: Currently you are a member of the San Francisco Guitar Quartet, and the Pacific Guitar Ensemble—a Bay Area supergroup which includes S.F. Conservatory faculty members David Tanenbaum, Marc Teicholz, and Larry Ferrara, fingerstyle guitarist Peppino D’Agostino, and your fellow SFCM alumni Michael Bautista, Tony Kakamakov, and Paul Psarras. Tell me more about your experience playing in these groups.
Jon: Ensemble playing has become a big part of what I do, and performing with both the San Francisco Guitar Quartet and the Pacific Guitar Ensemble has been a lot of fun. The SFGQ is a very progressive group with a focus on 20th/21st century music and works written for us. With the Pacific Guitar Ensemble we also play a fair amount of “chestnuts”, so to speak—Bach, Dowland, Brahms, Mozart—which is great because I love that music and I am very much pro-transcription. The guitar repertoire is just too limited without arrangements.
Both groups are a lot of fun to work with – it’s been an honor to get to perform with some of my professors in the PGE. Sergio Assad is writing us a new piece for mixed ensemble that we are set to premier in the spring which is going to include instruments like electric guitar, bass, oud, steel string acoustic and more—so that’s very exciting and we are looking forward to that. The SFGQ has given me some great opportunities to travel and play—we went to Dresden, Germany, last year, and it’s become one of my favorite cities. This past September we had the honor of opening up for Pepe Romero at the La Guitarra California festival in San Luis Obispo, and that was a blast. I met a lot of great people and heard some absolutely stunning playing by the other artists.
CG.org: What about your solo performance? What are some of your upcoming projects?
Jon: I’ve been playing concerts as much as I can this year in support of my album, and that’s taken me up and down the west coast and into Nevada. As I said, I’m also taking some time to develop different repertoire and seek out new pieces for my 11-string. I hope to play some more concerts in 2012, and start thinking about a new album then too. I think my next album will be more eclectic than my first, with some 21st century music as well as some early music. I’d love to record something very dark, like Dowland or one of the Weiss Tombeaus. And I also want to record my version of Mertz’s Fantasie Hongroise, which was originally written for 10 string guitar with a low A. I can play it with all the original bass notes on the archguitar, and it’s quite a different experience hearing it that way. So that’s a bit of what’s to come.
CG.org: Thanks so much for your time and your insightful responses, Jon. All the best to your multiple endeavors!
Rasgueado strums represent the backbone of many Mediterranean and Latin American folk styles, and they’re found throughout the modern classical repertoire from Joaquin Turina to Magnus Lindberg. Because of their reliance on extensor muscles, rasgueados also make for an excellent practice tool, even if you’re not trying to incorporate them in your playing otherwise.
The rasgueado originates its striking force as a flicking gesture of the finger, wrist, elbow, or, most often, a combination of the above. I think of this motion as much more “explosive” and instantaneous than the regular plucking one. For finger flicks, I find “cocking” the fingers against the heel of my hand most useful—allowing the fingernails to dig into my palm a tiny bit. For flicks originating from the wrist or the elbow, I let the weight of the hand do most of the work. I should also point out that wrist and elbow flicks are akin to the “rotating” motion one does when turning a door knob, only “looser”.
Get to Know Your Hand Better
Most flamenco books teach rasgueados as going from pinky to index. An often overlooked problem with this approach is that not everyone’s hand is “wired” to unfurl the fingers in that order. Mine most certainly is not: I can fan my fingers open much faster and more seamlessly if I go from index to pinky—and that’s true with both of my hands. To find the way your hand “likes” to open, simply rap your fingers on a table-top, starting from a closed-fist position. Try both ways (pinky-to-index vs. index-to-pinky), and you should find one of them to be much more natural.
I suggest you stick to the most natural finger order when first learning some introductory rasgueado patterns, and then slowly to begin re-training your hand to do some in the opposite way
Bursts Vs. Rolls
Below are some of my favorite finger-strumming patterns, but in this case the sky’s the limit—nothing really keeps you from discovering what works for your hands. The nomenclature reflects the conventional one; however, I’m introducing the letter “h” to mean any combination of fingers (hand-strum).
Generally speaking, rasgueado patterns can be divided into bursts (quick sequence of finger strums used as an accenting devise) and rolls (sequences that can be looped indefinitely). You should strive to learning a couple of useful patterns for each category.
In terms of rolls, I would suggest you eventually build your own: you can do so easily by dividing each roll into sets of motions that allows for some time to recoil in between. In other words, you don’t want to use the same finger twice in a row, or go back to a finger that hasn’t had a chance to recoil to a “ready to strike” position. Also, notice how some use the whole hand as a “big finger”, integrating wrist- and elbow motions into the roll to enhance fluidity and seamlessness. Finally, I should point out that downstrokes (towards the floor) are marked with up-arrows, for consistency with sheet music notation (towards the “high” treble string).
As with every new technique, practice slowly and take frequent breaks. Your extensor muscles might be a bit underdeveloped if you haven’t spent a lot of time practicing these sorts of motions before, but if you incorporate some rasgueados in your daily practice routing you’ll soon see the results of this new technique in all aspects of your playing.
*note: the two consecutive downstrokes are obtained by combining the outward flicking of the fingers with a forearm rotation; returning the forearm to the normal position will yield the thumb upstroke.
**note: return all fingers to a coiled position as you do the upstroke with p.
*note: this one’s tricky. Start with all fingers coiled. Flick i out, then, as you flick c out, recoil i. Unfold each successive fingers. When you loop back to flick i out again, recoil all remaining fingers at once. Personally I find this particular rasgueado quite awkward to pull off, but it’s one of the most widely-taught patterns.
A while back classical guitarist Giacomo Fiore asked for help. He did it with a Kickstarter campaign that raised several thousand dollars and helped him cover the licensing costs for the music he recorded.
The Texas Guitar Quartet is doing the same. They’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising funds for their debut album.
Well, not exactly. Kickstarter is a lot like doing pre-sales. For instance, if you give the TGQ 10 dollars, you’ll receive a copy of their album if it gets recorded. If you donate $3,000, the quartet will travel anywhere in the state of Texas and play a concert for you.
Moreover, you only “donate” the money if the campaign meets its goal. If the TGQ doesn’t raise $4,000, none of the pledged money will get sent to them and you won’t be charged.
Kickstarter is an intermediary that takes care of the technical details (secure payments though amazon, tracking gift givers, etc) allowing independing artists to connect with fans to “crowdfund” their endeavors. Of course, you still get something out of it! When I “donated” to Giacomo’s campaign, I got a copy of his excellent CD and a recipe for some great Italian food.
I suspect you’ll be seeing more kickstarter campaigns for guitarists in the future. At least I hope so: more great musicians can get exposure without the marketing budget of Milos Karadaglic.
As a budding musicologist living in the Bay Area, I couldn’t have avoided this year’s iteration of the AMS meeting if I tried. For four days, the biggest names in music history and criticism convened in an unusually sunny and terse San Francisco. Imagine my excitement when I spied a lecture recital on early-nineteenth century guitar practice in the Parisian scene on the busy program—a particularly surprising listing, given how guitar matters are not exactly the main preoccupation of this Society.
The speaker was Pascal Valois, a guitarist and independent scholar based in Montreal. Valois is a former student of Hopkinson Smith, with whom he recently completed a postdoc at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis—one of the world’s epicenters for early music and historically-minded performance.
The first part of the presentation was dedicated to a brief lecture on the guitar scene in Paris between 1800–1830, a time when both foreign-born and French guitarist-composers represented a major component in the city’s musical life. The abundance of composers, coupled with a healthy publishing industry and the meticulous archival practices of the Bibliothèque Nationale, meant that even today there is no shortage of repertoire and pedagogical material from the time, making it a treasure-trove for students and scholars alike.
Valois’s presentation was terse and succinct. After a discussion of nineteenth-century playing posture, he proceeded to demonstrate some ornamental practices, such as portamenti, arpèges, and harmonics, drawn from the method books of Adolphe Ledhuy, Pierre Joseph Plouvier, and Charles Doisy.
For the performance part, Valois presented a tried-and-true standard such as the Variations on the Magic Flute, Op. 9, by Fernando Sor, juxtaposed to two pieces by French composers I had not encountered before: the opening allegro from the Sonata Brillante by Louis-Ange Carpentras (1786–1854), and Five Andantes (from opp. 8 and 17) by Victor Magnien (1804–1885).
Valois played with grace, elegance, and élan. This repertoire is far from my favorite (let’s just say I would die perfectly happy if I never heard the Sor again), but I thoroughly enjoyed this performance: it was light, effortless, and full of spirit. The previously-unknown pieces were surprisingly good—motivically charming, harmonically inventive, and with a sort of ineffable “French” air. I heard much more counterpoint than you usually do in guitar music of the period, and some textures were almost suggestive of the Style Brisé of late-seventeenth century lutenists.
Performing on an instrument built in 1825, Valois was the right man for the job: he took advantage the shorter scale and lower action of the nineteenth-century guitar by slurring most scalar passages and thus projecting a sense of lightness and grace. His phrasing was similarly remarkable, as he imbued each melody with a beautiful vocal quality.
To top it all off, the audience—consisting largely of non-guitarist, with a couple of notable exceptions—absolutely loved it. As I left, many of the attendees were still showering Valois with questions and compliments. I was especially pleased to see such interest around the guitar in the broader musicological arena. Congratulations to Pascal Valois for his inspiring scholarship and inspired performance—he did the guitar world a great service today.
The time we spend practicing is probably the most critical time from a creative and professional standpoint. Part athletic conditioning, part meditation, and part artistic development, who we are on the concert stage depends largely on who we are in the practice room. If you’re not prepared for a concert, your nerves are going to be much worse than usual, and—unless the stars are looking kindly upon you—chances are you’re not going to have the most memorable night. Over the years I have found that there is a particular mindset that one can strive for when practicing, in order to obtain more reliable and, dare I say, flat-out better results as a performer.
Let’s assume you divide your practice time more or less equally between technical issues, learning new pieces, and the upkeep of pieces you already play or are currently programming. Every time you’re “running” one of these latter pieces, I suggest you do that as if you were onstage. Picture yourself in concert garb, hear the hollow reverberation of your steps on the wooden floor, see the dimly-lit figures in the scarcely attended hall…wait a second—since this is a visualization exercise, let’s be generous and give ourselves a standing-room only performance. With some practice, you should be able to recreate the experience, and hopefully the same pre-performance focus. If you’re doing it really well, you might even get a little nervous.
Now play. Unlike the saying, play as if someone is listening. Play outwards, project the sound to the back of the imaginary hall, project your musical thought and interpretations to the imaginary audience. Let your playing be bold and clear—own every note you play, and put all of yourself into every musical gesture. In other words, be deliberate, and practice being deliberate.
Granted, reading the above couple of paragraph might make the more pragmatic among you scream. But in all seriousness—shouldn’t we aim to recreate what happens in performance within the confines of the practice room? Isn’t one of the worst elements of stage fright that feeling of alienation, that eerie taste of strangeness that comes from realizing that you’ve never actually done that before? New hall, new program, new shiny suit—it even makes the guitar slip a little bit. All strange and unfamiliar. “Wouldn’t it be so much better,” you think, as you notice the pounding of your heart and the dryness of your mouth, “if I could just be back in the safety of my practice room? Then I could really play.“
What I’m suggesting is that you pre-empt that feeling of strangeness through the methodical employment of visualization techniques. As you prepare for a performance, you should try as much as possible to envision yourself in the act of playing. Do so without a guitar, perhaps with the score, or simply by closing your eyes. As you go through each piece on the program, hear the music in your head as you feel the movement of your hands on the guitar. Imagine the sound of your guitar in the hall, and if you lose your place—well, you have found a spot that requires a bit more attention. As you get better, you can do these exercises in places and situations quite remote from your usual practice schedule, effectively expanding and maximizing your actual practice time. Nothing wrong with visualizing your program as you go for a jog, or when you’re stuck in traffic (just don’t get in an accident).
Run-throughs, whether physical or imaginary, can help making your next performance an enjoyable and successful one. Don’t wait until it’s showtime to practice your performing—make every practice session more deliberate and expressive, and I guarantee you’ll be amazed at the results.
