submitted by Neil T
So on the guitar, I divide the year up into quarters and work on stuff for a quarter and then move on. This year’s first quarter I was working on a transcription of Ravel’s Death of a Princess. I spent three months and got to the third of four pages and moved on. I love the song, but it’s not really a good guitar song, and it was too hard to concentrate on the finish.
Second quarter I worked on Villa-Lobos Prelude no. 5. Villa-Lobos is a Romantic parading as a Modernist, and I have an easy time with his music. Some of the first songs I ever learned were the Villa-Lobos Estudio 1 and the Prelude 1, and if you asked me to play them today I could do a credible job. They’re fun to play, have tricks to their playing that make perfect sense, and they’re deeply Romantic, which I find easy. I once followed a young Japanese guitarist from guitar shop to guitar shop in Granada: he was playing Flamenco like only a young obsessed Japanese kid could play flamenco, and I was playing the Prelude 1. Three days later in a shop in Sevilla he held up a guitar and joyously told me he’d found one. It was one of the best moments of my life.
This past quarter I’ve been working on Leo Brouwer’s 20 Estudios. No one but classical guitarists have ever heard of Leo Brouwer. He’s Cuban, a member of Cuba’s Communist Party, and he hasn’t actually played professionally in a while because of a hand injury. Unlike Villa-Lobos, he’s a Modernist without much Romanticism. A friend once took a master class from Brouwer, and he told me that he thought Brouwer thought exactly like his music sounded.
There are four great sets of Estudios for classical guitar. An Estudio is that: it’s a study. It’s supposed to improve your playing by concentrating on one thing that the guitar is supposed to do, or better yet that you’re supposed to do to the guitar. There are the Carcassi Etudes. There are a bunch of Sor Etudes from the early 1800s, which I think were actually grouped into a set of 20 by Segovia. Then you jump to the Villa-Lobos Estudios which were written for Segovia but which Segovia wouldn’t play. You want to know an odd fact? Villa-Lobos wrote one Concerto for guitar and orchestra, which was premiered in 1956 by Segovia, in Houston, with Villa-Lobos conducting. Villa-Lobos wanted it buried with him, but it wasn’t.
And then there are the Brouwer Estudios, which are just weird. And fun. And weird.
This is a nice You Tube playing of the Brouwer Estudios. They’re nice because you can see the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ5XRfKccoo I’ve memorized some, and right now I’m working on numbers 9 and 10. My favorites are numbers 2, 3 (because it is so damned fun to play), 6, and 7 (because it is even more fun to play), and 10.
The Brouwer Estudios make no rational sense. No one who didn’t think that way would put together music like that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be learning, except maybe a lot of right hand and syncopation, but they’re perfect. Just perfect. Damned perfect.
I was listening to no 15 during the last out of tonight’s 8th inning. It’s now my favorite. No 18 is the most beautiful, and I listened to it in the 9th. No matter where it is, beauty is beauty.
Astros 3
Dodgers 0
Fiers W.