02.21.2023 FAC Rimple Program Notes

Notes on Tonight’s Program

With some notable exceptions, modern lutenists are classical guitarists who became enchanted by transcriptions of lute or vihuela music. Once given the opportunity to explore the lute first-hand, they become ensnared by its vast repertoire and resonant sound and jump ship. Moreover, modern guitarists and lutenists have often regarded each other’s art uneasily. Classical guitar is played with nails or a combination of nails and flesh, based on the orthodox pedagogy of Andres Segovia that prizes the modern ideals of consistency, evenness and volume. The use of nails was central to the bright sound of 19th-century guitarists including Mauro Giuliani and has become the dominant approach to playing the instrument. Some lutenists also favored the use of nails, as described in 1623 by the Bolognese lutenist Alessandro Piccinini. While 20th-century pioneers such as guitarist Julian Bream played the lute with nails (on instruments dubbed the “lutar” by modern lutenists, given the heavy, guitar-based state of lute reconstruction at the time), many later 20th-century lutenists, most notably Paul O’Dette, disavowed nails to play on lighter, historically-based instruments. Clues about right-hand technique are found in Thomas Mace’s Musical Monument, reflecting the practice of 17th-century French lutenists, “because the Nail cannot draw so Sweet a sound from a Lute, as the nibble end of the Flesh can do”. Some modern guitarists have also turned away from using nails. Emilio Pujol retrospectively described the conflict between nails and nibbles in “The dilemma of timbre on the guitar” (1960). Direct contact of the right-hand fingertips with the guitar produces …uniformity and fusion of notes on the whole extension of the strings … welded together and directed with a feeling of musical sobriety. The chords now achieve the maximum of unity, intensity and volume: the tremolo is no longer metallic and brilliant, but acquires an ethereal sonority; the pizzicato is clean and acute on all the strings, and the arpeggios and scales obtain all the volume of which they are capable, together with equality and regularity of tone between the notes (tr. Jean Girodon).

Pujol notes that there are advantages to both styles of playing, and that the response of the string to the flesh is a double-edged sword, providing humanity and warmth but limiting the brilliance so important to a particular brand of virtuosity. His essay is an important reminder that while the playing style of the Segovia school remains the dominant, prejudicial view, a flesh-only approach has a pedigree that connects the guitar to the lute techniques of previous centuries. One such approach has been demonstrated admirably by the Scottish guitarist Rob MacKillop with no lack of virtuosity, and another was taken by Francesco Tarrega and some of his pupils after 1900. On this program, I have tried to forge my own way rather than adopting the Tarrega/Pujol technique wholesale. This necessitates some slower tempi at times than nails-based playing can afford, in order to find a particularly round tone on the guitar. My exploration this evening is an ongoing attempt to reconcile past and present. An historical approach was my first organizing principle, moving through two centuries from archlute to guitar, and the geographical center that emerged was decidedly French.

The lute was the queen of instruments, second only to the organ, before being dethroned by the harpsichord late in the 17th century. Giovanni Gabrieli was painted played the instrument, and over two centuries later, Johann Sebastian Bach owned a lute when he died. While tablature notation was used by lutenists in Bach’s time, his obligato, continuo, and solos for the lute were copied into staff notation, and he was not alone doing so, as Handel did likewise for a lute obbligato. The last known manuscript of works for lute was assembled in a 1757 collection of works for the “arcileuto Francese” by the Bolognese lutenist Filippo Dalla Casa, also written in grand staff notation, and there are similar examples from this period. It is also important to note that the shift from tablature to notation occurred earlier and more fully with the viol than the lute. Some of Bach’s lute music also appeared in tablature, though these manuscripts were written in the hands of his students or associates. His lute works (e.g., BWV 996 and 998) often seem more like compositions for his special lute-keyboard (Lautenwerke) and are wellsuited to two independent hands, eschewing the idiomatic style of his Dresden-based friends, the lutenists Sylvius Leopold Weiss and his student Johann Kropfgans. One of Bach’s violin works that is well-suited to the lute is the Partita in D minor for Violin Solo, BWV 1004. His polyphonic approach to the four strings of the violin and cello resembles the virtuosic, polyphonic viol playing of his colleagues from the Abel family. It is often forgotten that polyphonic viol playing emerged in competition with lute music in the late 16 th and early 17th century, before the advent of the d-minor, Baroque lute, and the textures of Bach’s Partita inherited many textural elements of older lute writing, perhaps indirectly adopted by viol players. My transcription is a creative adaptation for my archlute, in

Notes on Tonight’s Program the spirit of Bach’s transcriptions, and not meant to prove it ever existed as a lute work, though I use the instrument’s historical performance practices. Like many of Bach’s dance suites, BWV 1004 speaks with a decidedly French accent. While Bach never visited France, he was very familiar with French music, in harpsichord works by Couperin and Rameau, as well from absorbing the French style when the orchestra from Celle-Lüneberg visited town when he was studying in Lüneberg. Alexander Silberger argues that Bach’s use of the chaconne (technically a passacaille) is indebted to the dramatic chaconnes of Lully’s tragedies lyriques.

The Spanish guitarist Fernando Sor abhorred the use of right-hand nails and only admitted their use in special effects to imitate the oboe or trumpets. Reviews of his many performances speak to his great musicality and ability to play all parts of a musical texture much as a pianist did; one Parisian critic called his guitar “a complete orchestra, enclosed in small compass”. The majority of reviews suggest that a lack of nails was not an inhibitor of his tone or technique, though there were many who scoffed at his choice of instrument. Unlike many early 19thcentury guitarists who focused on flashy arpeggios and scales, Sor always focused on the music first and foremost, using his technique to prove his sure musicality. His early training was conservative in nature: in an entry of the Encyclopédia pittoresque de la musique, Sor describes his musical training at the Monastery of Montserrat: initially, he struggled but eventually mastered the Guidonian solmization system designed ca. 1000 for learning Gregorian chant also familiar to Bach. His eventual success in Guidonian solmization was rewarded by intensive, daily studies in counterpoint, with rules memorized in these older syllable combinations. The choir often sang contrapuntal motets in prima pratica style in addition to their regular fare of more contemporary masses with small orchestra, as well as polyphonic canons and Spanish villançicos. Sor distinguished himself by his solo singing, and by the end of his studies he was proctor of the music making and first violin in the orchestra. At the organ, he learned fugue, imitation, and figured bass. He and his colleagues practiced their instruments in the same room at the same time, creating a “veritable chiarivari” (somehow along the way he mastered the guitar!). All of these details point to the Neapolitan conservatory model. Sor’s facile production of operas and ballets is yet more evidence for this consummate training in the craft of musical production. He spent several periods of his life in Paris, and much of his music was published in that fertile, guitar-crazed milieu where the guitar was au courant, especially among women; the third of his Trois Pièces de Société Op. 33 is a mini-suite dedicated to a young guitar virtuoso, Athenaïs Paulian. It opens with a sicilienne and concludes with a dramatic march replete with special effects, imitating drum rolls (colorfully recalling the young Sor’s duty in the Napoleonic Wars) with a trio written entirely in natural harmonics. The march in particular earned critical praise at an 1828 performance. Thanks to Daniel Boring, use of a reproduction of a 19th-century Lacote guitar demonstrates the lute-like reactivity of Sor’s guitar as opposed to the modern classical instrument.

Giulio Regondi was a child prodigy whose adoptive, Italian father trained him in his native Lyons, and like the young Mozart, took him on tour to exploit his talents. Scandalously, his father left him high and dry at age 12.

Regondi was a sensation in Paris, exhibiting his talents and gaining the notice of Paganini, Liszt, and Sor, who dedicated his Sourvenir d’Amité to the young virtuoso, considered “the Paganini of the guitar”. Eventually “Jules” settled in London, equally famous as a virtuoso on the guitar and the concertina (mellophone). The famous vocal artist Pauline Viardot wrote to her friend of his artistry and playing of the concertina, piano, violin and guitar. At least once he shared the stage with Clara Schumann, and in later life often appeared on programs with Franz Liszt.

We do not know whether he played with nails or flesh, though the only surviving portrait of him seems to show a bare thumb stretched toward the fingerboard, with his tiny pinky is supported by a metal thimble to keep it in touch with the body of the instrument. His extreme virtuosity is clearly reflected in his few surviving works, including the elegant and expressive Rêverie Nocturne, Op. 19. The use of tremolo on the guitar is more difficult without nails, but in the context of this night-music, a flesh-based tremolo helps to divide these episodes from the clear daylight of the surrounding music, which feels more tempestuous and potent. In this way, technique can reveal structural opposition that brings the lighter, major key’s pleasant dreams into sharper relief against less emotionally stable music, largely in d minor, that is easily supported by fuller strokes.

Gertrude Stein said that it was only possible for Pablo Picasso to express his Spanish cubism freely in Paris. The guitar was a commonplace enough object for Picasso and George Braque to deconstruct and distort geometrically in some of their finest canvases of the 1910’s. By the turn of the century, the city was already in the midst of a decades-long, radical shift away from the Romantic and largely Germanic musical mainstream. The revolt began at

Notes on Tonight’s Program the hands of Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, the composers known as Les Sixes, and soon thereafter, Igor Stravinsky. In the first decades of the 20th century, foreign musicians, artists and writers were drawn to Parisian salons, cafés, to Serge Diaghalev’s Ballets Russes, the Moulin Rouge and the Opera. Some of these musicians, like the self-taught Brazilian Hietor Villa-Lobos, came fully formed and ready to seek their fortune, while others came to study the craft of composition at the Paris Conservatoire or the Schola Cantorum, like Manuel de Falla and Joaquin Turina.

Heitor Villa-Lobos began his musical life as a guitarist, and played the new Brazilian repertoire with the street musicians as a chorāo in Rio de Janero. He lived in Paris frequently in the 1920s, first visiting in 1923. There he met Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, and Edgard Varese. He was friends with Darius Milhaud of Les Six who he helped delve into Brazilian indigenous and popular music and who introduced him to the music of Igor Stravinsky. VillaLobos considered his national style, the chorô, nothing other than Brazilian popular music, played by a community of musicians together throughout the night for pleasure. According to Thomas G. Garcia, this urban improvisational style emerged ca. 1870 out of a mélange of old and new-world musical influences, and reached its first heyday in the first two decades of the 20th century. Such popular music was anything but slight, and brought out strong passions in its players and audience. Villa-Lobos’ Chorôs no. I (1920, subtitled “tipico”) exhibits the central elements of the genre, including the short, syncopated, three-note lilt in its climactic passages and its simple rondo structure. It also contains a good dose of Bach (and Chopin) in its careful, chromatic chord sequences and contrapuntal voice-leading. His Twelve Etudes (1929, rev. 1948) for the guitar are based on patterns improvised by chorões in Rio, but in his approach to the instrument, the guitarist-composer’s approach mirrors Debussy’s search for unusual but idiomatic sounds at the piano. As Debussy once said of harmonic grammar, “there are no rules, pleasure is the law”. Likewise, Villa-Lobos’ way is not that of a conservatory-trained composer.

As Debussy explained, a composer should search for sound outside of musical traditions: “He collaborates with the scenery around him and hears harmonies of which our textbooks are ignorant.” Villa -Lobos writes music that shifts in fixed shapes around the fingerboard, phasing in and out of consonance with open strings (a style that was co-opted decades later by Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson). Etude no. 9 resembles Chorôs no. I in its popular simplicity, a study in tone and Jazz-age harmony, though its opening music is quite abtract and dissonant. In Etude 11, his colorful use of the entire fingerboard and special, harp-like arpeggio and tremolo effects are ultra-specific to the instrument and would be ineffective on the piano or any other instrument. Etude 5 is even more impressionistic, using the open strings of the guitar like chimes, with a child-like, motoric ostinato constantly reinterpreted by its surroundings; comparisons could be made with Debussy’s Prelude “Des Pas Sûr la Niege” or Stravinksy’s neoclassic works of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Even its melodic themes, freely inverted in the treble and bass duo that competes throughout, are simple and diatonic, though occasional chromatic superimpositions frequently jar against their child-like simplicity. Incidentally, I have returned to the 1928 score to remove many of Segovia’s willful revisions.

Manuel de Falla was greatly influenced by Debussy, who had given him some guidance in composition. Two years after Debussy’s death, Falla was invited to contribute a commemorative work for a specially-curated edition of La Revue musicale in December 1920. The several compositions in this volume were planned as a series of tombeaux, entitled after the stylized musical epitaphs, often suites of short works, written by lutenists and harpsichordists in the age of Couperin. Falla’s Homenaje: Sur la Tombeau de Debussy, written in Grenada in 1920, brings the late composer’s essence to the fingerboard of an instrument for which he never composed but often evoked, and contains two “Spanish” quotations from Debussy’s oeuvre. The first, a phrase from “La Soirée dans Grènade” from Estampes (1903), is clearly stated at the end of de Falla’s Homenaje; Debussy’s original begins similarly to Falla’s with an habanera ostinato. The other quotation, identified in a 1992 article by my late mentor, Dr. Peter Segal, is more abstract: the rocking half-step from Debussy’s “La Sérenade impromptu” Preludes, book 1 (1919), itself an imitation of flamenco guitar playing and marked “quasi guitarra”. Falla chose the first of these quotes in admiration of Debussy’s ability to summon the sound of Granada without ever using an authentic Spanish element. Falla’s Homenaje was premiered by Pujol, without nails, in 1922, in what must have been an intimate and expressive performance.

Manuel de Falla’s friend, the pianist, conductor and composer Joaquin Turina resided as a student in Paris from 1905 – 1914. The two met at the premiere of one of Turina’s works, where Isaac Albeniz was in attendance and took the pair for a heady conversation about Spanish music that changed their musical lives forever. Like many

Notes on Tonight’s Program Spanish musicians of the time, Turina studied composition with the historically-minded Vincent d’Indy at the Schola, which bolstered his conservatism, but he was also greatly influenced by Debussy, who advised him to seek out a more authentically Andalusian source material in an age when flamenco was becoming a commerciallybankrupt craze. Just as Debussy distilled an imaginary yet authentic Andalusian musical language in Iberia and other works, there is likewise a hint of Debussy’s architecture flair and rhetoric beneath Sevillana’s flamenco surface. Thematic ideas tend to repeat verbatim each time, and his harmonic surface employs a Debussy-like freedom of chromaticism. There is an artificial, studied symmetry in the work, a kind of structuralism that also interested Debussy. Turina’s parallel voice motion in this work is obviously drawn from flamenco style on the surface, but also has a less obvious affinity with Debussy’s mature style. The first time it occurs, it is clearly meant to evoke the festive style that begins the genre: rasgueado alternating with melodic interjections on the low strings; this music also closes the work. Parallel, sliding harmonies also comprise a series of important themes in the outer soléa sections that nest just inside its strummed extremities. A Phrygian malagueña comprised of parallel chords is heard twice at the work’s center, with its bass falling on the strong beats where singers and dancers would typically clap rhythmically. The melodic writing in Sevillana has a precedent in the use of modality in several of Debussy’s Preludes, and like Debussy, learned about Gregorian modality directly (Debussy at Solesmes, Turina as part of d’Indy’s schola curriculum) as well as from the modality of flamenco.

Debussyisme and the Spanish nationalist movement in music both defy the tonal grammar of classical tradition. On its own, geography would keep these worlds apart: traversing the Pyrenees northward is a study in dramatic contrast, a quick volte-face from the hot, arid vistas of Spain to the lush, green slopes of gently grazing sheep and fast-moving mountain streams. Yet Falla and Turina’s music unites these apposite musical climes poetically. In a 1933 letter to Pujol, Falla considers the Spanish guitar as the European muse stretching back to the Baroque: One must acknowledge that the guitar, of all stringed instruments with a fingerboard, is the most complete and richest in its harmonic and polyphonic possibilities. And more, the history of music itself shows us its magnificent influence as a means of transmitting throughout Europe the essence of the musical resonance of Spain. With what emotion do we find its clear echo in Scarlatti, in Glinka and his disciples, in Debussy and Ravel! (translated by Peter Segal) It is a historical fact that both Spanish and French musicians followed their political leaders into southern Italy, and that the guitar’s immediate predecessor, the vihuela, was popular there in the Renaissance, as documented by musicologist John Griffiths. Josquin des Prez and the Flemish had already paved the way in Rome, Ferrara and Milan for foreigners to dominate courtly and religious music making. This trend towards musical import and export is a natural consequence of political change. It is also reciprocal. At Montserrat, Sor was trained in Neapolitan counterpoint and solfege. How much it was influenced by Spanish or French practice, given the many wars for dominance over the kingdoms of Sicily (southern Italy)? For Sor or Regondi, the salons of Paris were central proving grounds for stylistic development. Falla sees the guitar as an Iberian propagandist, minimizing outside influences, as did a generation of musicians who studied with Felipe Pedrell. The truth is that the guitar was derided by the majority of critics in the 19th century, or, at best praised with back-handed compliments. The best guitar composers were congratulated for fitting their genius to an inferior instrument; François Fétis complained that Sor wasted his talents on the fingerboard, though he enlisted him in readings of Baroque works on the lute and approved of his musicality and compositional skill. The guitar was just too quiet and limited for an age that worshipped great pianists like Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt. Among orchestral composers, Berlioz’ limited proficiency on the instrument was an oddity. But the guitar was a potent symbol of Spanish folk culture, and the instrument was named “the Spanish guitar” despite its international reach and mixed Italian-Spanish parentage.

Guitarist and musicologist Felipe Pedrell turned his most successful students, composers-pianists Isaac Albeniz, Enrique Granados, and Manuel de Falla, towards the gestures and soul of flamenco guitar and singing to build a new, Spanish art. Only Falla and Turina wrote for guitar, though transcriptions of Albeniz and Granados were soon published by Tarrega, Llobet, and others. By 1924, Segovia’s first recital in Paris seems to have cemented Falla’s observation, as it included both Falla’s Homenaje and Turina’s Sevillana, a pavane by the vihuela composer Luis Milan, transcriptions of Albeniz and Granados, and music by Sor, the talk of Paris a century before, situated in an overtly Spanish program stretching back to the 16th century.