Review Summary: A musician who plays the classical guitar.
Classical Guitar Music. No. 4
Before his tragic passing in 2016, Roland Dyens was without a doubt the most famous classical guitar composer on the planet (Brouwer can be a bit too erudite and/or idiomatic for some, and none of the top players like John Williams or Julian Bream ever composed). Born in Tunisia in 1955, Roland Dyens was a French classical guitarist, composer and arranger. After receiving his first guitar at nine, it took Roland only four short years to be enrolled in one of Europe’s most prestigious music schools, the Junior Paris Conservatory. While there he took lessons under the direction of the Spanish guitarist Alberto Ponce (who is still alive) and the French conductor and composer Desire Dondeyne after study with whom Roland graduated as the number one in his 1976 class in harmony, counterpoint, and analysis. That’s really, really impressive.
More impressive than his accolades, which are many, (1st place in an international guitar competition in Alessandra, Italy in 1979, a 2006 award of Grand Prix of the Academie Charles Cros for his recording of a Villa-Lobos Concerto, a commission to write a performance piece for the Guitar Foundation of America in 2007, an honoring by the Fiuggi Guitar Festival in Rome in 2008 etc.), is that Dyens became the head of the guitar school at the Paris Conservatory, the single most prestigious guitar school in the world. Roland was special, a true virtuoso.
Somehow, though, virtuoso can be a kind of dirty word, especially for a guitarist. It usually conjures up images of neo-classical electric guitar shredder guys that do little more than play at a thousand beats per minute over silly chord progressions. “But dude! John Petrucci went to Berkeley and Dream Theater plays this one passage in F# Locrian…” cool lol. Roland, on the other hand, was a man less concerned with breakneck speed and precision, although he possessed both of those in spades, than he was with musicianship, and boy could he produce. Roland’s playing was once described as that of a Jazzist with the hands of a Classicist, and you’ll never hear anyone described that way again. One of the coolest things about Roland is that he often began his concerts with an improvisation, and let me tell you something, no other major player on the planet, of which there are many, does that. I’m not saying that there are players who do it and do it poorly, I’m saying that nobody else on the planet begins their classical guitar recitals with an improvisation. Perhaps only in Roland’s guitar program do they teach a classicist improvisational skills. In other words, in no other guitar school on the planet is improvisation a part of the pedagogy, a severe determent to the classical guitar community.
Why is this the case？Part of it is because the classical guitar is
the single hardest instrument to become proficient at, by far. Am I exaggerating？Let’s see. Effectively, a classical guitarist must keep track of eleven mechanisms at once: five individual weak hand fingers
plus the weak hand as its own individual unit, and four strong hand fingers plus the strong hand as its own individual unit. But what makes this even harder is that the classical guitar requires different mechanisms for each hand; the strong hand pumps the strings while the weak hand frets. The classical guitar, therefore, requires more right-brain left-brain concentration than the piano which only demands one mechanism from the hands.
Making matters worse is the fact that the fingers have mere centimeters for vertical and horizontal movement. While the piano requires tremendous strength, dexterity, and accuracy from its players, the hands have considerable freedom to move up and down the length of the keyboard which allows them to relax. A guitarist on the other hand must keep his hands precisely anchored to the strings and frets which requires a tremendous amount of restraint, and restraint produces the enemy of clarity, tension. On the guitar, the fingers must strike the strings on the same part of the flesh for each stroke. If your hands are the least bit tense the fingers will not obey the mind, and let me tell you another thing, it’s
extremely difficult to play the guitar without tension in the hands. Indeed, the guitar requires that the player develop strength and dexterity in the tiniest, smallest parts of the muscles in the hands, and targeting them requires
a lot of patience and perseverance. It would be like trying to strengthen the muscles on the tips of your toes. How much patience might you have for that？I’ll put it as succinctly as I can; the guitar requires twice as much accuracy from its players while making it twice as hard to achieve that accuracy.
So, what does all this mean. Well, just look at what’s happened to the classical guitar pedagogy. From nuts to bolts the pedagogy is preeminently focused on overcoming the technical difficulties of the instrument, so much so that mastering the hands is all too often the only end in and of itself for the instrument. There’s just no room to apply the musicianship you’ve learned in, you know, music school. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that the classical guitar pedagogy avoids improvisation and composition like the plague. This is fundamentally wrong. For example, if you pick up an adult learner’s piano book each chapter will have a section that focuses on improvisation. Try to find the same in any classical guitar book. You won’t. Write me if you do. Sadly, classical guitar virtuosos are often little more than
players rather than
musicians.
This is why Roland was so special. Much in the same way that Beethoven was a musician who played the piano, Roland was a musician who happened to play the classical guitar, a man who understood that music is so much more than the instrument that produces the soundwaves. Capital M music encompasses: the tremendously important aural skills, harmonic and contrapuntal theory (which includes the ever-important skills of voice leading and figured bass) composition, instrument specific composition, the study of music history, improvisation, sight reading, singing, solo performance, ensemble performance, keyboard proficiency, pedagogic skills, and
then instrument specific skills. This is the beauty of music, there’s so much more than the instrument, and there’s an air of fun about it all. You get to keep learning for a lifetime. Roland understood that the complete composer has come to master all the skills of music rather than just those of the instrument.
The proof is in the pudding. So, let’s look at Roland’s most famous piece, Tango en Skai. The story of Tengo en Skai is a musical irony. I’ve heard two competing theories about its genesis. The first is that after much prodding by family and friends Roland reluctantly agreed to write a Tango; for whatever reason, he hadn’t wanted to. The other is that Roland simply improvised the rudiments of the Tango at a party and polished it up later, not thinking too much of the piece. Either way, the irony is that Tango en Skai became Roland’s most famous piece when he clearly hadn’t intended or wanted it to be.
And yet, Tango en Skai is nearly perfect, and in more ways than one. Technical wise, Roland writes in just about every single technique available to the guitarist. From open string harmonics, to four and six-note hammer-ons, to p-i-m-a roulades, to tremolos, Roland really runs the gambit. And we haven’t even left the seventh measure! And wait, there’s more! There’s half and full bars, artificial harmonics, pizzicatos, flamenco strumming, finger drumming, p-i-m roulades, pull-offs, and glissandos.
But technicality means less than nothing if it isn’t used to a musical purpose. Since Tangos are worn somewhat lightly in that they want you to dance rather than think, the composer must find a way to get the listener moving, and it requires much more decision than the choice of meter. Tango en Skai is written in 4/4 (four beats to a measure), a choice that makes its bounce even more impressive. There are various ways to obscure meter, and Roland sets out to do so from the very beginning with a heavily syncopated rhythm that steps to Ta-Mi-Ka-Mi, (briefly, in the Ta-Ka-Di-Mi system, sixteenth notes are counted with the aforementioned syllables, just like the 1-e-and-a, 2-e-and-a system. Roland’s rhythm therefore sounds on the first sixteenth note and then the fourth in the first beat, and then on the second and the fourth sixteenth notes respectively in the second beat). In fact, Roland features syncopation throughout the piece time and time again emphasizing the upbeat. If you don’t know what I mean, think about how Reggae sounds. It’s kind of like that.
Roland is also quite fond of switching rapidly between beats with three notes and beats with two. Where our ear expects a triplet, we are presented with a duplet and vice versa. Roland’s last trick is to present lines that attack on weak beats. So, not only is the meter constantly obscured, but natural weak beats are consistently attacked in an irregular sequence. If you think about reggae, although the rhythm is syncopated, the rhythm quite regular: one-TWO, one-TWO, one-TWO etc. Roland is very regular in his irregularity. In the fourth measure, there’s a sudden subito fortissimo on the last fourth of the third beat that really grabs you. The composer understands a fundamental rule of music, something that many classical guitar composers either do not or just ignore entirely; because our ears are always searching for the down beat, the delay of rhythmic resolution keeps the listener at attention, keeps our bodies wanting to move. It’s a really cool concept, and Roland is a master of it.
But let’s not forget about the harmonies and the form. Although no key is indicated, Tango en Skai exists in the tonal universe of E minor but with non-harmonic “jazz” notes mixed in. Part of what makes the piece so popular is its catchy, tunesmithy melody, and like any good jazz tune, the melody in Tango en Skai will lodge itself in your brain. The melody moves mostly scale-wise and there’s a particular emphasis on a falling second (like the falling F-E in the third measure) which is so catchy that we recognize it even if we don’t know it! But it’s the chord progressions replete with suspended tones, seventh chords, and just plain awesome rollicking between chords underneath the melody that really give the melody a sense of style.
What is this style I speak of？Well, Skai is a French slang term for imitation leather that in this instance refers to the cowboys of Argentina and southern Brazil known for their leather outfits. As specific as this is, somehow Roland manages to evoke the swagger and ruggedness of a slick desert desperado. Have you ever met someone you would describe as one cool cat？Well after having met the character that greets you in Tango en Skai, you can say that you have. He’s smooth, righteous, and dripping in ladies. If there’s ever someone who could convince you that “it’s the guitar man!”, it’s Roland Dyens, and I love him for that.
I had the lucky opportunity to see Roland in concert twice before he passed, once in 2011 and again in 2014. He was just awesome. But, beyond his otherworldly musicianship, Roland was just a genuinely great guy, someone around whom the pretensions of being a composer have wilted away long ago. He made jokes, laughed with us, and simply put, made you want to be around him. I could have met him if I stuck around after the concerts, each time he stayed and talked with the audience, but I didn’t. In fact, he stayed at the house of my guitar professor both times he was in town and graciously talked with any of the classical guitarists who wanted to bend his ear. One of my friends saw him putting salt in his coffee. And still, I didn’t meet him. I regret that now. Roland was a beautiful musician, but an even more beautiful person. Rest in Peace, Roland.
