Review Summary: You’d Think It Was the Coolest Thing You'd Ever Heard.
The Classical Guitar. No. 1
This is probably going to sound like a humble brag but it truly isn’t; I have a degree in music performance on the classical guitar. Here’s the thing though… I fu*king hate the classical guitar. There’s too many things wrong with it. First of all, the repertoire is tiny. Much of this has to do with the volume of the instrument; it’s soft as sh*t. The classical guitar just cannot compete with other stringed instruments or the piano. This makes writing chamber and orchestral music for the guitar exceedingly difficult.
On top of the fact that its repertoire is miniscule, the classical guitar is arguably the hardest acoustic instrument to become virtuosic at. Part of this is because the classical guitar requires different mechanisms for both hands; your strong hand pumps the strings while your weak hand frets. The classical guitar, therefore, requires more right-brain left-brain concentration than the piano which only demands one mechanism from its players.
But my biggest gripe with the classical guitar is the repertoire itself. The majority of it ain’t all that good. There’s frankly an embarrassing amount of study pieces (etudes) that the modern classical guitar community likes to pass off as if they were the miniatures of Schumann, a sizeable amount of empty virtuosic music, and mountains of pieces by modern guys trying waaaaay too hard to be cool.
So, yeah, the guitar is
very imperfect, extremely difficult, and most of the repertoire stinks. But, ya’know, the situation ain’t
all bad. If it was, the classical guitar wouldn’t be an instrument at all. In fact, there’s one major flipside. Out of all of those who have written for the classical guitar there are but a few who did it well, and the good pieces of these few are
absolute gems. So, as we go through this series I will detail four points that underscore the dual nature of the classical guitar repertoire: the imperfections of the instrument that make both empty, vapid virtuosic music and “cool guy” music possible, the “masters” behind their “craft”, the imperfections of the instrument that make gemming possible, and the masters behind
their craft. Furthermore, I will detail what makes good virtuosic music and what doesn’t, what makes good study music and what doesn’t, and what makes good 19th and 20th century music and what doesn’t.
Since I’ve done a lot of hating I need to back it up with examples, and boy have I got the one, Francisco Tarrega’s
Recuerdos de la Alhambra. Throughout the entire repertoire for the classical guitar,
Recuerdos, or
Remembrances, is the single highest example of the classical guitar community’s rabid obsession with virtuosity. The reason for this stems from one of the imperfections of the instrument itself; the guitar has no mechanism to sustain pitch. Worsening the situation, and as has been previously stated, the guitar is a low volume instrument; once a string has been pumped its wavelengths cannot compete with the decay that sets in immediately. Luthiers and guitarists, therefore, had to come up with creative ways to boost its volume. They added soundboards, began picking with their nails rather than their flesh, and invented certain techniques to overcome the guitar’s deficiencies.
Here’s where the Spaniard Tarrega enters the narrative. Tarrega, rightly so, has been called the father of the modern classical guitar technique for his invention of the tremolo. In a series of repetitions, the strong hand ring finger (a), middle finger (m), and index finger (i), all pump the same string in rapid succession. It’s a simple enough technique to understand but an extremely difficult one to master.
The tremolo achieved popularity overnight and quickly became an integral part of the pedagogy; almost immediately classical guitarists were taught it and required to develop proficient at it. So, the composition of study pieces for the development of the technique became not only pedagogically paramount, but very much in vogue, and by far the most famous study piece for the technique is Tarrega’s
Recuerdos.
Recuerdos is a petite, four-minute tremolo study in a quasi-impressionist manner that is supposed to evoke Tarrega’s memories of Granada’s most famous palace, Alhambra. It doesn’t.
The piece is set in A-minor and in 3/4, three quarter notes to a measure. The tempo, rhythmic attack, and chord structure are the same per measure: allegro, six sets of four 32nd notes, and one-two chords a measure. The two things to pay attention to are the tremolos in the melody and accompaniment in the thumb. The melody is as simple as simple gets. It moves almost exclusively in stepwise motion (sol-fa-may-fa-sol etc.), and is underpinned by a very regular diatonic chord structure that makes use of simple chord progressions like Am-Cmaj-Fmaj etc. We move into Amaj for a time, explore that key, come back to Am, and return to Amaj before the piece kind of just ends. That’s it. For reasons I’ll get into next time, the guitar often struggles to be harmonically sophisticated. Simplicity isn’t a bad thing, but in this case Tarrega’s simplicity isn’t enough to evoke something as complex as a specific palace in a specific place. I don’t see how anyone could think it does.
Is
Recuerdos awful？Far from it. At best, it’s cool or neat. And it is. But here’s the kicker,
Recuerdos has been recorded more than any other piece for the classical guitar. It’s the most ubiquitous piece out there, and the classical guitar community eats it up. Utterly, utterly ridiculous. There’s good sh*t out there that deserves that spot. But, somehow guitarists are obsessed with stuff that makes them look cool. We all know a wanker or two or ten, and frankly, no other instrument attracts wannabes like the guitar, classical or not. The same aspect of the instrument that fosters “shredders” on the electric guitar is present in the classical one. Tarrega is not at fault for
Recuerdos’ popularity, the failure of the instrument is, and if the classical guitar community wants to deify
Recuerdos they are wrong. But since the classical guitar community has in fact deified
Recuerdos it’s fair to critique it using the same standards one would with pieces that do deserve to be deified. Using these standards,
Recuerdos is a failure.
