CM Notes » Assad Guitar Duo
September 28, 2003
The Instrument
The guitar began as slightly less respectable than the lute but has now surpassed it in every way. Strumming a guitar was possible for a person with almost no instruction, contributing to its popularity among the mass of the people. The lute was the instrument of the nobility and the court.
A stringed instrument with a flat back has been depicted throughout antiquity. By early modern times, the guitar had its familiar waisted shape with the large central sound hole, though it only had four strings. The other two were added in the eighteenth century. The additional strings give the guitar a range of almost five octaves, from the E more than two octaves below middle C to the C two octaves above.
This range covers the same pitches as the middle of the piano and is what allows musicians to transcribe music written for other instruments effectively. It is not easy to do and there are many technical problems to be solved. The most basic is tuning. The six strings are tuned at intervals of a fourth. The player has to compromise between getting perfect octaves and the correct harmonics for chords.
Andres Segovia’s single-minded devotion to elevating the guitar to a serious solo instrument was similar to that of Pablo Casals and the violoncello and Lionel Tertis and the viola. Segovia worked with Antonio de Torres Jurado, a great luthier, to extend the possibilities of the instrument. Torres enlarged the body of the guitar, strengthened the internal structure, added a bridge saddle for the strings and changed the neck slightly. All this allowed the guitar to be heard in a large concert hall or over a symphony orchestra.
The Composers
Serio and Odair Assad have reached deep into their capacious repertoire to give us a program full of delicate paradoxes. It begins in a deceptively simple fashion, with a more or less chronological arrangement of pieces, but take a look just under the surface.
Fernando Sor was the son and grandson of Catalan army officers, of impeccable military descent. He collaborated with the French in Spain after the Peninsular Wars, and was exiled to Paris as soon as the French were driven out in 1813. Sor himself served itn the Cordovan regiments. His father the captain taught him how to play the guitar and later Sor became the founder of the modern guitar school.
Joaquin Rodrigo was the establishment Spanish composer of the twentieth century, friendly with Franco, and yet was married to a Turkish Jewish woman, descended from the Jews who had been driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. So far we are dealing with Spanish composers writing Spanish music.
What are we to make of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in this assembly? On the face of it he was a well-known Italian composer who became successful quite young. He was born and educated in Florence, studying music at the Cherubini Conservatory.The name Castelnuovo should alert us to his not being the conventional Italian we expect. He too was a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors came from Castila Nueva in Spain. When they were driven out they went to Italy but retained the name of their birthplace.
Mario was also driven out of his native country, in the mid-twentieth century, by the Nazi race laws, and ended up in Hollywood as a very well-respected composer of film music and teacher of André Previn and John Willams. Sergio and Odair Assad are playing two of his pieces written in homage to Bach for Spanish guitar.
Another strand of the French connection is the inclusion of music by Ravel and Debussy. The strand is enhanced by the fact that Ravel’s mother was a Basque woman and he considered himself part of the Basque heritage. Ravel wrote several works in the Spanish idiom, though the one being heard today is only very peripherally related to Spanish history. “Une infante defunte” is not just any dead baby girl, but the Infanta of Spain, a royal princess. The work was possibly inspired by the famous painting of the Spanish royal children by Velasquez.
Ravel and Debussy were almost contemporaries. Foolish newpspapermen of the period tried to make out that they were in direct competition with each other but the truth was far more subtle. In many ways they resembled each other quite closely. Neither of them could tolerate the rigid discipline required to complete the courses at the conservatory. Both narrowly missed important piano prizes.
Each of them pushed music into the modern period. Ravel turned to the distant past to restore a lost sound of open harmony and austere, frequently dissonant, chords. Debussy was fascinated by the Impressionists and used equivalent methods to convey his thoughts and feelings. Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s former patron, employed Debussy while still in his teens to teach her sons music for two summers in a row, 1881 and 1882. Her judgment in composers was impeccable.
Ravel and Debussy led us into the twentieth century but Leo Brouwer and Sergio Assad take us further into the twenty first century. Brouwer is a Cuban composer who studied composition at the Juilliard School and the guitar at Hartt College in the United States. The Cuban government supported his education. He has travelled all over the world. Leo Brouwer recently became the conductor of the municipal orchestra in Cordova, in Spain.
Both he and Sergio Assad base their work on popular and folk music, thus completing the circle begun by the guitar as it switched from a street instrument into a vector of serious musical expression. Its hold on the popular imagination is of course stronger than ever.
The Music
Fernando Sor 1778 - 1839 Fantasia for two guitars , Opus 54
Sor arrived in Paris in 1813. He later spent several years in London. He had established himself as a composer in many genres, as well as being a scintillating soloist. He had written at least one opera and various orchestral works. None of his music had been published in Spain. In Paris he had the same publisher as Rossini, giving some idea of his importance.
When he got to France fashionable Paris was going through one of its periodic crazes and this time it was for the guitar. At least three other well-known guitar soloists had taken control of the scene and resented this newcomer.
Sor soon triumphed over these pygmies. He had many wealthy and aristocratic pupils, he wrote very fine new music all the time and laid down the foundations of serious guitar pedagogy for the next hundred years. The first “golden age” of the guitar had arrived. After his death the role of serious guitar music in concerts receded until Segovia revived it sixty years later.
While not in the forefront of great composers Sor’s work is solidly constructed with much pleasing melody, and has considerable merit. During his lifetime he was known as the ” Spanish Beethoven”. The fantasia form was appealing because it allowed him wide melodic latitude and yet remained within a unified compass. Sor wrote a number of fantasias, some for single and other for duo guitars. Opus 4 is perhaps the best known and most difficult.
Opus 54 was dedicated to one of his pupils, Mademoiselle Houzé, and published in 1814. It was followed by other fantasias, opus 58 and 59, and by his series of graduated études and exercises for the guitar student.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco 1895 - 1968
Prelude and fugue No.7 in C sharp minor
Prelude and fugue No, 17 in B major
From Twenty four Preludes and Fugues for Well-tempered Guitar(s) Opus 199
Castelnuovo-Tedesco began composing very young. In his late twenties he had already written several symphonies, concertos, piano music and song cycles. His name was linked with those of the most promising young Italians such as Respighi and Malipiero. Toscanini conducted his work, and his solo pieces were played by great virtuosi such as Walter Gieseking, Jascha Heifetz, and Gregor Piatigorsky. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music was romantic and tonal. He did not join the atonal movement.
Within this remarkably creative period he maintained an emotional attachment to his Spanish heritage. Meeting Segovia in the 1930s only strengthened this feeling. He wrote numerous pieces for the classical guitar, among them two concertos for solo guitar, a guitar sonata and one concerto for two guitars. Segovia played most of them for the first time.
One of Segovia’s most important innovations had been to cease the playing of showpieces written by virtuoso guitarists simply to show off their dazzling techniques. He substituted music written by great composers which he transcribed and adapted for his instrument. First and foremost among these was Johann Sebastian Bach. The music spoke for itself and the technique was never in doubt.
Castelnuovo -Tedesco had not studied the guitar, but was primarily a pianist. Some of his earlier pieces turned out to be beyond the range of the instrument and could not be played. In spite of this Segovia said that Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music was the first which showed an instinctive grasp of the possibilities of the guitar.
Segovia introduced Castelnuovo-Tedesco to Presti and Lagoya, duo guitarists. He was inspired to write the “Twenty four Preludes and Fugues for Well-tempered Guitar(s)” for them in 1961. Bach wrote his series to show that music could be played in any of the diatonic keys when the harpsichord was tuned according to the compromise noted in the introduction above, ie ” well- tempered”. This was revolutionary for his time. Castelnuovo-Tedesco displayed the same possibilities for the guitar.
Both the preludes in today’s group have a jaunty quality to them, one being very dry and witty, the other somewhat more legato.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco continued to compose serious music while working in Hollywood, but much of it has never been played. His heirs have given his manuscripts and notes to the Library of Congress.
Maurice Ravel 1875 - 1937 Pavane pour un infante defunte
Ravel had a very private and indeed enigmatic personality. Always neat and tidy, he was the external antithesis of the rebellious artist and yet he refused to conform to almost all the artistic conventions imposed on him. In some ways he reminds me of Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener who kept saying ” I would prefer not”.
He was dismissed from both his piano and composition classes at the Paris Conservatory for failing to do as he was told. His failure to win the Prix de Rome despite being an excellent pianist was due to the deceitfulness of the head of the music department and not his playing. Only the professor’s pupils had any chance of winning. Once Fauré became head of the department, Ravel began to receive proper recognition.
The Pavane was written in 1899, while he was still very young. Old French dance forms attracted him, both the pavane and the forlane. The pavane dated back to Italy in the early 16th century. The first printed version appeared in 1508. The dance is slow and stately and was adopted by the royal courts for processions. Etymologically ” pavane” derives from ” Paduan”, ie of the town of Padua.
Ravel was preoccupied with an imagined musical past yet paradoxically moving forward constantly. This tension was seen in his work. Modal harmonies were intermingled with a rich melodic line and modern dissonances somehow connected them. With all this, he was a great admirer of Chabrier and accused of copying that composer’s style too slavishly in the Pavane. Stravinsky referred to him disparagingly as a ” Swiss watch maker”.
Ravel used bare sequential fifths in the Pavane, simple and compound octaves, and cadential flattened sevenths to create a vaguely ancient sound woven around a rather lush melody which appears several times over these varying harmonies. The Pavane was written for the piano but Ravel later orchestrated it himself.
Joaquin Rodrigo 1901 - 1999 Tonadilla para dos guitarras
Allegro ma non troppo
Minueto Pomposo
Allegro vivace
Rodrigo was born in Sagunto, Valencia, the youngest of the Marquise de Jardines de Aranjuez’ ten children. His prosperous family could not protect him from the ravages of epidemic diphtheria. He caught it at the age of three and it is said to have left him blind. This is a very rare consequence of this dreadful disease. What their wealth could do was to make sure he was properly educated and not left to the usual fate of blind children in those days.
Because he showed great musical promise early, he went to Paris for further study with Paul Dukas. Rodrigo never travelled without his confidential servant, Rafael, a man who did everything for him, including writing down his compositions. Rodrigo met his future wife in Paris,Victoria Kamhi, also a promising piano student.
Segovia exerted an immense influence on Rodrigo after the latter returned to Spain to become a professional composer. This influence inspired him to write many works for the guitar, the most famous of which is the ” Concerto de Aranjuez”. This is justly popular because of its soaring themes, rich harmonies and rousing mood.
Curiously the most well-known Spanish composers who just preceded Rodrigo, Albeniz and Granados, never wrote directly for the guitar but much of their music was transcribed for that instrument. Heavily romantic and sentimental, heart-on-the-sleeve “Spanish”, this music appealed to a wide audience. Rodrigo rejected that easy path in his solo guitar music though the “Concerto” had some of these characteristics. He chose to use fewer notes, and to stick to a more disciplined and austere style, rather more like Manuel de Falla.
The ” Tonadilla” exemplifies this resolve. The word means ” a little tune” . Tonadillas were used as incidental music between the acts of stage plays. The name may denote a trivial piece but this one is almost a complete sonata in form.
Rodrigo was close to many other guitar virtuosi beside Segovia. The “Tonadilla” was written for the Presti-Lagoya duo in 1960 and dedicated to them.
Unlike transcriptions, dependent on the second instrument to fill out the harmony, this piece specifically exploits the possibilities of two guitars. All the movements have a version of tertiary form, ABA, with the central ” B” section containing enriched harmonies, and tonal modulation, almost a brief development. The instruments contrast with each other, alternating rapid runs and chordal sections.
There is no mistaking its Spanish heritage. Strong rhythmic pulses keep it moving and there are rapid repeated notes on the upbeat reminiscent of flamenco.
Leo Brouwer 1939 - Tres danzas concertantes
Molto vivace
Interludio
Toccata
Brouwer made his debut playing the guitar in Havana in 1955, when he was sixteen years old. He began to compose very early too. It was clear from his choosing to study composition in New York. His music can be divided into three periods. At first he used themes and melodies from popular Cuban culture, but within a few years he started to experiment with open forms, or indeterminate, music.
In the third period he has reached back to his roots and fused avant-garde techniques with popular Cuban songs. ” Tres danzas concertantes” was written in 1958, during his first period.
Achille Claude Debussy 1862 - 1918 Suite bergamasque (arranged for two guitars by Sergio Assad)
Prelude
Menuet
Clair de lune
Passepied
Debussy’s father was a shopkeeper and he did not have the advantages of Ravel or some of his other contemporaries, yet his dependence on the goodwill of his teachers did not make him any more amenable than Ravel nor any less uncompromising. He studied both piano and composition at the conservatory. The music of Erik Satie influenced him at a critical point in his development.
This is an interesting example of the pupil outstripping the teacher. Satie is considered a minor composer nowadays while Debussy has always remained in high esteem. It was Satie’s ” deconstruction” of harmony which caught Debussy’s attention, before that expression was commonly used. The Impressionist painters were doing the same thing in art and it is hardly surprising that a sensitive observer like Debussy would be affected.
The ” Suite Bergamasque” was written for the piano. It was one of his earliest significant piano works, published in 1890 and revised in 1905. Debussy was ravished by the poetry of Paul Verlaine. In ” Fêtes Galantes”, Verlaine wrote ” . Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques, Juant du luth et dansant..” Debusssy took his title from the poem. A bergamasque is an old Italian dance. Verlaine’s poem was inspired by Watteau’s painting” Embarkation for Cythera”.
Once ” Clair de lune” appeared it was an instant success, becoming utterly hackneyed in very short order. Note the ancient dance forms in the suite, menuet and passepied. Debussy was contrasting the polite formality of the eighteenth century with his quizzical modern sensibility.
In fact there are many resemblances between Ravel’s and Debussy’s music, two composers who appear to be so different. Unorthodox harmony abounds, breaking all the rules of nineteenth century composition. Debussy softened and blurred his harmony, giving the impressionistic character he sought. Ravel was more disjointed, with a bleaker palette of sound, but could bring out a richly harmonic quality if he chose.
Sources
New Grove Dictionary of Music 2002 Centennial Edition ed. Laura Kuhn
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians 2001
Brian Jeffery 1994 Fernando Sor: composer and guitarist
Complete Encyclcopedia of the Guitar 1996
Tom Bruner 1972 The Arranger / Composer’s Complete Guide to the Guitar and other
Fretted Instruments
Graham Wade 1996 Distant Sarabandes: the guitar solos of Joaquin Rodrigo
Paul Roberts 1996 Images: the piano music of Claude Debussy
Sundry web sites
The Instrument
The guitar began as slightly less respectable than the lute but has now surpassed it in every way. Strumming a guitar was possible for a person with almost no instruction, contributing to its popularity among the mass of the people. The lute was the instrument of the nobility and the court.
A stringed instrument with a flat back has been depicted throughout antiquity. By early modern times, the guitar had its familiar waisted shape with the large central sound hole, though it only had four strings. The other two were added in the eighteenth century. The additional strings give the guitar a range of almost five octaves, from the E more than two octaves below middle C to the C two octaves above.
This range covers the same pitches as the middle of the piano and is what allows musicians to transcribe music written for other instruments effectively. It is not easy to do and there are many technical problems to be solved. The most basic is tuning. The six strings are tuned at intervals of a fourth. The player has to compromise between getting perfect octaves and the correct harmonics for chords.
Andres Segovia’s single-minded devotion to elevating the guitar to a serious solo instrument was similar to that of Pablo Casals and the violoncello and Lionel Tertis and the viola. Segovia worked with Antonio de Torres Jurado, a great luthier, to extend the possibilities of the instrument. Torres enlarged the body of the guitar, strengthened the internal structure, added a bridge saddle for the strings and changed the neck slightly. All this allowed the guitar to be heard in a large concert hall or over a symphony orchestra.
The Composers
Serio and Odair Assad have reached deep into their capacious repertoire to give us a program full of delicate paradoxes. It begins in a deceptively simple fashion, with a more or less chronological arrangement of pieces, but take a look just under the surface.
Fernando Sor was the son and grandson of Catalan army officers, of impeccable military descent. He collaborated with the French in Spain after the Peninsular Wars, and was exiled to Paris as soon as the French were driven out in 1813. Sor himself served itn the Cordovan regiments. His father the captain taught him how to play the guitar and later Sor became the founder of the modern guitar school.
Joaquin Rodrigo was the establishment Spanish composer of the twentieth century, friendly with Franco, and yet was married to a Turkish Jewish woman, descended from the Jews who had been driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. So far we are dealing with Spanish composers writing Spanish music.
What are we to make of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in this assembly? On the face of it he was a well-known Italian composer who became successful quite young. He was born and educated in Florence, studying music at the Cherubini Conservatory.The name Castelnuovo should alert us to his not being the conventional Italian we expect. He too was a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors came from Castila Nueva in Spain. When they were driven out they went to Italy but retained the name of their birthplace.
Mario was also driven out of his native country, in the mid-twentieth century, by the Nazi race laws, and ended up in Hollywood as a very well-respected composer of film music and teacher of André Previn and John Willams. Sergio and Odair Assad are playing two of his pieces written in homage to Bach for Spanish guitar.
Another strand of the French connection is the inclusion of music by Ravel and Debussy. The strand is enhanced by the fact that Ravel’s mother was a Basque woman and he considered himself part of the Basque heritage. Ravel wrote several works in the Spanish idiom, though the one being heard today is only very peripherally related to Spanish history. “Une infante defunte” is not just any dead baby girl, but the Infanta of Spain, a royal princess. The work was possibly inspired by the famous painting of the Spanish royal children by Velasquez.
Ravel and Debussy were almost contemporaries. Foolish newpspapermen of the period tried to make out that they were in direct competition with each other but the truth was far more subtle. In many ways they resembled each other quite closely. Neither of them could tolerate the rigid discipline required to complete the courses at the conservatory. Both narrowly missed important piano prizes.
Each of them pushed music into the modern period. Ravel turned to the distant past to restore a lost sound of open harmony and austere, frequently dissonant, chords. Debussy was fascinated by the Impressionists and used equivalent methods to convey his thoughts and feelings. Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s former patron, employed Debussy while still in his teens to teach her sons music for two summers in a row, 1881 and 1882. Her judgment in composers was impeccable.
Ravel and Debussy led us into the twentieth century but Leo Brouwer and Sergio Assad take us further into the twenty first century. Brouwer is a Cuban composer who studied composition at the Juilliard School and the guitar at Hartt College in the United States. The Cuban government supported his education. He has travelled all over the world. Leo Brouwer recently became the conductor of the municipal orchestra in Cordova, in Spain.
Both he and Sergio Assad base their work on popular and folk music, thus completing the circle begun by the guitar as it switched from a street instrument into a vector of serious musical expression. Its hold on the popular imagination is of course stronger than ever.
The Music
Fernando Sor 1778 - 1839 Fantasia for two guitars , Opus 54
Sor arrived in Paris in 1813. He later spent several years in London. He had established himself as a composer in many genres, as well as being a scintillating soloist. He had written at least one opera and various orchestral works. None of his music had been published in Spain. In Paris he had the same publisher as Rossini, giving some idea of his importance.
When he got to France fashionable Paris was going through one of its periodic crazes and this time it was for the guitar. At least three other well-known guitar soloists had taken control of the scene and resented this newcomer.
Sor soon triumphed over these pygmies. He had many wealthy and aristocratic pupils, he wrote very fine new music all the time and laid down the foundations of serious guitar pedagogy for the next hundred years. The first “golden age” of the guitar had arrived. After his death the role of serious guitar music in concerts receded until Segovia revived it sixty years later.
While not in the forefront of great composers Sor’s work is solidly constructed with much pleasing melody, and has considerable merit. During his lifetime he was known as the ” Spanish Beethoven”. The fantasia form was appealing because it allowed him wide melodic latitude and yet remained within a unified compass. Sor wrote a number of fantasias, some for single and other for duo guitars. Opus 4 is perhaps the best known and most difficult.
Opus 54 was dedicated to one of his pupils, Mademoiselle Houzé, and published in 1814. It was followed by other fantasias, opus 58 and 59, and by his series of graduated études and exercises for the guitar student.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco 1895 - 1968
Prelude and fugue No.7 in C sharp minor
Prelude and fugue No, 17 in B major
From Twenty four Preludes and Fugues for Well-tempered Guitar(s) Opus 199
Castelnuovo-Tedesco began composing very young. In his late twenties he had already written several symphonies, concertos, piano music and song cycles. His name was linked with those of the most promising young Italians such as Respighi and Malipiero. Toscanini conducted his work, and his solo pieces were played by great virtuosi such as Walter Gieseking, Jascha Heifetz, and Gregor Piatigorsky. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music was romantic and tonal. He did not join the atonal movement.
Within this remarkably creative period he maintained an emotional attachment to his Spanish heritage. Meeting Segovia in the 1930s only strengthened this feeling. He wrote numerous pieces for the classical guitar, among them two concertos for solo guitar, a guitar sonata and one concerto for two guitars. Segovia played most of them for the first time.
One of Segovia’s most important innovations had been to cease the playing of showpieces written by virtuoso guitarists simply to show off their dazzling techniques. He substituted music written by great composers which he transcribed and adapted for his instrument. First and foremost among these was Johann Sebastian Bach. The music spoke for itself and the technique was never in doubt.
Castelnuovo -Tedesco had not studied the guitar, but was primarily a pianist. Some of his earlier pieces turned out to be beyond the range of the instrument and could not be played. In spite of this Segovia said that Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music was the first which showed an instinctive grasp of the possibilities of the guitar.
Segovia introduced Castelnuovo-Tedesco to Presti and Lagoya, duo guitarists. He was inspired to write the “Twenty four Preludes and Fugues for Well-tempered Guitar(s)” for them in 1961. Bach wrote his series to show that music could be played in any of the diatonic keys when the harpsichord was tuned according to the compromise noted in the introduction above, ie ” well- tempered”. This was revolutionary for his time. Castelnuovo-Tedesco displayed the same possibilities for the guitar.
Both the preludes in today’s group have a jaunty quality to them, one being very dry and witty, the other somewhat more legato.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco continued to compose serious music while working in Hollywood, but much of it has never been played. His heirs have given his manuscripts and notes to the Library of Congress.
Maurice Ravel 1875 - 1937 Pavane pour un infante defunte
Ravel had a very private and indeed enigmatic personality. Always neat and tidy, he was the external antithesis of the rebellious artist and yet he refused to conform to almost all the artistic conventions imposed on him. In some ways he reminds me of Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener who kept saying ” I would prefer not”.
He was dismissed from both his piano and composition classes at the Paris Conservatory for failing to do as he was told. His failure to win the Prix de Rome despite being an excellent pianist was due to the deceitfulness of the head of the music department and not his playing. Only the professor’s pupils had any chance of winning. Once Fauré became head of the department, Ravel began to receive proper recognition.
The Pavane was written in 1899, while he was still very young. Old French dance forms attracted him, both the pavane and the forlane. The pavane dated back to Italy in the early 16th century. The first printed version appeared in 1508. The dance is slow and stately and was adopted by the royal courts for processions. Etymologically ” pavane” derives from ” Paduan”, ie of the town of Padua.
Ravel was preoccupied with an imagined musical past yet paradoxically moving forward constantly. This tension was seen in his work. Modal harmonies were intermingled with a rich melodic line and modern dissonances somehow connected them. With all this, he was a great admirer of Chabrier and accused of copying that composer’s style too slavishly in the Pavane. Stravinsky referred to him disparagingly as a ” Swiss watch maker”.
Ravel used bare sequential fifths in the Pavane, simple and compound octaves, and cadential flattened sevenths to create a vaguely ancient sound woven around a rather lush melody which appears several times over these varying harmonies. The Pavane was written for the piano but Ravel later orchestrated it himself.
Joaquin Rodrigo 1901 - 1999 Tonadilla para dos guitarras
Allegro ma non troppo
Minueto Pomposo
Allegro vivace
Rodrigo was born in Sagunto, Valencia, the youngest of the Marquise de Jardines de Aranjuez’ ten children. His prosperous family could not protect him from the ravages of epidemic diphtheria. He caught it at the age of three and it is said to have left him blind. This is a very rare consequence of this dreadful disease. What their wealth could do was to make sure he was properly educated and not left to the usual fate of blind children in those days.
Because he showed great musical promise early, he went to Paris for further study with Paul Dukas. Rodrigo never travelled without his confidential servant, Rafael, a man who did everything for him, including writing down his compositions. Rodrigo met his future wife in Paris,Victoria Kamhi, also a promising piano student.
Segovia exerted an immense influence on Rodrigo after the latter returned to Spain to become a professional composer. This influence inspired him to write many works for the guitar, the most famous of which is the ” Concerto de Aranjuez”. This is justly popular because of its soaring themes, rich harmonies and rousing mood.
Curiously the most well-known Spanish composers who just preceded Rodrigo, Albeniz and Granados, never wrote directly for the guitar but much of their music was transcribed for that instrument. Heavily romantic and sentimental, heart-on-the-sleeve “Spanish”, this music appealed to a wide audience. Rodrigo rejected that easy path in his solo guitar music though the “Concerto” had some of these characteristics. He chose to use fewer notes, and to stick to a more disciplined and austere style, rather more like Manuel de Falla.
The ” Tonadilla” exemplifies this resolve. The word means ” a little tune” . Tonadillas were used as incidental music between the acts of stage plays. The name may denote a trivial piece but this one is almost a complete sonata in form.
Rodrigo was close to many other guitar virtuosi beside Segovia. The “Tonadilla” was written for the Presti-Lagoya duo in 1960 and dedicated to them.
Unlike transcriptions, dependent on the second instrument to fill out the harmony, this piece specifically exploits the possibilities of two guitars. All the movements have a version of tertiary form, ABA, with the central ” B” section containing enriched harmonies, and tonal modulation, almost a brief development. The instruments contrast with each other, alternating rapid runs and chordal sections.
There is no mistaking its Spanish heritage. Strong rhythmic pulses keep it moving and there are rapid repeated notes on the upbeat reminiscent of flamenco.
Leo Brouwer 1939 - Tres danzas concertantes
Molto vivace
Interludio
Toccata
Brouwer made his debut playing the guitar in Havana in 1955, when he was sixteen years old. He began to compose very early too. It was clear from his choosing to study composition in New York. His music can be divided into three periods. At first he used themes and melodies from popular Cuban culture, but within a few years he started to experiment with open forms, or indeterminate, music.
In the third period he has reached back to his roots and fused avant-garde techniques with popular Cuban songs. ” Tres danzas concertantes” was written in 1958, during his first period.
Achille Claude Debussy 1862 - 1918 Suite bergamasque (arranged for two guitars by Sergio Assad)
Prelude
Menuet
Clair de lune
Passepied
Debussy’s father was a shopkeeper and he did not have the advantages of Ravel or some of his other contemporaries, yet his dependence on the goodwill of his teachers did not make him any more amenable than Ravel nor any less uncompromising. He studied both piano and composition at the conservatory. The music of Erik Satie influenced him at a critical point in his development.
This is an interesting example of the pupil outstripping the teacher. Satie is considered a minor composer nowadays while Debussy has always remained in high esteem. It was Satie’s ” deconstruction” of harmony which caught Debussy’s attention, before that expression was commonly used. The Impressionist painters were doing the same thing in art and it is hardly surprising that a sensitive observer like Debussy would be affected.
The ” Suite Bergamasque” was written for the piano. It was one of his earliest significant piano works, published in 1890 and revised in 1905. Debussy was ravished by the poetry of Paul Verlaine. In ” Fêtes Galantes”, Verlaine wrote ” . Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques, Juant du luth et dansant..” Debusssy took his title from the poem. A bergamasque is an old Italian dance. Verlaine’s poem was inspired by Watteau’s painting” Embarkation for Cythera”.
Once ” Clair de lune” appeared it was an instant success, becoming utterly hackneyed in very short order. Note the ancient dance forms in the suite, menuet and passepied. Debussy was contrasting the polite formality of the eighteenth century with his quizzical modern sensibility.
In fact there are many resemblances between Ravel’s and Debussy’s music, two composers who appear to be so different. Unorthodox harmony abounds, breaking all the rules of nineteenth century composition. Debussy softened and blurred his harmony, giving the impressionistic character he sought. Ravel was more disjointed, with a bleaker palette of sound, but could bring out a richly harmonic quality if he chose.
Sources
New Grove Dictionary of Music 2002 Centennial Edition ed. Laura Kuhn
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians 2001
Brian Jeffery 1994 Fernando Sor: composer and guitarist
Complete Encyclcopedia of the Guitar 1996
Tom Bruner 1972 The Arranger / Composer’s Complete Guide to the Guitar and other
Fretted Instruments
Graham Wade 1996 Distant Sarabandes: the guitar solos of Joaquin Rodrigo
Paul Roberts 1996 Images: the piano music of Claude Debussy
Sundry web sites
