- Lucerne Festival: lots of piano, especially Igor Levit, lots of orchestras and lots of violin. I looked at the first six pages of concert listings and no guitar
- Verbier Festival: in the chamber music series there are lots of violinists, cellists and pianists, but no guitarists
- Forum Guitar Wien: lots of fine guitarists plus a competition.
Guitar festivals always seem to feature a competition. This fulfills two purposes: it attracts a lot of guitarists and it sustains the belief that the only real problem in the guitar world is that classical guitarists are not as technically proficient as pianists. This is likely less true than it used to be. In any case, what we see is that the guitar is excluded from the mainstream music festivals and pushed off into its own ghetto. Is it because guitarists are poorer technically and musically? That may be true. But what I suspect the real problem is that the guitar repertoire that really attracts a broad audience consists of about a half-dozen pieces. Sitting in the smaller venues at the Salzburg Festival I asked myself, which guitarists playing which repertoire could be guaranteed to fill any of these halls. And no names came to mind.
Perhaps the real problem is not technique, but composition.
Your thoughts?
24 comments:
Matanya Ophee's still on point about this question forty years later.
https://www.digitalguitararchive.com/2022/03/repertoire-issues/
I think I recall reading that article years ago. Very thorough. The irony is that while he has a lot of criticism of Segovia, mostly well-founded, the truth is that the one person that could pretty much fill any hall during much of his career was Segovia. That would seem to justify his approach at the time. A concert guitarist today would need a different approach of course, as conditions have changed. But since the heyday of Williams and Bream, no guitarist has been able to crack the mainstream. Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make. I think this will only happen if there is guitar repertoire that is so good, that audiences want to hear so badly, that the festival organizers will have to book some guitarists. I certainly think there are guitarists good enough. What I don't think is that there is repertoire good enough. Apart from the Concierto de Aranjuez, there is no really indispensable guitar repertoire that is not transcribed from another instrument. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
At this point even another Concierto would have a too limited audience compared to violin or piano or even viola or cello. I think the more viable path would be a very clean toned electric guitar. That would limit the virtuosity but would make it easier to write for the guitar lyrically and pair it with orchestra or other ensemble. And with very clean tone, chords should sound reasonably distinctly.
up here in the Puget Sound area Michael Nicollella has been pretty reliably shifting back and forth between classical and clean tone electric guitar repertoire for decades, Maury, so I'd say you raise a good point on the electric. M. N. played electric guitar on the recent Mason Bates opera, if memory serves.
The concerto rep may be both saturated and limited to just Aranjuez and a few staples. I've heard some guitar concerti in the last twenty years that I thought sounded pretty good and I have liked all the Brouwers I've heard but the concerto may be a part of the problem Ophee was venting about with "lollipops", otherwise good or even great repertoire that too easily panders to guitarist player cliches rather than breaking new ground with newer audiences.
Remembering Taruskin's posthumous book I suppose the other side of the coin would be that when guitarists who composed either get faded out of music history or are known for all the non-guitar music they wrote figures like Berlioz and Villa-Lobos only provisionally made it into the canon because they, despite their respective chops on the guitar, mostly DIDN'T WRITE for it. I'm not counting Schubert as there's been arguments that the whole idea he even played guitar is more of a wish/urban legend.
It does seem that whether it's Britten or Ponce or Takemitsu or Castelnuovo-Tedesco a lot of the better solo guitar music has been composed by non-guitarists. I'm kind of a Frank Martin fan (his Mass is, I think, really good) so I'll add him in, too as another non-guitarist who wrote solid music for the instrument.
Lots of interesting perspectives. Even though I have played in a contemporary orchestral piece where I doubled on classical and electric guitar, I tend to think of the electric guitar as being such a radically different instrument that there should be a separate discussion of it. Mind you, I have seen recently that Sean Shine has been making a lot of waves by playing both classical and electric guitar (as well as Renaissance lute) so if he is a good model of what guitarists should be doing now, then why doesn't he get the big bookings (at least, outside the UK)?. Steven, would you comment?
I kind of think that the real point of my post had to do with why isn't there really great music for guitar. If there were, then audiences would want to hear it. I also speculate that perhaps the guitar, while having real strengths in certain coloristic repertoire, just is too limited a solo instrument.
Bloody autocorrect! I wrote "Sean Shibe" of course.
Well, you have shifted the goalposts. The original issue was composing audience grabbing new content, not the same repertoire. My point was just that acoustic guitar is limited as a solo instrument when paired with orchestra so anyone who comes up with great orchestral material would use it on a violin or cello or piano concerto rather than "wasting" it on a guitar concerto. Writing for clean tone electric guitar is not "rock" music these days but at least jazz. Classical compositions with clean tone electric guitar have been written before and continue to be written. But as I said, you have more flexibility as a composer with it, including stylistically. So it should be easier to write interesting material and no more difficult to play. Have younger people under 40 had any contact with the classic acoustic guitar style? The guitar greats you cite were old 20 years ago.
Sean Shibe was old 20 years ago?
Also, this isn't about concerto repertoire specifically. Because I cited the Concierto de Aranjuez, we seem to have gotten fixated on that.
I was talking about Bream, Williams etc. not Sean Shibe who was never at that level. If you have your own answer to your question it would be best to state it clearly so we can respond to it. Both The Hatchet and myself are noting that composers today who would be capable of writing whatever type of audience grabbing new material for the acoustic guitar you are seeking are not going to waste their time that way, particularly anything orchestral or large ensemble. They might do something with clean tone electric guitar though. You didn't dispute my point that people under 40 simply have had no contact with the old classic acoustic guitar style and you can't reach them anymore with that.
I'm having deja vu -- I'm sure we've had discussion before!
The two players who fill out halls here are Milos and Sean Shibe. I would say Milos through marketing and Shibe through imaginative programming and yes -- I admit this somewhat reluctantly -- his use of electric guitar. However, the last purely classical recital of his that I went to was packed. And the centrepiece of the programme was a new 20 minute solo work by Thomas Ades that may be the best thing written for the instrument in some time (I'd have to hear it again before I can say this with confidence). Which would support the argument that very good new repertoire is what's needed.
I thought Shibe did get good bookings in Germany, where I believe he now lives, but I could be wrong. Shibe's also done some well-received work with singers, which I think is a more promising route for the guitar than orchestras. There are still prominent acoustic guitar singer-songwriters within popular music, after all. Though the guitar generally, including electric, seems to be going out of fashion. The guitar has gone through rather dramatic rises and falls in its approx. 500 year history, and it looks like were at the fall stage again.
Yes Steven, Bryan revisits this topic frequently but I fear we don't give him the answer he is looking for. I'm a former HS violinist unlike you guitarists anyway. Just so we have a frame of reference when you say Milos/Shibe fill halls, the Carnegie Hall in NY has 3 theaters: the Stern with 2800 seats, the 599-seat Zankel Hall and the 268-seat Weill Recital Hall. Which are you approximately referring to with Milos/Shibe? I can well understand Shibe relocating to Germany which still has an active classical music audience.
Also as you note we have to sharply distinguish the guitar as soloist vs accompaniment. It couldn't be more ubiquitous in the pop world. I myself have advocated for classical guitarists to be more aggressive in accompanying other soloists in chamber music. If Shibe is doing that then kudos to him. Although these are small audience events they'd increase the visibility of the instrument. I suspect that most current classical guitarists dream of filling Carnegie Stern Hall as soloist with orchestra which is not practical career management.
As for Thomas Ades he is one of a small number of current classical composers that has made even a slight impression. I looked up Shibe playing Ades on Bachtrack and there is one concert in Switzerland. However it is unclear the size of the space at Lugano Theater where he is performing. It is not the main hall with 1000 seats but the Teatrostudio which didn't have a description I could find. The Ades work is Forgotten Dances. He also plays works by Frank Martin a Swiss composer, Ginastera , and Villa Lobos. He is touring over sites in Australia in the Fall but the program appears to be entirely non-classical, based on traditional Scottish dances.
If we cast the net wider to include clean-tone electric guitar, as Maury has suggested, then surely Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint has managed to gain at least minor intra-guitar canonical status. Electric Counterpoint has more a claim to canonical status at this point than any of Glenn Branca's symphonies featuring electric guitars for the time being.
Of course Pat Methany wasn't and isn't a classical guitarist, which might just reinforce Ophee's earlier point alluded to earlier. However many centuries the guitar has been around, the longer it has been around the more overt the problem is that it has never featured in music festivals to any significant degree--the problem gets worse the older the guitar is considered to be. The pianoforte isn't "that" much older than the modern six-stringed guitar, is it?
The Hatchet
The different performance histories of the piano and the guitar are due to the change from the fortepiano to the pianoforte. The fortepiano was developed around 1700 and through the 18th C was a lightweight rather tinkly instrument more piano than forte as can be heard on recordings or YT. I am not a guitar expert but I thought there were 4 and 5 string guitars even by the end of the Renaissance. The 6 string was in the 18th C . But when the pianoforte was developed it was game over because of its sheer dynamic prowess which increased steadily in the 19th C. Also the arrangement of the piano keyboard is maximally efficient for the use of two hands. The guitar is even more difficult given its layout than the harp in combining chords with melody. So that's why the strum! The ease of strumming and its resultant ubiquity has probably tainted the guitar in the classical world.
Sorry The Hatchet I can't get used to the new format for IDs here.
Apologies to all for my absence from the discussion! After getting back from Salzburg I was jet-lagged, swamped with work and then came down with a bad cold that I am just now getting over.
Thanks for all the cogent comments! Yes, we have discussed this before. Let me explain my idiosyncratic stance on this. The fortunes of the guitar, as has been noted, have risen and fallen over the centuries. I came along around 1970 and was a professional concert artist between 1975 and 1995 when I switched to musicology. I witnessed a decline in audiences throughout that whole time as the surge in interest sparked by Segovia slowly ebbed. But I was always accepted as a peer by my pianist, violinist, flautist, singer and composer colleagues (though not by university administrators!). I think a lot of this was due to my being a good musician, but mostly a good chamber music player. Over the years I played virtually the entire repertoire for voice and guitar, violin and guitar, flute and guitar, guitar duo, and larger ensembles such as the Villa-Lobos sextet.
So what I would expect, at this point in time is perhaps not any solo recitals by guitarists in major music festivals but certainly some chamber music with guitar. But instead, the only similar instrument you see is the theorbo. To me this is a bit of a puzzlement.
I was thinking it was simply a repertoire problem--our repertoire is simply not good enough. Thanks, by the way for providing a couple of good examples: Adès Forgotten Dances and Reich Electric Counterpoint. Perhaps we could add some pieces by Takemitsu. I guess my subtext here is that the classical guitar provides a unique voice and atmosphere, so why is it so thoroughly excluded from the stage?
I'd definitely add pieces by Takemitsu. Toward the Sea for alto flute and guitar is one of the best works ever written for that combination of instruments.
Ophee covered most of the prejudices pretty well. That you went out and did what he suggested guitarists do explains why people take YOU seriously but not the guitar or guitarists more generally. Ophee, were he still with us, would say you're a case in point of someone who got his message whether you heard it from him or not.
I never really thought about it--it just seemed perfectly obvious that you should play as much chamber music as possible because it extends the field of possibility aesthetically and you reach more people. Plus, there is a lot of good music there and one does get tired of playing the same solo repertoire over and over.
I just noticed that Mark Anthony Turnage has written an electric guitar concerto for Simon Rattle's 70th birthday. John Scofield will be playing the guitar part, with Rattle conducting LSO. Could be interesting.
Maury, I forgot to answer your question, apologies! Approx 500 seat halls -- Wigmore, LSO St Luke's, King's Place. I don't get the impression that the guitar is ubiqutious in the pop world anymore. When I sample the top charting songs, I don't often hear much guitar. Sometimes an acoustic guitar tinkles gently in the background. The cultural enthusiasm for the electric guitar 'strapped on and brandished like a livid dildo' (as Scruton memorably described it!) has surely passed.
Steven, could you possibly run a link of that by me when one becomes available. That has me curious.
We might be more likely to hear ukuleles than guitars these days. :) I don't have a problem with ukuleles or banjos, I just like the guitar better.
Will try to remember! Concert is in January, and will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 apparently. I had heard rumours about a guitar concerto by Turnage a few years back, though I didn't realise it would be electric.
I would like to hear that concerto.
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