Hispanic Citharae Ars Viva

I haven't thought about my time in Alicante in detail for a long time and I don't recall exactly what we did in the very first lesson. But I do recall that we did not spend time on technical exercises. Instead, one of the first things Tomás did was to have me work on some simple pieces from this collection:

As you can see, it is well worn. I bought this in 1974 when I was in Spain. It was published in 1956 and is a collection of music for vihuela by Valderrábano, Milán, Mudarra and Narváez from the 16th century. One of the first pieces I learned was this one:

I needed to start with something simple because I had not been taught the basics in any organized way. But this is not the kind of piece any other teacher would likely have assigned. José Tomás was unusual in that he had a particularly strong interest in early music: the vihuelistas of the 16th century, the English lutenists of the 16th century, Girolamo Frescobaldi of the 17th century and J. S. Bach and Sylvius Leopold Weiss, both of the 18th century. He took a scholarly approach and made a number of his own transcriptions of their music for guitar. His fingerings are particularly highly regarded. If I had been with a more conventional teacher I likely would have been put through a hearty list of studies by Aguado, Giuliani and Sor. But instead he had me work on this which cultivates one's sensitivity to counterpoint and voice-leading. One of the things Tomás was known for was playing an eight string guitar so he wouldn't have to leave out those low bass notes in Weiss.

I'm sorry to say that I don't recall every piece that we worked on, but they included the first English Suite by John Duarte, Villa-Lobos Etudes (just nos 1 and 8), the Prelude no. 1 by Villa-Lobos, the first Cello Suite by Bach, studies by Stephen Dodgson and I think some preludes by Manuel Ponce. It is hard to recall because I collected a lot of Tomás' transcriptions while I was there but didn't work on them until much later. These included a Fantasia by John Dowland, La Frescobalda by Frescobaldi, and some Bach.

One week I took the Cello Suite No. 1 to him and played the prelude. This was in the transcription in D major by John Duarte with added bass lines that nearly everyone was playing. Tomás didn't actually say anything, he just picked up his guitar and dug out an edition for cello of the suites. He sight-read through the first suite in the original key of G major, which he could do on his eight string. Then he just said, in this key it sounds full and rich and doesn't need any added bass notes. Very true. And frankly, the problem with adding bass notes to Bach is that they are never as good as what Bach himself might have written.

I didn't get to it when I was in Spain, but years later I took Tomás' advice and figured out how to play the suite as close to the original key as possible. You can do it in A major, just a tone higher, if you tune the sixth string to D. After working on the whole suite for a while, I decided that it worked very well if you also tuned the third string to F#, which we usually did for lute and vihuela music. Here is my recording of the Prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1 played in A major. These are exactly the notes the cello plays, nothing added.

That's enough for one post. Next time I will talk about what it was like living in Alicante, Spain and the other guitar students that were there.

The Journey: Alicante, Spain

How did I end up going to Spain to study guitar? As part of my discovery of classical music I discovered that classical guitar existed. One of the first albums I owned was Christopher Parkening's debut album. which contained a recording of the Chaconne from the Partita no. 2 for solo violin in D minor. This is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, probably the longest single movement in the whole Baroque period. When Segovia decided to transcribe it for guitar, that was a moment of sheer genius. It sounds great on guitar and went a long way to win the classical guitar a place on the concert stage.

As I started my classical guitar journey I was surprised to discover that the only people I could go to for lessons were themselves amateurs of limited ability. The classical guitar did not exist in the West Coast Canadian musical scene. So after going to a succession of guitar teachers and leaving them after six months when I had learned everything they had to teach I ended up commuting to Vancouver which involved a four-hour bus and ferry trip. I had discovered a good teacher named Teo Bagchus who had studied in Spain with José Tomás. After a few months with him he suggested that I needed to go to Spain as well. He told me a little about Tomás and I realized that this was the maestro I had been looking for. In some ways the classical guitar world is a little like a medieval guild--you have to go sit at the feet of a master.

So I said to Teo, "what do I do? Phone him? Write a letter?" Teo said, "well, he doesn't answer letters and he doesn't have a phone. You have to go and knock on his door." In order to get ready for this trip I needed some cash so I went to work for the BC Ministry of Education in the data services branch--the only normal job I have ever had. I realized I had to have a proper concert guitar and my research revealed that there was a builder in Madrid, José Ramirez, that had made guitars for Segovia, so I wrote to them and ordered one to be picked up when I arrived in Spain. The cost back then was a mere $650 CAN.

I arrived in Madrid in January of 1974 and spent most of the year there. My visit to the Ramirez store was interesting. They gave me a guitar to try out and after hearing me play a little Manuel Ponce, they escorted me downstairs to a private room. The walls were lined with guitars in glass cases, some once having belonged to Segovia.

I keep mentioning Andrés Segovia assuming you know who I mean. He was born in 1893, played his first concert in 1909 and his last in Los Angeles in 1987 when he was 94. He passed away a few months later. He never retired. He put the classical guitar on the international concert stage almost single-handed. His notable disciples included Alirio Diaz from Venezuela, Oscar Ghiglia from Italy, José Tomás from Spain and a later generation including Michael Lorimer from the US and John Williams from England. I had the good fortune to study with Oscar Ghiglia as well as José Tomás. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I got to choose among three or four Ramirez guitars, all of them first-class concert instruments. Then I jumped on the train to Alicante. The folks in the Ramirez store kindly gave me Tomás' address. I remember it was Taquigrafo Marti something. So I went and, somewhat apprehensively, knocked on his door. He lived in a second floor apartment. A rather large man answered the door and when he heard I was a student of Teo, he was quite friendly. He asked what I was working on and when I mentioned a couple of etudes by Villa-Lobos that seemed to be an adequate audition. He said he was leaving for Japan to give master-classes there and would be back in three weeks and we could start lessons then.

Speaking of auditions, I forgot to mention my audition for UVic. When I first arrived at the music department a few weeks before classes were due to start, they told me I had to audition which I hadn't realized. I didn't even have my guitar with me. The secretary beckoned a tall distinguished gentleman over. This was George Corwin, the conductor of the choir and orchestra. He took me into a little practice room with a piano and had me sing back some high and low notes. Then he played some intervals for me to sing back and finally some chords asking if they were major, minor or diminished. It took about two minutes. As I had been singing in a rock and blues band for a few years, it was not difficult. The truth is, you can actually tell if someone has much musical ability this easily.

Here I have written a whole post and I haven't even gotten to my first lesson with Tomás. Next time! Let's end with one of those etudes by Villa-Lobos. This is no. 8 and sorry I don't have my own recording of it.

This is John Williams:

The Journey: University

 My entry into a music program at university was probably the major turning point of my life. Which university? The University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The only reason this was possible was because we had moved to a smaller town on Vancouver Island in 1965. Prior to that I lived in northern BC and Alberta. No universities up there back then. But UVic was only a two and a half hour drive from where we lived.

It was a major turning point not just for my musical life, but for my intellectual life. For the first time I realized that I was intellectually starved. One look at the million book university library and I realized just how big the world of ideas really was. Living on campus, my pianist roommate and I took out the maximum number of records from the listening library every day: six. I had never seen a listening library before. Recall that this was in 1971, no streaming and even poor selection at record stores. We had hardly heard any of the classical canon.

But so many doors were open: my courses included German, Linguistics, English Literature, Philosophy, Music Theory, Ear-Training, Music History, Choir and private lessons. I was a guitar player and I expected guitar lessons. However, the guitar teacher had moved away and there was no replacement--literally, there was no qualified guitar teacher in Victoria. The university didn't offer a guitar program until 1985 when they hired me to start one. There's an irony for you! So, what they signed me up for were piano lessons. Of course, this was perfectly reasonable from their point of view. Playing piano was a necessity if you wanted to be a music theorist or historian or a conductor and so on. But from my point of view it was absurd. I also was assigned an ensemble: a trio in which I played lute. Yes, they had a lute and they thought I could play it. It wasn't the lute that was the problem--the music we were playing was Machaut. Recall that less than a year prior I had been playing bass in a rock and blues band. I was not ready for medieval rhythms and counterpoint.

But the best part was the whole university context. I was surrounded by people who came from musical families, who were already virtuosos, who studied Greek in private school, who came from wealthy or at least prosperous families. I was so engaged in my studies that I hardly realized that my class background was rather different. Yes, I came from fourteen generations of dirt farmers, mostly on the Canadian prairies. I was the first one to set foot on a university campus.

I solved my personal problem, of needing a real guitar teacher by leaving UVic and going to Alicante, Spain to study with the great maestro José Tomás. But that was in the future. What I really got out of the first couple of years of university was an introduction to music history and theory, a fantastic course in philosophy where I met Bishop Berkeley, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume and Plato, a wonderful course in English literature where I met Theodore Roethke, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka and others and an entirely new life.

I spent two years at UVic and in 1974 I flew to Spain, my first time out of Canada and I didn't speak a word of Spanish. I will describe my time there in the next post.

Here is a piece by Machaut. It doesn't sound too hard, but for someone who had spent much of his musical life playing B. B. King and The Rolling Stones, it was quite a challenge.

The Journey: Beginnings

It just occurred to me, while I was playing the Sarabande to the 3rd Lute Suite a few minutes ago, that I have been playing guitar for sixty years. Yes, I'm pretty sure I started playing around July 1966 on electric bass. I actually wanted to play drums, but it cost too much to rent a drum kit and, as my mother explained, bass guitar was also in the rhythm section. My favorite music back then was a couple of songs by Eric Burden and the Animals. But I soon discovered The Monkees, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. Six months after taking up the bass guitar (on which I had one lesson) I was in a band and soon after that we played our first engagement, a dance in a tiny community hall for which we received the sum of $6.50 each. Something like that, my memory is a little hazy!

As time went on I got a six-string acoustic guitar and finally an electric, an old Gibson Les Paul jr from the 50s. I had a Yamaha amp. We played a lot of little gigs including high-school dances and I doubt we ever made more than 50 bucks. Except New Years when live music was at a premium.

After three or four years of this I discovered classical music and started listening to stacks of old vinyl records of Debussy, Schubert, Dvořák, Beethoven, Bach and others. In the town library I discovered books on music history and ran across names like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. I started buying as many records as I could afford (not many, but cheap vinyl you could get for 90¢ or $1.20. The expensive new issues, like The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky on Columbia might run $2.98.)

After a year or so of this, I realized that I could go to university and study music. I had already taught myself how to read music so I could write down arrangements. I had written some forty songs as well--all lost in the mists of time along with a recording I made of a few of them, plus "The Thrill is Gone" by B. B. King.

The things I recall as having the greatest impact back then were the first time I heard the Mass in B minor by Bach and singing in the university choir--we did the Mozart Requiem and the Te Deum by Bruckner. This was in 1971-72.

This is obviously going to be in a bunch of parts, so let's end here with the Bruckner conducted by Sergiu Celibidache. So I went from Eric Burden and the Animals to Bruckner in five years.

What I'm reading now

 My last post on this topic was in May, so I have some catching up to do. Here is what I have read and am reading since then:

A quick and easy read where the novelist Tom Wolfe takes a stab at explaining the origins of all the remarkably ugly post WWII architecture.

Ishiguro certainly appears to be a Japanese novelist, but his family moved to England in 1960 when he was six years old, so he could equally qualify as an English novelist. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a delicate and sensitive account of the fading of some aspects of English culture, a bit like Downton Abbey. But it is rendered in pastel tones.

Gogol's short stories are bordering on madness: witches, crazy peasants, weird costumes and weirder tales. However, this collection contains the absurd short story The Nose that Dmitri Shostakovich set as his first opera. Worth a read for sure.

Friedrich Schiller wrote the poem that Beethoven used as text in the last movement of his Symphony No. 9. He was a renowned playwright and aesthetic theorist. Unfortunately I got almost nothing from this collection of essays other than a headache. Too much foggy German abstraction.

Bashō is the great 17th century Japanese poet famous for his haiku. He wrote the most famous haiku of all:

Breaking the silence

Of an ancient pond

A frog jumped into water --

A deep resonance

The book is a collection of several travel sketches where Bashō recounts his lengthy travels in prose and poetry. The beauty of nature is the central theme. A wonderful book.

This novel is weird in a way that I suspect only an Icelandic writer could be. I really have no idea what it is about. A young man is tasked with traveling to a remote village to check up on whether the local pastor is doing his job properly or not. The village lies next to a glacier which plays an important role. Why was someone buried on the glacier instead of in the graveyard? Why is the church boarded up? Who is this mysterious woman who appears? You don't find out the answers to these and many other questions. For all that, it was an enjoyable read. I'm just not sure why. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

* * *

Those books were all completed. Here is what I am reading right now:

The Bhagavad Gita is the most popular portion of the epic poem Mahabharata and was composed sometime around the second century BC. Peter Weir used a quote from the Third Discourse as the theme to his wonderful film The Year of Living Dangerously. In the film the quote is "wisdom is clouded by desire, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust." The Bhagavad Gita bears a vague resemblance to the Tao Te Ching in its collection of contradictions that might lead to wisdom.

Vincent Van Gogh was a surprisingly good letter-writer. These were mostly written to his brother Theo with whom he had a close relationship. I'm only a short way into it so I don't have anything to say, but it seems quite promising. Decades ago I read the similar collection Dear Theo but this is a new translation.

I was given a copy of this years ago by a girlfriend but I never got around to reading it. Now that I am, about two-thirds through, I can say without hesitation that this is a horrible book about a horrible character who commits horrible crimes. It is fascinating in the way a traffic accident is fascinating. The literary hook that the book hangs on is that a portrait is painted of a handsome young scion of the nobility. As he ages, he retains his good looks while his portrait takes on the ugliness of his soul. Unfortunately Dorian Gray is simply a fanatically narcissistic sociopath who can wreak emotional damage on the vulnerable, murder a friend and blackmail another friend into disposing of the body and do it all without the slightest moral conscience. I wonder if my girlfriend was trying to tell me something?

* * *

What am I listening to?

This gorgeous collection of Haydn's "Sturm und Drang" symphonies with Trevor Pinnock conducting the English Concert. In many ways the finest symphonies ever written. You be the judge, here is the first symphony in the box:

Hail Rick Beato

 This is today's listening:

I am hardly posting anything these days, but this is such a beautiful post with such beautiful music. I respect Rick Beato more than anyone else in pop music these days because he is such an unbiased and sensitive listener. He has earned the huge following he has. This post only went up sixteen hours ago and already has 1,600 comments,

If anyone is interested, I might put up a post on what I'm reading right now in a few days. It includes the Bhagavad Gita and Oscar Wilde!

Lots of new releases from Naxos