After Segovia: Can the Guitar Still Interest “Everyone”?
Speech at Convention in Pontedera
Segovia said: “The artist is a man like the others, and he mustn’t ever fall in love with himself. He would irreparably lose something …Like the others, with an extra marvelous gift: and for this gift he must always be close to every other man.”
It’s undeniable that Segovia’s career has also had this effect, beyond others: he didn’t only make sure that the music world noticed the guitar, but he brought, through the guitar, many other people to classical music, so that the guitar became, to say a happy expression by Oscar Ghiglia (from Livorno, so we’re not off subject!), an ambassador of classical music. But I believe that the key to this universal success must be looked at in what seems in us a paradox: Segovia touched “everyone” because really he maintained the level of his study and proposal extremely high. Actually, he went towards the essence of artistic value, which can be understood by man in as much as man – “The artist is a man like the others” – and so he could be “close to every other man”, according to a definition of genius that I read: the genius is he who expresses what the others wouldn’t be able to say, but recognize as their own.”
The profound conference by Carlos Andrés Segovia published by the Segovia Foundation in Linares suggests, to understand the work of Segovia, this course of enlarging circles, like zooming out: from music to beauty, to metaphysics, to man.
Let’s also remember some of the best comments by the Maestro: “the guitarists need to think more about the music than the guitar”, “music is an ocean, instruments are only islands”; he said, furthermore, that a guitarist must be illuminated by the “sun of Culture”. I was present at one of the last interviews of Segovia (in Milan, 1985); he was asked, “Maestro, what’s left in the end?” And he said, “In the end remains goodness”.
Filippo Michelangeli said recently that guitarists are good people; I thought that maybe this is due to the persistence of the influence of the personality that directly or indirectly drew us all to the guitar.
The universal success of Segovia also favored, we know, the beginning of a guitar “market”; a demand was created that justified the supply, and therefore the “professional category” of the guitarist. Like this, on the wave of this popularity, the guitar in the post-war period entered into the conservatories and an enormous number of professional guitarists appeared on the market, a bit in the entire world.
But at the same time the world of music, more and more, seems often fallen into that “falling in love with oneself” against what Segovia was worried about: I see it in much technique to its own end, a certain analytic and philological emphasis to its own end, in the sterile intellectualism so much avant-garde music to their own end.
In this period, let’s say starting from the ‘60s - ‘70s, the guitarists, finally welcomed thanks to Segovia’s work in official musical programming, often made a decisive error in my opinion: “cutting” with the tradition that they came from, they stopped referring to that “making music” in the high sense and therefore, to that universal public mentioned before, but they tried to conform rather to the then prevailing style in the “musical way”, making choices that in theory would have made them similar to the other instrumentalists and well-accepted, finally equal to the others, but practically made them lose their audience undermining their insertion in the market.
For example, the guitarists thought that it was necessary to emancipate themselves from the repertoire that they felt inadequate compared to what “the others” were playing. I remember the diatribe about transcriptions: it seemed due at all costs to only propose original repertoire and all the pieces in their unabridged version without being able to or wanting to assess the value in absolute terms – but it was, as I was saying, the air that was blowing in that period; I remember a caustic observation of the composer Niccolò Castiglioni: “the fashion of unabridged editions is the symptom of the inability to choose what counts” – or try out intellectualistic music by some contemporary authors that were fashionable.
The tendency to overcome the “anomaly” of our repertoire is recognizable even in the make-up of the guitar programs of study in the Italian conservatories. In my opinion, it remains a nice program, but one notices a bit within them that there’s a desire to be, as we say today, politically correct, for example eliminating all the transcriptions except those from lute, vihuela and antique guitar – but many colleagues wouldn’t even want those.
Also because of these choices (that run parallel, understandably, with a certain general and approving interpretative flatness, verifiable in other resources: a famous competition, for piano or violin I believe, recently shut down saying to have lost its function since one winner had become indistinguishable from another) the guitarist started to lose his audience, just that added audience that Segovia had won over to the guitar.
Then the concert seasons, that before invited guitarists because they “filled the hall”, had taken note of the mutated situation and the presence of the guitar in traditional musical life became much rarer (in this sense I agree with the analysis made by Filippo Michelangeli in an editorial in “Seicorde” some years ago).
In the meantime, guitarists were growing and multiplying, becoming a large catchment area for those who were more seen in teaching and publishing. So (I would say since the ‘80s) the second great error of our “scene” was that of believing to be able to replace that universal openness that had characterized the guitar boom (openness, I remember, in two ways: openness of the guitar to culture, to a world high in values, and at the same time openness to everyone, bringing the beauty of classical music to everyone) with a closure of the guitar upon itself and with an internal market, made up of aficionados of the guitar, a bit like the times before Segovia, even if with much greater technical resources of all kinds (from the general technical level of the guitarists nevertheless grown enormously, to the ease of publishing recordings and scores, to the ease of communications and of organizing events…). We resigned ourselves to be a small niche inside of the slightly larger niche of classical music lovers (“the guitar doesn’t even interest other musicians, go figure if it interests the others!” said someone recently however very active in organizing guitar events).
In the meantime, with the coming of the end of the 20th century, the once reigning intellectualism also in the music world has paid the price (and the guitar, yet again, has followed what’s popular): today we see set up against a little castled musical world in excessive defense of the ivory tower of an “academy”, an emerging boil of instinctiveness and “weak thought”.
This opposition can be seen even among guitarists; it’s enough to think about the phenomenon of some guitarist composers with their music between crossover and new age; tangos everywhere and so on, and in the entire world (I’ve played in 50 countries, the standardization that I’ve seen is truly frightening).
Today the “world of the guitar” is essentially too often a self-referring world in which the guitarist doesn’t have the people as interlocutors anymore – people (“close to all” said Segovia), but other guitarists and what the magazines and special forums say; and, if it opens up to the rest of the world, it does so in terms of musical populism, lowering itself to compromises with the music of consumption. This self-referencing, then, tends to perpetuate itself, because what does a young serious guitarist who wants to be up to date about what’s happening? Probably he subscribes to a guitar magazine, he goes to the closest or more famous festivals and guitar competitions, and what does he find? This self-celebratory world closed in on itself, a niche with its heroes and its fashions (the presence of the guitar in important musical contexts, when it happens, risks not finding any echo in these environments if, for example, the composer or performer in question – possibly objectively significant – aren’t among the names that “circulate” in the scene).
For me, who plays almost always for an audience of non-guitarists, the difference is impressive; for example, I recently played for a guitar festival in Mexico City and then right after, played the same program in San Francisco for a “normal” audience: they seemed two parallel universes that couldn’t communicate between them.
Even if today it appears lively and swarming with enterprises, it’s as if the world of the guitar, because of this break with its tradition, has undermined its foundation, and it were for this reason a “giant with clay feet”.
There’s a caustic observation regarding this that I read recently in the Sor method and it could be also applied to today:
“What was considered mastery of the instrument was just that which impeded the reaching of it”.
(Sor, Metodo)
Maybe it seems like a difficult phrase, but I’ll clarify it with another example. Recently one of my students went to hear a concert at a guitar festival. The audience went wild, but she says to the enthusiastic person next to her, “but this said nothing to me”. And he, as he turns around: “In fact, it’s true”. Just that which had made him applaud had impeded him to realize what was missing.
For me, the encounter with Segovia was a shock that put into motion a thinking process in continual evolution; of course, it’s important for me that the guitar “moves ahead” like Segovia himself had said to me, the last time that I met him in Madrid, that he hoped that it happened after him, but go ahead in that direction. The problem, to refer myself to a sometimes re-emerging torment, isn’t if there is or isn’t the new Segovia, but if we move ahead, as each one can, on that path of cultural openness and therefore openness to everything that he lived, or if we break with this tradition. Regarding myself, I intend all my professional activity as an attempt to bring along that tradition that I spoke of. This implicates doing some things that today I see very little; in the first place ask onesself the reasons of what one plays without taking for granted: “what does this say to me? And what can it say, therefore, to everyone?” (I remember a phrase by Belohradsky: “European tradition means not being able to ever live beyond awareness reducing it to an anonymous apparatus...”); an absolutely personal research, an attentive and personal comparison with the great compositional and performance tradition of the past to our days, the critical awareness of the value of our repertoire, that is extremely variegated, in relation with our needs.
One of the things that I’m doing in the direction of which I’m speaking is the proposal of a program, let’s say of a popular kind, that pairs the history of art with music. It’s a program that’s been highly requested: I’ve done it about a hundred times in the last couple of years going just about anywhere, from schools to universities to cultural centers, in the attempt to contribute to taking the music back to “everyone”; and the results are very encouraging.
Instead of talking about it I’ll show you an example of about five minutes, maybe we’ll be able to talk after.
The musical examples are taken from a series of three concerts on music and art about an hour long each one, with musical pieces from the Renaissance to today.
I only chose three examples, each one significant in its own way; a segovian transcription from Mendelssohn; a piece written for me by Gilberto Cappelli just for these occasions (think: a great composer – Cappelli also won the Abbiati prize – that writes brief pieces that even can be listened to by a schoolgirl) and one of my transcriptions of a piano piece by John Cage “A Room”.
Afterwards, I await your comments for a dialogue that I hope can continue on later.
Thank you.
Speech at Convention in Pontedera
Segovia said: “The artist is a man like the others, and he mustn’t ever fall in love with himself. He would irreparably lose something …Like the others, with an extra marvelous gift: and for this gift he must always be close to every other man.”
It’s undeniable that Segovia’s career has also had this effect, beyond others: he didn’t only make sure that the music world noticed the guitar, but he brought, through the guitar, many other people to classical music, so that the guitar became, to say a happy expression by Oscar Ghiglia (from Livorno, so we’re not off subject!), an ambassador of classical music. But I believe that the key to this universal success must be looked at in what seems in us a paradox: Segovia touched “everyone” because really he maintained the level of his study and proposal extremely high. Actually, he went towards the essence of artistic value, which can be understood by man in as much as man – “The artist is a man like the others” – and so he could be “close to every other man”, according to a definition of genius that I read: the genius is he who expresses what the others wouldn’t be able to say, but recognize as their own.”
The profound conference by Carlos Andrés Segovia published by the Segovia Foundation in Linares suggests, to understand the work of Segovia, this course of enlarging circles, like zooming out: from music to beauty, to metaphysics, to man.
Let’s also remember some of the best comments by the Maestro: “the guitarists need to think more about the music than the guitar”, “music is an ocean, instruments are only islands”; he said, furthermore, that a guitarist must be illuminated by the “sun of Culture”. I was present at one of the last interviews of Segovia (in Milan, 1985); he was asked, “Maestro, what’s left in the end?” And he said, “In the end remains goodness”.
Filippo Michelangeli said recently that guitarists are good people; I thought that maybe this is due to the persistence of the influence of the personality that directly or indirectly drew us all to the guitar.
The universal success of Segovia also favored, we know, the beginning of a guitar “market”; a demand was created that justified the supply, and therefore the “professional category” of the guitarist. Like this, on the wave of this popularity, the guitar in the post-war period entered into the conservatories and an enormous number of professional guitarists appeared on the market, a bit in the entire world.
But at the same time the world of music, more and more, seems often fallen into that “falling in love with oneself” against what Segovia was worried about: I see it in much technique to its own end, a certain analytic and philological emphasis to its own end, in the sterile intellectualism so much avant-garde music to their own end.
In this period, let’s say starting from the ‘60s - ‘70s, the guitarists, finally welcomed thanks to Segovia’s work in official musical programming, often made a decisive error in my opinion: “cutting” with the tradition that they came from, they stopped referring to that “making music” in the high sense and therefore, to that universal public mentioned before, but they tried to conform rather to the then prevailing style in the “musical way”, making choices that in theory would have made them similar to the other instrumentalists and well-accepted, finally equal to the others, but practically made them lose their audience undermining their insertion in the market.
For example, the guitarists thought that it was necessary to emancipate themselves from the repertoire that they felt inadequate compared to what “the others” were playing. I remember the diatribe about transcriptions: it seemed due at all costs to only propose original repertoire and all the pieces in their unabridged version without being able to or wanting to assess the value in absolute terms – but it was, as I was saying, the air that was blowing in that period; I remember a caustic observation of the composer Niccolò Castiglioni: “the fashion of unabridged editions is the symptom of the inability to choose what counts” – or try out intellectualistic music by some contemporary authors that were fashionable.
The tendency to overcome the “anomaly” of our repertoire is recognizable even in the make-up of the guitar programs of study in the Italian conservatories. In my opinion, it remains a nice program, but one notices a bit within them that there’s a desire to be, as we say today, politically correct, for example eliminating all the transcriptions except those from lute, vihuela and antique guitar – but many colleagues wouldn’t even want those.
Also because of these choices (that run parallel, understandably, with a certain general and approving interpretative flatness, verifiable in other resources: a famous competition, for piano or violin I believe, recently shut down saying to have lost its function since one winner had become indistinguishable from another) the guitarist started to lose his audience, just that added audience that Segovia had won over to the guitar.
Then the concert seasons, that before invited guitarists because they “filled the hall”, had taken note of the mutated situation and the presence of the guitar in traditional musical life became much rarer (in this sense I agree with the analysis made by Filippo Michelangeli in an editorial in “Seicorde” some years ago).
In the meantime, guitarists were growing and multiplying, becoming a large catchment area for those who were more seen in teaching and publishing. So (I would say since the ‘80s) the second great error of our “scene” was that of believing to be able to replace that universal openness that had characterized the guitar boom (openness, I remember, in two ways: openness of the guitar to culture, to a world high in values, and at the same time openness to everyone, bringing the beauty of classical music to everyone) with a closure of the guitar upon itself and with an internal market, made up of aficionados of the guitar, a bit like the times before Segovia, even if with much greater technical resources of all kinds (from the general technical level of the guitarists nevertheless grown enormously, to the ease of publishing recordings and scores, to the ease of communications and of organizing events…). We resigned ourselves to be a small niche inside of the slightly larger niche of classical music lovers (“the guitar doesn’t even interest other musicians, go figure if it interests the others!” said someone recently however very active in organizing guitar events).
In the meantime, with the coming of the end of the 20th century, the once reigning intellectualism also in the music world has paid the price (and the guitar, yet again, has followed what’s popular): today we see set up against a little castled musical world in excessive defense of the ivory tower of an “academy”, an emerging boil of instinctiveness and “weak thought”.
This opposition can be seen even among guitarists; it’s enough to think about the phenomenon of some guitarist composers with their music between crossover and new age; tangos everywhere and so on, and in the entire world (I’ve played in 50 countries, the standardization that I’ve seen is truly frightening).
Today the “world of the guitar” is essentially too often a self-referring world in which the guitarist doesn’t have the people as interlocutors anymore – people (“close to all” said Segovia), but other guitarists and what the magazines and special forums say; and, if it opens up to the rest of the world, it does so in terms of musical populism, lowering itself to compromises with the music of consumption. This self-referencing, then, tends to perpetuate itself, because what does a young serious guitarist who wants to be up to date about what’s happening? Probably he subscribes to a guitar magazine, he goes to the closest or more famous festivals and guitar competitions, and what does he find? This self-celebratory world closed in on itself, a niche with its heroes and its fashions (the presence of the guitar in important musical contexts, when it happens, risks not finding any echo in these environments if, for example, the composer or performer in question – possibly objectively significant – aren’t among the names that “circulate” in the scene).
For me, who plays almost always for an audience of non-guitarists, the difference is impressive; for example, I recently played for a guitar festival in Mexico City and then right after, played the same program in San Francisco for a “normal” audience: they seemed two parallel universes that couldn’t communicate between them.
Even if today it appears lively and swarming with enterprises, it’s as if the world of the guitar, because of this break with its tradition, has undermined its foundation, and it were for this reason a “giant with clay feet”.
There’s a caustic observation regarding this that I read recently in the Sor method and it could be also applied to today:
“What was considered mastery of the instrument was just that which impeded the reaching of it”.
(Sor, Metodo)
Maybe it seems like a difficult phrase, but I’ll clarify it with another example. Recently one of my students went to hear a concert at a guitar festival. The audience went wild, but she says to the enthusiastic person next to her, “but this said nothing to me”. And he, as he turns around: “In fact, it’s true”. Just that which had made him applaud had impeded him to realize what was missing.
For me, the encounter with Segovia was a shock that put into motion a thinking process in continual evolution; of course, it’s important for me that the guitar “moves ahead” like Segovia himself had said to me, the last time that I met him in Madrid, that he hoped that it happened after him, but go ahead in that direction. The problem, to refer myself to a sometimes re-emerging torment, isn’t if there is or isn’t the new Segovia, but if we move ahead, as each one can, on that path of cultural openness and therefore openness to everything that he lived, or if we break with this tradition. Regarding myself, I intend all my professional activity as an attempt to bring along that tradition that I spoke of. This implicates doing some things that today I see very little; in the first place ask onesself the reasons of what one plays without taking for granted: “what does this say to me? And what can it say, therefore, to everyone?” (I remember a phrase by Belohradsky: “European tradition means not being able to ever live beyond awareness reducing it to an anonymous apparatus...”); an absolutely personal research, an attentive and personal comparison with the great compositional and performance tradition of the past to our days, the critical awareness of the value of our repertoire, that is extremely variegated, in relation with our needs.
One of the things that I’m doing in the direction of which I’m speaking is the proposal of a program, let’s say of a popular kind, that pairs the history of art with music. It’s a program that’s been highly requested: I’ve done it about a hundred times in the last couple of years going just about anywhere, from schools to universities to cultural centers, in the attempt to contribute to taking the music back to “everyone”; and the results are very encouraging.
Instead of talking about it I’ll show you an example of about five minutes, maybe we’ll be able to talk after.
The musical examples are taken from a series of three concerts on music and art about an hour long each one, with musical pieces from the Renaissance to today.
I only chose three examples, each one significant in its own way; a segovian transcription from Mendelssohn; a piece written for me by Gilberto Cappelli just for these occasions (think: a great composer – Cappelli also won the Abbiati prize – that writes brief pieces that even can be listened to by a schoolgirl) and one of my transcriptions of a piano piece by John Cage “A Room”.
Afterwards, I await your comments for a dialogue that I hope can continue on later.
Thank you.