Stradivarius Guitars

I'll bet you didn't even know there was such a thing as a guitar built by Stradivarius. The late 17th and early 18th centuries were a particular golden era for the guitar and it was a hugely popular instrument in the royal courts of Europe so it was inevitable he would have built some. There are four guitars by Stradivarius still in existence and here is an excellent website with lots of photos.

There are some modern copies that are played by performers specializing in historical performance, but the Stradivarius guitars occupy a tiny position in the modern musical world, compared to their violin and cello cousins. Why is that?

Here is an interesting thing about guitars and violins. The violin top (and bottom, though that is less important) is vaulted as you can probably see in this photo of a Stradivarius violin:

This gives the top a great deal of structural integrity, making for a long life. The top of the guitar, however, is flat. This top, moreover, is twisted by the tension from the bridge. In a modern instrument this amounts to some 125 lbs of torque. After twenty to thirty years, the acoustic integrity of the top starts to go and significant loss of sound is the result.

But the vaulted top of a violin, with a different sort of bridge entirely and supported internally with a bass bar, is far stronger.

True, the guitar also has internal strutting, which does help, but the flat top makes for a short lifespan compared to the violin.

UPDATE [Oct. 28, 2012]: This post keeps being popular so I am updating it by including a musical clip of Baroque guitar. Here are the first four movements of the best-known suite by Robert de Visée (1655 - 1733) including the Prelude, Allemande, Courante and Sarabande. The guitarist is Rob MacKillop and the guitar looks quite a bit like a reproduction of a Stradivarius.

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History of a Composition

I've been a composer nearly all my life, but for most of that time composition has had a distinctly secondary role. Often I composed simply because I needed repertoire for a certain combination of instruments. I have a good friend who is a fine violist and there is absolutely no good repertoire for viola and guitar so I have written a couple of pieces. I used to coach guitar ensembles and discovered that even after months or years of rehearsal, it is extremely difficult to get multiple guitars to play exactly together. Just listen to a recording of Julian Bream and John Williams. I wrote one piece that was an etude in ensemble, but that succeeded more in demonstrating the problem than in solving it. Finally I decided to write a piece for guitar ensemble that would pose no ensemble problems: the guitars would simply not be required to play together! Here is the piece:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Let me explain how this works: there is a conductor who cues the beginning and the progress through the piece. The score is a flow-chart. You start at the top and follow the lines, therefore everyone plays the top box, but then you have a choice of one of the two boxes below. That top box is a rather odd effect where, by crossing the 6th and 5th strings over one another and holding with the left hand and then by playing rasgueado (a kind of flamenco strumming) you get a nicely noisy, chaotic sound. I premiered this with an ensemble of ten guitars and having all ten start with that is a nice shock to the audience. With the next level down, all the guitars are either playing Bartok 'snap' pizzicatos or harmonics. As we move through the piece, pitched notes gradually predominate until at the ending we hear only melody. The way I conduct it, I keep going back to that opening chaotic gesture which I bring back in by cuing one or more guitars to return to that box, threatening to overwhelm whatever is going on. I end the piece by having a few guitars move to the final box, #10, while most stay with the chords on #9. Then I mix in more and more of box #1 until the melody is lost in the chaos. Then I chop off everyone except the guitars playing the melody and let it just float around and trail off...

It is actually pretty effective in concert and, since no-one has to worry about ensemble, they can, theoretically, be more creative.

The music obviously has flamenco influences as we can see from the chords of #6 and #7. I have never analyzed the piece, it was written purely from instinct.

The original title was "Forms" which is quite appropriate as the piece can have many different forms and will be different every time you play it. It is really a kind of toolbox for building a piece from scratch with the contents laid out, but with the flow determined completely by the conductor and players. I changed the title when it was published together with two other pieces for guitar ensemble because I had this great title and the piece it was supposed to be the title of never got past the sketch stage. It was originally going to be a 'string quartet' for mandolin, guitar, harpsichord and double bass.

I have a recording of this piece and if I get a chance to convert it to a digital file I will update this post with it.

But in the meantime, comments?

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Programming

After some forty years as a musician, I am finally pretty sure about what counts as good music! When I think of some of the pieces I subjected poor, innocent audiences to over the years, I weep.

Don't get me wrong, Henze has written some great pieces, but this arrangement, by Leo Brouwer from El Cimmaron isn't one of them. Then there is this piece:

It is not bad, but compared to the equivalent piano music it is dull, dull, dull. Now here is a fine piece for guitar:

Sorry for the sound quality of these clips...

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Discipline and Joy

When I switched from electric guitar and bass and acoustic steel string guitar to classical guitar around age 19 it was as profound a change as a Buddhist suddenly deciding to become Jewish or an Amish becoming a hip-hop artist. I described it in terms of a change in instruments--a small one, really from steel string guitar to nylon string--but it was really a profound aesthetic and philosophical one. I decided, over a period of a few months, to learn to be a classical guitarist and to stop being a guitarist who played popular music. I say 'popular' music--what I mean is "all that music that is not classical". I stopped buying popular records--I didn't even buy Abbey Road when it came out. Instead I started buying records of Dvorak, Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, Faure, Tchaikovsky and more Bach. I taught myself to read music by learning how to write it. I took classical guitar lessons. Before then I didn't really study music. Oh, I had a couple of lessons right when I started on bass guitar, but they didn't amount to much. How I learned to play was by listening and by forming a band. We learned together. Sort of. But as soon as I discovered classical music I realized this was a whole new ball game. No violinist learned how to play the Tchaikovsky concerto without studying. Big time. So after I had gone to two or three teachers and found out that they themselves hadn't actually studied the instrument seriously, I finally went to Spain early in 1974. At that time in Canada, believe it or not, there was hardly a single guitar teacher in Canada that was truly qualified.

I spend nearly a year in Spain, in the medium-sized town of Alicante, where there lived a fellow named Jose Tomas that you have probably never heard of. The greatest classical guitarist in the world at that time was Andres Segovia and there was a small circle of--could we call them disciples?--around him. Alirio Diaz from Venezuela, Oscar Ghiglia from Italy, John Williams from the UK, Michael Lorimer from the US and Jose Tomas from Spain. These guitarists were the second generation, at least counting from Segovia. The least well-known of them was probably Jose Tomas. But he was selected to be Segovia's assistant at the big annual master class in Santiago de Compostella. Jose Tomas lived in Alicante, surrounded by his own group of students from the US, Japan and Europe. It was this group I joined. I spent about six hours a day practicing guitar, doing technique, learning new repertoire. The rest of the time I went to lunch with some fellow students and read Russian novels. That's it. When I went to Spain I was a hack classical guitarist. When I got back, about a year later, I was a real classical guitarist. A few months after getting back I decided to continue my formal music education and auditioned to enter the performance program at McGill University in Montreal--then, and now, the finest music school in Canada. I played the best audition they had ever seen (which included the Theme and Variations by Lennox Berkeley).

What is the point of telling you all this? Just fond reminiscences? No! As my mother often reminded me, I don't have a lick of common sense. But there are some things I just know intuitively. One of them is the importance--and joy--of discipline. What I did in that year in Spain, during which I really learned how to play, was discipline. Every morning I would get up, have churros y chocolate across the street, then come back to my room and practice. I would start with simple exercises: slurs, arpeggios, scales, playing them in different ways at different speeds, until they were absolutely automatic. Then I would take up the new piece I was working on. Section by section I would memorize it. Then I would play over some older repertoire. This would take three hours. Then I would go for lunch. In the late afternoon, I would do it all again. And I did this day after day, week after week, month after month. A set of strings would be worn out in less than two weeks.

A very fine flute-player (who became principle flute in an orchestra) I used to perform with once said that everyone who really learned how to play did the core work in about a year of absolute total effort. Everything else is just refinement and trimming the edges. Don't know if that is true for everyone. But my point here is that mastery demands discipline. It can come in different ways. The way I did it is certainly not unusual. For the Beatles, it was probably the couple of years they spent playing clubs in Hamburg.

What drives people to this level of discipline? It might come naturally to some, but to others it is something they adopt because they have to. I think for me it was the vision that I talked about in this post. I don't remember the moment of epiphany--and that probably means it wasn't a moment. It was probably a phase of gradually clearing vision, like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. It might have taken months. All I know is that at the time the Beatles White Album came out, in November 1968, that was all I was interested in, musically. But by the time Abbey Road came out, in October 1969 (in Canada), I was barely interested in it at all and didn't even buy a copy. Sometime between fall of 68 and fall of 69 I became a classical musician. It took me several more years to learn how to play like one, but the allegiance was clear and unquestioned. I didn't even think about any of this. It was just as obvious as falling into the ocean meant you got wet.

The vision was one of joy. The ineffable joy of music. And the road to that joy was through discipline. You could write a book: The Joy of Scales. But it wouldn't be a best-seller.

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A Light Touch

I'm re-learning a Bach Gigue right now. I have always found them to be particularly challenging from a technical point of view. The tempo is quick and the texture can be complex, at least for guitar! Here is John Williams playing both the Bourree and the Gigue, which starts at around 1:52:

I haven't played this Gigue for about thirty years, but it seemed to come back into my fingers fairly quickly. Accent on "seemed", because then it bogged down. The usual solution to most technical problems, especially with Bach, is to practice very slowly, which I did, but it still was just not coming together. Then I tried something fairly new for me: practice very, very quietly. It is all about control, after all, and very quiet practice puts all the focus on control. This proved to be the answer. For too many years, ever since a trombonist said I didn't have a strong enough forte on one of my graduation recitals, I have just played the guitar too loud. I'm not alone, a lot of classical guitarists hammer away. But I think I finally shook that demon. These days, you don't have to whale on it, just amplify as needed. The virtues of the classical guitar lie more in the piano end of the spectrum, not the forte... It sounds like Williams is playing loud, but I don't really think he is. If you watch closely while he plays the prelude from this same lute suite, you can see he is very relaxed:

The incisiveness comes from the right hand position, I believe. With a high wrist, the nails are pointed into the strings at a sharper angle. You have to be relaxed to play this prelude--trust me! And I think he is. Also, with a little studio magic, you can punch up the sound as you wish. The one time I heard John Williams in a live concert, he used amplification for both the solo and concerto halves of the program. In conversation afterward, I learned that he has done a lot of research into how to get the best sound when amplifying classical guitar. So I don't think he ever plays heavily--or needs to.

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Instruments

I just ran across this post by Norman Lebrecht on violins. Some musical instruments can have a very special aura to them and at the top of that hierarchy are the instruments by the great Cremona builders. I used to play fairly regularly with a wonderful violinist who played a Guarnerius. Quite an experience. I have an extraordinary guitar built in 1983 that I have played continuously since then. A few years ago I had to have it completely restored as everything that could wear out had done so. Five cracks needed fixing, new frets, new tuners and new varnish. It was like a new instrument! And needed playing in again. A year or so ago I thought the instrument was dying of old age, as guitars can do, but it turned out that I hadn't been humidifying it enough for this dry climate. Now it is back to the wonderful sound of old. Here is a photo:

As you can see, it is an unusual design. The builder was Robert Holroyd of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The top is high-altitude spruce. He actually picked out the tree himself and supervised the sawing. The grain is very tight. The sound is open and clear and the instrument has about the finest bass sound I have ever heard. I have played some fine instruments, including one of  Manuel Barrueco's concert guitars, and I would put this up against any of them. Notice the unusual bridge: it is an ebony bridge, extending much further across the top than is usual,  but narrow in the other dimension. The idea is to have the instrument 'speak' very quickly.

But to get back to the question of why people spend millions on an instrument that may not be playable, I suppose that there are a number of possibilities. One is that, like my guitar, they just need some restoration to become playable again. Another is the historical value to scholars and builders. Perhaps there are some secrets to be learned. Instruments like the Stradivarius are so rare that there is the kind of value that attaches to similarly rare and valued paintings and sculptures. There is one guitar made by Stradivarius extant: I wonder what its dollar value would be?

For me, I have a relationship with my guitar that would be almost impossible to replace. I'm sometimes tempted to fly to Australia and buy one of those wonderful new instruments by Greg Smallman. But as long as my Holroyd hangs in there, I don't think I will. From many years of playing, I know exactly how it will respond on every fret. I also think that one 'trains' the instrument according to how one plays it. After enough years, it responds exactly the way you want it to within the limits of possibility.

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