Recording the Classical Guitar

Repertoire, Performance, and the Shaping of Musical Identity in the Twentieth Century

Mark Marrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351371407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música clásica

Recording the Classical Guitar charts the evolution of classical guitar recording practice from the early twentieth century to the present day, encompassing the careers of many of the instrument's most influential practitioners from acoustic era to the advent of the CD. A key focus is on the ways in which guitarists' recorded repertoire programmes have shaped the identity of the instrument, particularly where national allegiances and musical aesthetics are concerned. The book also considers the ways in which changing approaches to recording practice have conditioned guitarists' conceptions of the instrument's ideal representation in recorded form and situates these in relation to the development of classical music recording aesthetics more generally. An important addition to the growing body of literature in the field of phonomusicology, the book will be of interest to guitarists and producers as well as students of record production and historians of classical music recording.

1

Recordings and the Evolving Identity of the Classical Guitar in the Twentieth Century

Defining the Terms of the Study

The purpose of this book is to trace the evolution of the classical guitar in the twentieth century as an idea expressed in recorded form. In large part it constitutes a survey of the recording careers of many of the most prominent (and in some cases most obscure) classical guitarists active in Europe, North America and Latin America from the early twentieth century to the 2010s. The main focus is on evaluating, primarily through a consideration of artists’ recorded programs and their critical reception, the specific contributions that classical guitarists’ recordings have made to the identity of the classical guitar as a musical instrument. In addition, a number of recordings are considered in terms of the circumstances of their production, with a view to providing an overview of the evolving aesthetics of classical guitar recording practice which are often closely bound up with the instrument’s musical presentation. The book aims to provide both a resource for the classical guitar specialist wishing to study the historical evolution of classical guitar recording practice and, more generally, a model for the historical interrogation of classical music recording practice in reference to a specific instrumental context.

In terms of its general relevance to the broad field of Music Production Studies, as encapsulated within the Perspectives on Music Production series, this book may be regarded as a “phonomusicological” text. Phonomusicology (a term coined by Stephen Cottrell in 2010) is a relatively new branch of contemporary musicology that has emerged in the light of the explosion of academic literature concerned with prioritizing the musical recording as the object of study. Cottrell describes phonomusicology as an approach to the study of music

focused […] on the ways in which music-makers interact with recording technology, how they use this to support and sustain the musical traditions with which they identify, and what they reveal to us about their musical creativity and performance practice through the cultural artefacts they produce.

(Cottrell 2010: 32)

Transplanting this definition to the context of the present study, the primary objective of this book is to illustrate the ways in which recording practice has supported and sustained particular traditions of the classical guitar during the twentieth century and, furthermore, constituted a central site of debate concerning the question of what the musical traditions of the classical guitar actually are.

A key assumption that underlies this study is that recordings possess a “rhetorical” character, meaning that they have the capacity to persuasively communicate ideas regarding an area of musical practice, in this instance the classical guitar. Indeed, it is arguable that during the course of the twentieth century recordings have had as much to communicate, if not more, than live concertizing where ideas about the classical guitar are concerned. This is not to deny the importance of the concert tradition of performance, which has played a vital role in defining the structure of the classical guitar recording. However, relative to recordings concerts are by their nature an inherently fragmentary and ephemeral entity that makes them a far less effective means of sustaining a discourse of musical ideas. Recordings in comparison constitute a permanent record of a musical event which can be conveniently recalled and scrutinized, while their limitless repeatability gives them the capacity to naturalize a particular musical perspective in a way that a live performance never can (unless of course it was recorded). As recordings accumulate over time, they come to constitute an archive of cultural history whose constituent elements can be readily examined and considered in relation to one another. Through this it is possible to extrapolate specific criteria that at any given time have delimited the boundaries of a particular area of musical activity and discern the processes by which this may be modified as practitioners build upon, refine or reject preceding traditions.

For the purposes of this book then, recordings are understood to embody a narrative of the classical guitar’s history, repertoire and performance practice. For guitarists, they have provided a vital means of self-orientation, enabling reflection upon the evolution of personal artistry in relation to the heritage of their predecessors’ recorded work. For the critic and general listener, recordings have been as important as live concert performances in engendering knowledge of the classical guitar and securing their investment in the musical aesthetics that it embodies. In situations which have precluded the live experience, for example, due to the constraints of physical location, recordings have arguably become the principal means by which knowledge of the classical guitar has been disseminated. John Schneider encapsulates the importance of recordings for the dissemination of the idea of the classical guitar in the following remarks made in his inaugural Just for the Record column in the American periodical, Soundboard:

It is now generally accepted that the efforts of Andrés Segovia are the prime cause of the classic guitar’s phenomenal resurgence in this century. But I often wonder, would the maestro’s tireless globetrotting have accomplished this incredible feat without the advent of sound recording? Playing to thousands at a time no doubt increased the awareness of the instrument, but I am convinced that it was the intimacy of recordings that brought the magic of the guitar into the hearts of so many. A microphone always has the best seat in the house, and sitting a few feet away from the guitar has always been the best vantage point for what has been, until the advent of amplification, essentially a chamber instrument. That is exactly where a recording puts you—at the feet of the master, a position of honor traditionally reserved for only the most devoted acolyte, now available to anyone for the price of a CD. This almost voyeuristic intimacy has won millions of new admirers for the classical guitar, fans who have become strangely loyal to an instrument that was, only a few generations ago, just an obscure museum piece.

(Schneider 1994a: 44)

In his foreword to Enrique Robichaud’s book, Guitar’s Top 100 (2013), classical guitar musicologist Graham Wade affirms the value of recordings as a repository of knowledge concerning the classical guitar when he states: “Among the thousands of 78 rpms, long playing records, compact discs, tapes, films and DVDs of recorded guitar music, the instrument’s true history is for ever preserved for us and for future generations”. Wade’s suggestion that it is through recordings that the “true history” of the instrument is preserved, raises further pertinent questions where the premise of this book is concerned. Should such a statement be taken to imply, for example, that what recording media have preserved of the classical guitar for posterity already existed “out there” prior to the advent of recording? Was the classical guitar therefore already a well-defined concept with a clearly delineated history and prior repertoire, that only needed to be discovered and documented by recordists? From one perspective, the answer to this question is “yes”. In the early years of recording, recordists captured aspects of guitar performance practice taking place in Spain and parts of Latin America – styles of playing and repertoire – that would certainly accord with criteria used to define classical guitar performance today. To what extent, however, do our criteria for making such a judgment derive from the presence of these recordings? Are they a reflection of objective historical knowledge of classical guitar culture as it then existed, or have they themselves served to construct our idea of the classical guitar?

Robichaud’s book also offers a useful illustrative vehicle for considering the way in which recordings, when considered collectively as a body of material, can amount to a potent statement concerning the traditions of the classical guitar. Described by the author as “a guide to classical guitar’s most recorded music”, Robichaud ranks 100 classical guitar pieces in accordance with the number of recordings that have been made of each. The resulting list affirms a widely held conception of the classical guitar as an instrument whose musical identity derives primarily from its association with composers of Spanish and Latin American origin operating within a tightly defined historical context and within certain stylistic parameters. Specifically the most highly recorded works in Robichaud’s list were conceived between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries,with a particular emphasis on pieces by Francisco Tárrega and Agustín Barrios Mangoré and the prominence of composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos, Antonio Lauro, Manuel Ponce, Joaquín Turina, Federico Moreno Torroba and Joaquín Rodrigo.

Of equal interest however is the repertoire that is de-prioritized or marginalized by the criteria employed in Robichaud’s selection. Perhaps surprisingly no works by J. S. Bach are included, despite the centrality of Bach’s music to the repertoire of many classical guitarists since Segovia. The earlier period is instead represented by a handful of works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish composers associated with the vihuela and Baroque guitar: Alonso Mudarra’s Fantasía que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico, Gaspar Sanz’s Canarios, and two works by Luys de Narváez – his Diferencias sobre Guardame las Vacas and Canción del Emperador. Of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (the formative period of the six-string guitar) only five Fernando Sor compositions are present, including the well-known Variations on a Theme of Mozart Op. 9 (a piece which ranks highly) and the Grand Solo, four by Mauro Giuliani and one by Johann Kaspar Mertz. Very little of the repertoire in Robichaud’s selection reflects twentieth-century “modernist” tendencies, with the exception of two British works, Britten’s Nocturnal and William Walton’s Bagatelles, Swiss composer Frank Martin’s Quatre Pièces Brèves and Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera’s Sonata Op.47. On the other hand, the more “accessible” side of the contemporary repertoire is well represented, with five works by Cuban guitarist Leo Brouwer, three by Tunisian-born French guitarist Roland Dyens and one by American guitarist Andrew York (his Sunburst).

An interpretation of Robichaud’s data might give rise to the conclusion that the repertoire emphasized (the works by Tárrega, Ponce, Torroba, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Villa-Lobos in particular) reflects the dominance of the Segovian “paradigm”, meaning a musical aesthetic coherent with the concept of the classical guitar that was prioritized and widely disseminated by Andrés Segovia from the early to mid-twentieth century. The earlier pieces included by the vihuelists might also be seen to reflect a perspective on the classical guitar tradition that was advocated by Segovia (building on the work of Spanish contemporaries such as Emilio Pujol), which held that certain plucked string music pre-dating the era of the six-string guitar could also qualify as repertoire for the instrument. At the same time, however, other recurrent elements of Robichaud’s list reflect “revisionist” trends in relation to the Segovian perspective. The strong presence of Barrios, for example, implies the late twentieth-century modification of the classical guitar canon in recognition of the importance of certain previously excluded strands of Latin American classical guitar music. The presence of post-war British works and Martin’s Quatre Pièces Brèves also hints at a form of dissent against the Segovian repertoire perspective, in this instance referring to progressive agenda of Julian Bream in the 1960s and 1970s. Such observations serve to illustrate the extent to which, when considering a body of recorded musical material, a range of ideological positions may potentially be inferred from its content.

Obviously in Robichaud’s case the statistical criteria employed for his survey, based on the relative popularity of particular works, are not likely to yield the most all-encompassing view of the idea of the classical guitar in recorded form. The repertoire included in Robichaud’s rankings represents only a small part of the literature of the instrument that guitar scholarship, concertizing and recordings have revealed over the last century. Such lists also cannot convey the broad range of motivations for recording particular works, nor the reasons for avoiding others, which have much to do with the ideological traditions that surround guitar performance and repertoire choice. Pieces may be recorded, for example, to demonstrate artistic prowess and technical range, or to stake out a particular claim to a particular area of repertoire. They may also indicate allegiance to a particular musical aesthetic, and, by implication, a lack of allegiance to another. This is a central objective of the study of classical guitar recordings undertaken in this book, namely, to account for the principal criteria that have determined their creation.

A second phonomusicological consideration of this study concerns what Cottrell has described as “the variety of articulations between recording technology, musical performance and creativity in the recording context” (Cottrell 2010: 19). Central to this are the ways in which the changing technological conditions of recording have fostered particular values concerning the presentation of classical guitar performances on record. Various lines of enquiry can be raised in regard to this area. For example, one might consider the ways in which classical guitarists have evolved particular sonic settings for their recorded performances which are designed to reinforce their conception of the guitar as a particular kind of musical instrument. Here one might consider contrasting notions of the ideal experience of the guitar in a particular acoustic environment such as a concert hall, in contradistinction to the more “artificial” perspective engendered by studio-based recording approaches. When classical guitarists make recordings they are also required to collaborate with a range of personnel (engineers, producers, editors and so on), and the specialisms such people bring to the recording situation will also to varying degrees determine the character of what is produced. This book therefore offers discussion of classical guitarists’ associations with such personnel and the ideas they bring to the conception of the classical guitar recording. Also of importance has been the evolution of the technological medium itself, which has impacted considerably upon the possibilities for the construction of recordings. For example, in the early days of recording there were various constraints on the way that an artist could envisage a performance in a recording context, not least the restriction on the amount of time available to record within. Since the 1950s, however, a variety of facilities (increased capacities of storage media, multi-tracking, close editing, use of effects etc) have gradually become available that have enabled the potential of classical guitar recordings to be limitlessly re-imagined. This has dramatically altered both performer and audience expectations of what a classical guitar performance actually is, which contrasts sharply with notions of the “live” concert experience.

A final phonomusicological dimension of this study concerns what Symes, in his book Setting the Record Straight (2004), has called the “discourses of the phonograph”, namely the textual culture that has accompanied the experience of musical recordings over the decades. This refers in particular to the substantial body of critical writing on classical guitar recordings that has accrued in publications such as Gramophone in the UK and High Fidelity in the US. Such commentary is harnessed throughout this book as a means of tracing changing critical perspectives on the classical guitar in reference to questions concerning, for example, its standing as a vehicle for the performance of serious music, the ideal nature of its repertoire, conventions concerning musical interpretation and the role of the recording in effectively representing the instrument. Also of importance to this study have been album liner (or “sleeve”) notes, whose centrality to the construction of the narrative of classical guitar recording cannot be overstated. Liner notes serve both as potent statements of agenda concerning the purposes of classical guitar recordings at any given moment and sources of critical insight into the musical culture they reflect.

At this juncture it is pertinent to define what is meant by the “classical” guitar for the purposes of this book. The following are some of the principal criteria, which will be elaborated as the book progresses:

1. It refers primarily to the modern six-string Spanish-derived instrument which came into its own at the end of the eighteenth century, strung initially with gut and later nylon strings (Tyler and Sparks 2002). This does not preclude mention of the modern guitar’s predecessors such as the lute, vihuela and Baroque guitar, particularly given that the r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Recordings and the Evolving Identity of the Classical Guitar in the Twentieth Century
• Part One The Recording Model Established
• Part Two The Recording Model Consolidated
• Part Three The Recording Model Interrogated
• Part Four The Recording Model Deconstructed
• Index