The Book

Guitar (Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides)

by Jonathan Leathwood & Richard Wright, with a foreword by David Russell (London: Kahn & Averill, 2024)| Sample pages

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Front cover of 'Guitar', showing a cubist-style guitar in a cubist background, all in various shades of blue.

The guitar is one of the most popular instruments in the world, but what does it take to become a fully rounded classical guitarist? In a systematic sequence of chapters, Jonathan Leathwood and Richard Wright offer a fresh perspective on technique, interpretation, learning, practising and repertoire, drawing on a huge variety of composers and works, including a separate exploration of Bach. A final section explores the guitarist as collaborator, with advice on how to make the guitar sound at its best in the company of other instruments and how to work with non-guitarist composers. Throughout the book, musical examples from key works illuminate the points discussed.

The book is the latest addition to the acclaimed series Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides.

In this guide to the guitar, you will find all the knowledge and information a guitarist may need, masterfully written in great detail by the authors, offering a wide range of musical tastes and expert technical knowledge.

David Russell, Grammy-award-winning guitarist

This book is what we’ve all been waiting for. A must for all serious guitar people.

Stephen Goss, composer

Here is a book that will transform how you play and think about the classical guitar and its music. Performing professionals, students, and teachers alike will find a wealth of new perspectives, from insightful musical analyses to practical advice on achieving rich and sustainable careers. Each technical discussion is rooted in a profound musical understanding, inviting readers to reimagine the guitar’s infinitely expressive possibilities.

Emmanuel Sowicz, guitarist

This book is such a treasure chest, chock-full of many incredible gems of wisdom that will play a hugely pivotal role in contributing to the pedagogical literature of the classical guitar.

Kevin Loh, guitarist

Reviews

This book is scattered throughout with fantastic analogies and practical strategies we can pass on to our students. Much content is directed towards those working at a refined level of skill and expression; but most of the creative ideas will enrich teaching at any level.

Guitar is a springboard for further exploration, with quality resources and pedagogical value; it is a significant contribution to any classical guitar teacher’s professional development.

Paula Child, Music Teacher Magazine (read the full review)

…monumental. It is expansive and mind-opening yet perfectly concise and relatable, with text and music examples that can be used by amateurs and professionals alike, drawn from every time and style period, and every level of repertoire. It is unlike anything else before it. . . . Rarely does a work encapsulate the guitar’s history, repertoire, playing techniques, learning strategies, and much more, with such clarity and insight as Guitar. . . . This book is a must-read for any guitarist, beginner to professional, amateur to connoisseur.

Brad DeRoche, Soundboard 51 no. 1 (March, 2025)

Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Foreword by David Russell
  • Preface
  • Introduction
    • Different types of guitar: what they play…
    • …And how they are played
    • Parallels and equivalence
    • Instrumental role models 

­Part 1: Teaching and Playing

  1. The Question of Difficulty
    • Counterpoint
    • Left-hand physicality
    • The tirando stroke
    • Reading
    • Presenting a complete musical performance
  2. Touch, Sound and Voice
    • Point of contact 
    • Planting 
    • Right-hand finger independence 
    • Chord voicing 
    • Right-hand fingering: a neglected consideration?
    • The role of the rest stroke
  3. Left-Hand Expression
    • Changing position 
    • Vibrato 
    • Slurs
    • Left-hand finger independence
  4. Articulation
    • Hierarchies of expression 
    • Instrumental speech 
    • Making room for articulation
  5. Intonation and Tuning
    • Tuning and Temperament 
    • Twelve tips for tuning
    • Dealing with scordatura
  6. The Full-Time Guitarist
    • Choosing repertoire 
    • Competitions
    • The community guitarist

­­Part 2: Learning and Practising

  1. Body and Mind, Guitar and Score
    • Internalising the music 
    • Hearing the score 
    • Internalising the guitar
    • Putting it all together: the two stations
  2. Creative Practice
    • Improvising for technical refinement 
    • Improvising for musicianship 
    • X-ray vision 
    • Building a vocabulary in post-tonal music
    • What if?

­­Part 3: Repertoire

  1. Player-Composers
    • The guitar and the voice 
    • The influence of chamber music 
    • Keyboard textures 
    • Sor the enigma 
    • Sor’s opus 60 
    • The development of notation 
    • Notating harmonics and slurs 
    • Coste, Mertz and multi-string guitars 
    • Regondi’s expansive vocabulary 
    • The people’s instrument: Arcas and Tárrega 
    • Transcriptions enter the repertoire 
    • Borrowings and theft 
    • Agustín Barrios, indigenous genius of the Americas
    • The twentieth century: Villa-Lobos and Brouwer
  2. Unstable Texts
    • De Visée’s Suite in D minor 
    • Giuliani’s Gran sonata eroica 
    • Schubert/Mertz, Ständchen 
    • Albéniz’s Granada 
    • The Segovia repertoire
    • Developing your own authority
  3. The Guitarist’s Bach
    • Start simply 
    • Commit to rhythm and flow 
    • Refine your pronunciation 
    • Be sceptical of complex notation 
    • Map out the music with a harmonic reduction 
    • Notice the lines 
    • Cultivate your imaginary acoustic 
    • Explore the harmonies through improvisation 
    • Avoid costly ornaments
    • Beware the Romantic mindset

­­Part 4: The Collaborative Guitarist

  1. Chamber Music
    • Playing with other guitarists
    • Playing with non-guitarists
  2. Working with Composers
    • Managing difficulty
    • Matters of style
    • Instruction and materials
    • Resonance, Texture
    • Working together
    • Case studies
    • Performance
  • About the Authors
  • List of Musical Examples
  • Further Reading
  • Index of Names and Works

Where to Buy

Guitar was published on 30th September, 2024. It is published by Kahn & Averill, along with other volumes of the Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides, and can always be ordered from them with shipping from the UK. It is also available in other countries:

About the Authors

Jonathan Leathwood performing in 2024.
Photo by Jennifer Heglin

Jonathan Leathwood has performed in venues throughout Europe and both American continents. Equally known as a collaborator with both performers and composers, he has recorded with the legendary flutist William Bennett and collaborated on works for six- and ten-string guitar from composers such as Param Vir, Stephen Goss, Robert Keeley, Chris Malloy, Harrison Birtwistle and Roxanna Panufnik. He gave the Julian Bream Trust’s inaugural concert at London’s Wigmore Hall, at the personal invitation of Bream.

As an educator, Jonathan is passionate about integrating different types of skill, knowledge and understanding. He has a PhD from the University of Surrey and a bachelor of music from King’s College London, and he is an internationally certified teacher of the Alexander Technique. He teaches guitar, music theory and the Alexander Technique at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music, where he is chair of guitar. He is the editor of the Guitar Foundation of America’s peer-reviewed journal of guitar studies, Soundboard Scholar.

For more demonstrations and lessons, see Jonathan’s YouTube channel.

Photo © bogdan_schiteanu

Since graduating from the Royal Northern College of Music, Richard Wright has pursued a highly varied career in both classical and popular music. As a performer, his work has encompassed everything from contemporary music groups such as the London Sinfonietta to membership of the critically acclaimed rock group Latin Quarter, best known for their 1985 hit ­Radio Africa. He has worked with musicians as diverse as composer John Adams and guitarist John Williams and appeared everywhere from New York’s Lincoln Center to the pyramid stage at the Glastonbury Festival.

Above all, Richard is an internationally recognised teacher of the classical guitar and its pedagogy, with a special interest in the problems of early learning. He designed and delivered a teacher-training course for guitarists in Venezuela and has lectured on guitar pedagogy in the United Kingdom, Holland, Germany and the United States. In 2004 the guitar was added to the roster of instruments taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School, and Richard became its first teacher.