Touch, Sound and Voice – Guitar (Menuhin Guides)

Brouwer’s Combinatorial Art

When we understand Brouwer’s thinking, our performances become more vivid

Leo Brouwer’s output is often divided into three periods: folkloric, avant-garde and neoromantic. When I first started playing the guitar, he was in his avant-garde phase, and works such as La espiral eterna and Canticum helped me to understand how music could be an adventure for the ears, a kind of musical science fiction. Having got to grips with the dissonant sound world of the avant-garde pieces, I well remember the shock of hearing his first neoromantic works, such as El decamerón negro. It was difficult at first to come to terms with their sweetness and apparent rejection of the sonorities of the previous music.

And yet this period-based narrative is not so simple. One complication is that each of Brouwer’s compositional phases incorporates elements of the previous ones: a neoromantic work such as the Fifth Sonata might contain folkloric and avant-garde elements. Another is that Brouwer’s music is characterised not so much by its style as by the way he thinks: whatever he might have rejected is not as important as what he has retained. No wonder, then, that I eventually came to love his later works.

What unites Brouwer’s compositions is a constructive way of thinking that starts with short, incisive ideas and then combines them into larger sections. He can write a long line, but the typical Brouwer idea is a memorable cell: a riff, a dance rhythm, a flourish, a fanfare, a call, a peal of bells; an epigraph, a reminiscence, a quotation; a cry, catchphrase, invocation or curse.

So far, so good, but once a striking idea has been sounded, what comes next? The answer is simple: it can repeat; it can evolve or dissolve; above all, it can be put into conversation with other such ideas. The result might be hypnotic and minimalist, or it might be a glittering collage.

Voicing on the Guitar: Melodies, Textures, Chords

Balancing voices is an integral part of tone production.

Whether it is an individual chord or the texture of an entire passage – accompanied melody, counterpoint, chorale, and so on – there are endless ways of balancing the sounds, each with its own expressive effect.

Here’s a video talk I put together for the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society during the lockdown of 2020. My aim was to offer a toolkit of useful voicings, with examples from the repertoire, and suggest studies and exercises to help you develop your skills. Examples come from works by Narvaez, Bach, Sor, Aguado, Brouwer, and Britten.

We put much more on the fundamentals of right-hand touch, including to a discussion of voicing, in chapter 2 of Guitar, ‘Touch, Sound and Voice’. And there’s more discussion of the Brouwer Simple Studies in chapter 9, ‘Player-Composers’ (pp. 245–9).

Multitasking, Mompou and the Means-Whereby

Learning to play chords seamlessly teaches us much about coordinating hands and brain.

One of the challenges of playing the guitar is the very different set of skills demanded of our two hands. For each skill, taken in isolation – right-hand arpeggios, left-hand slurs, right-hand repeated chords, left-hand shifts, and so on– there is no shortage of exercises for us to practise. Yet I have often been struck by how little we discuss one of the most fundamental difficulties of all: making the two hands work at the same time. We are all multitaskers.

Let’s look at a typical test of multitasking: performing a passage in hymn-like texture, such as the Coral from Mompou’s Suite compostelana (1962). To make this movement sound like a choir, as the title dictates, we must create at least the illusion of a continuous legato between the chords. And at first sight, it’s the left hand that presents all the difficulties: the arm has to move rapidly between positions while the fingers take new chord shapes. On closer examination, however, the right hand faces its own demands. For one thing, there will be no legato unless the right-hand fingers find and pluck the strings in exact synchronicity with the left. For another, the right hand has to voice the chords if the parts are to sing independently and the chordal dissonances are to speak.

But this passage poses another, less obvious, challenge.