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.
Continue reading “Multitasking, Mompou and the Means-Whereby”
Guitar (Menuhin Guides) 