Tag: Brouwer

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.

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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).