Tag: practicing

Classical Improvisation

An interview with Nikhil Hogan

It was an honor to be interviewed by Nikhil Hogan recently. His YouTube channel, the Nikhil Hogan Show, contains a trove of fascinating interviews with many acclaimed musicians. Nikhil is a very acute musician and thinker who is now focusing his series on early music, music history, classical improvisation and elements of early-music pedagogy (such as partimento, hexachordal solfeggio, counterpoint and schemata). I learned a great deal from the conversation and the messages we exchanged afterwards.

In this interview, we touch on a lot of things, but the focus is on classical improvisation at the guitar. I share some ideas on how classical guitarists might think of improvisation and how to get started in a very simple way. I recommend some materials and strategies for Baroque improvisation in particular.

For yet more on improvisation and how we can incorporate it into the way we learn and practise notated scores, see Guitar, chapter 8, ‘Creative Practice’.

A Conversation with Stephen Goss and a Recital by Menuhin School Guitarists

Here is a video of the book launch, in which composer and guitarist Stephen Goss interviewed us about the book, and past and present guitar students from the Yehudi Menuhin School played a beautiful recital.

Steve took Richard and me through the book’s four major parts, giving us the opportunity to explain our approach: some themes include the challenge of integrating technique and musicianship, how to practise creatively and how to encourage students to make their own discoveries. 

As for the guitar recital, it was spectacular and very touching to witness.

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.

Continue reading “Multitasking, Mompou and the Means-Whereby”