A New Musical Form for a New, Multiguitaristic Sound
Published: 1993 Author: Angel Gilardino
AS A GUITARIST-COMPOSER, I have always been puzzled by a well-known statement of Hector Berlioz, a fine musician who, despite being totally unqualified to perform on any instrument, felt for a while entitled to give guitar lessons. He maintained that a unison produced by ten guitars sounds ludicrous. I think that even a great orchestrator like him would hardly have been able, at that époque, to collect ten guitarists in a row and obtain from them, with perfect ensemble, the highest E with a fortissimo, so as to excite his hilarity: he must have relied upon his imagination. Still, his statement may have some significance. How exactly? I believe he meant that the aim of adding together ten guitars in the manner of the string section of an orchestra – in other words, to create a thickness of sound – was doomed to failure. I believe he was right: when listening to a guitar ensemble that imitates – through just a compression/transposition of the parts – a full orchestra, or even a string quartet, perhaps we are not compelled to laugh; but for sure we cannot find it pleasant and we turn unavoidably – with a sense of homesickness – to the original sound of the real orchestra we keep in our memory. I feel the same unease when occasionally reading, in the course of my work as the editor of a major guitar series, so called original pieces for three, four or no matter how many more guitars, scored by composers who treat guitars generically, as if they were writing for a string ensemble. On another side – but really saying the same thing – Andrés Segovia openly declared that the best guitar sound was produced by just one guitar, and any further addition had to be paid at the dangerous price of opacity (an effective metaphor indeed).
After composing – between 1981 and 1991 – no less than sixty concert Studies (Studi di virtuosità e di trascendenza), two large Sonatas and three extended cycles of variations for guitar, I naturally wondered what else I could do with the solo instrument. I am not inclined to repeat myself, and indeed I felt that I had scarcely exhausted my investigation of guitar sound: thus, I decided to enter the mysterious – and rather unexplored – area of guitar ensembles, and I first of all thought to mark the kind of work I had to do with the elegant label of multiguitaristic composition. Why not give a pleasant name to a task you expect to be very hard indeed?
Of course, I did not fail to read what had been made available in this uncharted musical region. May I pay once and for all my debt of attention to my predecessors by mentioning with great respect the multiguitaristic pieces composed by Gilbert Biberian and Dusan Bogdanovic? They are, in my opinion, the two guitarist-composers who have tackled the problem through an approach that I consider original and specific. Thus, respectful as I was of their works, my principal wish when approaching multiguitaristic composition was exactly to devise a very specific (and, needless to say, original) treatment of the sound and, necessarily, of the connected musical form.
I presented the problem to myself in the following terms: how is it possible to escape the limits of solo guitar composition and, at the same time, avoid the opacity that seems to be the main danger of composing for guitar ensemble? The answer seemed obvious to me: I had to forge a way of writing for a ‘virtual’ solo guitar, represented by a variable number of actual guitars. What Berlioz implied is still true: guitars cannot be added; still, one guitar can be divided. After all, hadn’t French and Italian painters, about a century ago, discovered how to divide a colour by representing separately all of its components – either by small points (French pointillism) or by thin filaments (Italian divisionismo)?
From this point of view, we can make a distinction between what might be described as a reality (the sound of a solo guitar) and its virtual projection (the sound of an invented guitar made up of a number of real guitars), the next step being the design of a musical form that allows this comparison to live in some dramatic perspective.
It would be quite ingenuous to think that such a musical form already exists in the tradition, and that it is just a matter of adapting the traditional form to the new sound (or vice versa): the composers of the ancient concerto grosso, or of the romantic concerto for solo instrument, or of the twentieth-century concertos, designed those forms according to the sounds they had to deal with – and there is no way of working seriously simply by scoring a concerto for solo guitar and a guitar ensemble, where this latter makes a monkey out of a string orchestra – or, even worse, a full orchestra.
Of course, the alternation between solo and group is still the main feature of any new form of concerto – but alternation, musically speaking, should be in this specific case something very different from the responsorial dialogue of the traditional concertos. To establish a definite sound of a particular soloist I need to bring to the basic material some degree of elaboration and development: in other words, I need a certain time-space for each solo. Only after creating a strong atmosphere within a solo can I enter the new world of a virtual guitar. Through it, I need firstly to return to the basic elements of the solo, and then I can move along the path of further, newer elaborations and developments, without suffering the restrictions of an actual solo guitar. This pushes not toward a strict conversation between the two levels of sound, but toward an alternation of rather long episodes, with only short and occasional superimpositions of solo and group: in this kind of form, alienation is as important as affinity, despite the fact that the two sounds stem from the same source. The title concerto, which I gave to the pieces I composed as a result of this research, calls then for a careful appreciation, and I tried to help the performers with three alternate scoring systems: solo; group; solo and group – a device that helps to make clearer the articulation of the form.
A characteristic – and extreme – example of this form occurs at the very beginning of the first of the four works I wrote: Concerto d’estate (1992) for solo guitar and guitar quartet: The source of the piece is a short, delightful lesson by Fernando Sor (op. 44 no. 17, in D minor), which appears first in a four-guitar setting I created by thinking of Sor as well as of Franz Schubert (I am not sure that he was one ‘qui aimait la guitare’, but I am sure I love his music). When the pathos of the beautiful poetry of Sor’s piece is complete and is fading out, it seems to me we are not at an end, but at a beginning: here the first solo breaks in with its alien ricercare, which, although created from the same notes that Sor used, lies a hundred miles distant from it. Guitars and guitar in this beginning play an inverted role: the reality is the quartet, the virtuality is the solo. But, from the following section of the quartet, a new virtual development comes…I know how far from pleasant the music created from such an approach may sound, and how inconsistent with an idea of the guitar sound as something nicely entertaining it may appear. It may be significant to recall, at this point, the sublime lesson given by Francis Bacon in his series of interpretations of Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X: assuming the noble figure painted by the Spanish master as a basic reality, Bacon has pushed it to extreme, virtual representations of even higher levels of truth: if there is any debt of inspiration I have to pay, here it is, to this great British painter.
A curious feature of this sort of musical form comes from the fact that the alternation actuality–virtuality is given by rather a free recitation in the ‘actual’ side (the solo), with a good deal of agogic expression, and by a solid, straightforward recitation in the virtual side (the group). Here it is impossible not to recall a form of the ancient Greek theatre (the individual character and the chorus), but this was not a foreseen affinity: it simply happened, and I noticed it only when finishing the first work.
Of course, once the formal problem has been solved, there is still the kernel of the whole matter before us: how to avoid awkward thickness in the sound of the guitar ensemble? To divide a solo among various parts is not of course a matter of transposing three parts to three different guitars…I know that this has been done of course, but it is not worthy of the interest of somebody who intends to be a composer. The point, then is to create single parts that, while much thinner than a solo (otherwise the famous opacity lamented by Segovia would be unavoidable), are still guitar parts (not clarinet, viola or cello parts), and that can produce the illusion of an extraordinary guitar: extended, divided from within in different sounds, and still no less transparent than a solo. A difficult aim indeed, which I tried to attain by composing, in four years, exactly four concertos.
The Concerto d’estate was suggested by a hearing of the small piece by Sor I mentioned in quite an unusual situation: I was giving a lesson to a distinguished student of a Summer course – during a beautiful evening – whilst next door a front-rank Italian guitar quartet was working in a rehearsal session. I could have felt troubled in that strange situation, but I was not. On the contrary, it was the inspiration for my first concerto for guitar solo and guitar quartet.
The following year, 1993, I visited the noble ruins – now very well restored – of the ancient residence of the Arabian caliphs at Medina Azahara – near Cordoba – and there, with the help of the splendid essay written by Marguerite Yourcenar about Andalusia, I had some perceptions of a dissolved poetic world that stimulated me to compose my second concerto for guitar solo and guitar quartet (Concierto de Córdoba). It is a dangerous title. Still, on the night of its first performance in Cordoba (July 1994), with a first row of listeners composed of several of the foremost flamenco guitar players of Spain, there was nothing to fear. No matter how many miles distant this concerto may stand from flamenco, it did not prevent people such as Manolo Sanlucar or Rafael Riqueni from paying close attention to the piece, impeccably served by the superior art of Luigi Biscaldi and the elegant togetherness of the Quartetto di Asti. The subsequent broadcasts given by national Spanish radio made this concerto the most successful up to now, though I suspect its title more than its appeal may be the main reason for its unexpected popularity in Spain (and in Italy, of course).
Subsequently, I felt attracted by the idea of another musical form, represented by a guitar solo and a guitar duo. Here I employed a different layout: a long solo is joined by another guitar – and they work for a while in a duo – before a third guitar comes in to make up a trio, where the first part retains the power of a solo and a certain sense of separation from the duo. The succession solo–duo–trio is repeated, so the piece is divided into six unbroken sections. It is a concerto, and a very elaborate one, but its peculiar form and its character suggested the title Poema d’inverno (‘Winter Poem’) . I was surprised to read in a guitar magazine (whose reviews are mostly just the opinion of a guitarist, very superficially conceived and written) a careful analytical commentary, detailing the process of construction of the piece, with its fair debt to Anton Webern’s techniques.
To conclude, having narrowed my multiguitaristic web, I decided to stretch it, and I composed the Concerto d’autunno (1994–95), which is scored for solo guitar and two guitar quartets, with the possibility – left to the conductor – of employing for each of the eight parts two or even three players – provided the soloist is up to it. The two quartets work with different tunings, and very seldom join in a tutti section. Perhaps the sound is as transparent as in the other concertos, perhaps even more. I decided to title it ‘for guitar solo and small guitar orchestra’, because I thought it more reasonable to open the piece to guitar orchestras than to restrict it to the very rare occurrence of having two guitar quartets joining a soloist…
From 1992 to 1995 my research as a guitarist-composer has been entirely devoted to this objective, and on this path I have learnt and discovered a lot of things about the guitar sound that – despite my being an active guitarist since 1954 (when I became a guitar student) – I had shamelessly ignored and that I could not have discovered if I had not entered the extraordinary experience of multiguitaristic composition. This is a very good reward for my efforts. As for the life of these concertos after their publication, it is only with mixed feelings that their composer may see them going about the world, missing news from them. A programme from Spain, a postcard from Japan: what are they doing there?
Copyright © 1993 by Angelo Gilardino