The EGTA Series: realising new aims in educational guitar music
Published: 1996 Author: Richard Wright
The EGTA series comprises nine books of educational guitar music, edited for EGTA UK by Richard Wright and published by Chanterelle Verlag (distributed in the United States by Mel Bay). The books are arranged in three series: 33 Czech Folk Songs (by Petr Eben, arranged for pupil and teacher by Peter Batchelar), One + One, Books 1, 2, and 3 (duets for pupil and teacher); Solo Now!, Books 1, 2, and 3; The Baroque Book and The Classical Book. What follows is a talk on the series given by Richard Wright at the First International Congress of EGTA in Berlin on 25 May, 1996. —JL
Introduction
The creation of Chanterelle Verlag’s EGTA Series was a direct consequence of EGTA UK’s guitar examination reform initiative. In order to understand the format of the EGTA Series it is therefore necessary to understand why we found the original guitar examinations unsatisfactory and what our proposals for their improvement were. When classical guitar exams were eventually introduced in Britain, guitar teaching as a profession was in its infancy and the instrument was taught in only a tiny number of schools. Thirty years on, things are very different: thousands of children have access to classical guitar tuition in schools throughout the country and it has become increasingly apparent to the many teachers now involved at this level that the original syllabus model—which has not changed in all that time—has not been as helpful in developing the skills of novice players as it might have been.
So what was wrong with the original approach to guitar examinations? In its 1992 report, the EGTA UK Grade Examinations Working Party isolated three basic areas for criticism.
The main problem was that the entry point for the examination system (i.e. Grade 1) was pitched at too high a level. This resulted in a lack of parity between the guitar and other instruments as the amount of time needed for the average conscientious and well-taught guitarist to reach Grade 1 was usually far greater than for his or her counterpart on other instruments. It is obviously discouraging for pupils if one child has passed, say, flute Grade 3 before the equally capable guitar-playing sibling or classmate has even entered Grade 1. All too often, this in turn would result in guitarists being entered for Grade 1 before they were ready—before the crucial, basic hand-skills had had time to settle down.
The cause of the parity problem is simple enough. The guitar had always relied exclusively on existing publications of its own solo repertoire for its source of examination material. The easiest available pieces were used for Grade 1, the next easiest for Grade 2; renaissance and baroque lute transcriptions were chosen for List A, Sor and Carcassi for List B, and so on.
On the face of it this would seem quite logical, but the nature of the solo classical guitar is such that even the easiest pieces can be too demanding for a child to achieve a musically satisfying and technically secure result in the time that it takes players of other instruments to reach Grade 1. Considering that most of the available material was not written for today’s guitar anyway (but for the lute or the 19th-century guitar) and that it was never intended for predominantly young children setting off on a course of graded examinations, there is absolutely no reason why it should be suitable. The nineteenth-century guitar was a much smaller instrument which placed fewer physical demands on the left hand, and the different tuning of the third string makes much of the renaissance lute music more awkward to play on the guitar than is often realised. Even in our own century, when much new guitar music has been written, there has until recently been very little work done on developing a genuinely child-oriented ‘early grade’ repertoire, one that takes hand size fully into account.
Our second observation was that the individual grades, regardless of the level at which they actually began, never adequately reflected or supported the different stages of technical development. Between Grades 1 and 8 the pieces gradually became longer and more difficult to play, but there was no clear sense of specific aspects of technique being introduced, grade by grade, in a controlled and cumulative way. This is particularly relevant for the guitar as no other string instrument has quite the same range of idiosyncratic and problematic left-hand techniques to deal with (barrés and ligados)—not to mention the two different but equally fundamental types of right hand stroke (apoyando and tirando) and, within the right hand, the separate roles of the fingers and thumb.
Third, the different parts of the guitar exam (pieces, scales, arpeggios, etc.) bore insufficient relation to each other in terms of both the amount and the type of musical and instrumental knowledge required by the candidate at any given level. We could see no point, for instance, in asking a candidate to prepare a scale in a key remote from, or using significantly higher positions than, the ones he or she would typically be using—and hopefully learning to understand the workings of—in the pieces at that grade. To do this is inefficient and at best results in rote learning, especially when a scale such as E flat minor, for instance, will almost invariably be played with the same left-hand fingering as D minor.
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So much for the critical analysis. But how could these problems be solved? We had already decided that the bottom end of the examination ladder was at least one, and probably two, grades out of sync (that is to say the old Grade 1, as far as technical difficulty is concerned, should really have been Grade 3). But if the easiest available List A and B repertoire was already being used, where would the material for a new-look Grade 1 and 2 come from? We looked at which aspects of so-called ‘easy’ guitar music caused it to be not so easy after all and drew up our own specific set of technical criteria for each grade—but one thing we could not do was go back in time and ask the early nineteenth-century guitar composers to rewrite their pieces to our late twentieth-century blueprint.
Our proposed solution was that the List A and B pieces at Grades 1 and 2 should be single-line melodies accompanied by the teacher on a second guitar. The third piece (List C) should be an unaccompanied solo piece of the broken chord, tirando type in which our stringent technical criteria for solo pieces would hopefully be met.
Today’s guitar teachers (in Britain at any rate) are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of accompanying their pupils in the early stages of playing. More and more guitar methods and tutor-books are based initially on the kind of accompanied ‘single-line’ material that makes this possible. Working in this way helps to remove many of the excessive physical demands that the premature use of chordal and contrapuntal music imposes, particularly on the left hand. This in turn makes it easier for the teacher to concentrate on the development of the more qualitative aspects of the pupil’s playing—those that involve the co-ordination of the hands and the right hand alone, such as rhythm, sound, phrasing, and articulation. In addition, this approach makes available to the guitarist music of an inherently higher quality than he or she has traditionally had access to—music by the great composers of the past that is invariably too difficult to play on the solo guitar at this stage of development, but which students of other instruments are able to play as a matter of course. It also gives the guitarist access to keys on the flat side of the key cycle that are understandably rare in the conventional solo repertoire but which it is essential for guitarists to be able to read and understand from a theoretical perspective at the same stage of their musical development as players of other instruments.
This is perhaps a good time to quote John Williams, EGTA UK’s Honorary President, who has supported our campaign from the outset and provided a foreword to the books in the EGTA Series. In an interview in the March 1985 edition of Classical Guitar he said:
I think the problem so far with guitar teaching at a young age is that...the guitar still tends to be a very individually oriented activity in terms of the lessons and the music. So that beginners, whether they’re children or grown-ups are learning how to play solo from the earliest lessons. And I think that’s a great pity.
He went on to say:
We are still asking guitar students from the earliest age to learn the guitar as they learn the piano...you end up with players who are obsessed quite inevitably with the difficulty of playing what is in a sense piano music...they are approaching the guitar as if it were a piano...it won’t work that way and it can’t work that way. Of necessity it limits the standard of playing, the standard of phrasing, the standard of sight-reading and the standard of musicianship, because it’s based on being a rather bad copy of another instrument.
He concluded by adding what can only be described as a motto for this entire project: ‘Everyone is trying to play too difficult solo pieces too early.’
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Everything I have said so far made complete sense to my colleagues on the EGTA Working Party as well as the wider membership. But how would the exam boards respond to such a radical departure from convention? The bowed strings provided us with a valuable precedent. For them, the use of arrangements in Lists A and B is very much the norm. In the Associated Board’s 1991/1992 violin syllabus for instance, the first appearance of an original eighteenth- or nineteenth-century composition was at Grade 3, and it is not until Grade 5 that everything listed is original.
This was a crucial discovery on our part, and it provides us with an interesting comparison between the highly evolved and unbroken pedagogic traditions of the bowed strings (from whom we can learn so much) and the somewhat shakier notions of the guitar world. Here was evidence that what we were asking for in our exams was no different to what violinists and cellists take for granted in theirs. For generations now, arrangements of carefully chosen classical melodies have been the cornerstone of the repertoire of young players of those instruments. Why? Because, just as with the guitar and lute composers of the past, virtuoso violinists from Corelli to Kreutzer and their cellist counterparts were not in the business of writing music for grade examinations. Nor were Bach, Mozart, Schumann or Tchaikovsky for that matter, but they did occasionally compose children’s music, and, as we might expect from genuinely great composers, they made as good a job of it as everything else they wrote. Arrangers of violin and cello repertoire turn to composers like this again and again because of the suitability and sheer quality of their music. Surely guitarists too would benefit from exposure to music of this calibre.
The question of accompaniment was to prove controversial though, and the exam boards have accepted it only with some reluctance for the simple reason that there is no precedent whatsoever for the idea of the same instrument accompanying itself, other than in a duo. The difference between most guitar duets and what we were looking for is that the examination candidate’s part would have to be the one providing the musical initiative at all times—the ‘lead guitar’ if you like—while the accompanying part would have to be as texturally and functionally distinct as possible.
For orchestral instruments, the advantages of using piano accompaniment in an examination are obvious enough: the provision of harmonic and rhythmic support enhances the overall musical experience and sense of performance and makes the music sound complete. Of course, playing with accompaniment is an integral and unquestioned part of their performance culture and not of ours, but we felt it would be wrong to deny melody-playing guitarists the same benefits that other string players enjoy. Having gained parity in the ‘time-scale versus difficulty’ area we would be throwing it away in the area of actual musical performance.
Having to provide an accompanist for an exam would of course be an added responsibility for the guitar teacher and possibly an added expense for the candidate or candidate’s parents. But there is little room for special pleading here: teachers of all other non-keyboard instruments accept this situation as a matter of course. Some of them are able to accompany their own pupils on the piano, but all professional guitar teachers should be able to play guitar accompaniments of the sort we envisaged.
By now we were clearly making progress on the ideological/theoretical front. Our one remaining practical problem was the availability of repertoire. The accompanied single-line material in guitar tutor books rarely possesses sufficient substance and musical quality to be acceptable for examinations, nor does it necessarily cover the required range of style and period. Nor did the majority of modern ‘easy’ solo pieces seem to do exactly what we would have liked them to do, so it became increasingly clear to all concerned with this initiative that we would have to produce the required repertoire ourselves or it would be impossible for our ideas to take root. And so the EGTA Series was born.
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To cater for the early grades there are two parallel strands in the EGTA Series: One + One (the pupil/teacher duos for Lists A and B) and Solo Now! (contemporary solo pieces for List C). Each strand has three volumes which correspond to the following levels of difficulty: Book 1 = Grades 1–2; Book 2 = Grades 2–3; Book 3 = Grades 3–4. The first two volumes of each set are available now and the third volumes will appear this year.
To complement the One + One books we have Petr Eben’s settings of 33 Czech Folk Songs arranged as pupil/teacher duos by Peter Batchelar. This collection covers more or less the same range as the three One + One books in a single volume.
In order to minimise the cost to the pupil, both the One + One books and the 33 Czech Folk Songs are published as a teacher’s score with the pupil’s part available separately. Each teacher’s score includes one free pupil’s part.
Finally we have produced two books of solo repertoire to cover List A and List B requirements for Grades 3 to 5. These are The Baroque Book (which is available now and figures prominently in the new Associated Board syllabus) and The Classical Book (which is currently in preparation).
One + One
The three volumes of One + One contain arrangements of music from the renaissance, baroque, classical and romantic periods as well as folk-song settings and new compositions written specially for the EGTA Series. We have included new compositions, even though they don’t apply to the exam list repertoire scheme that has already been outlined, in order to maximise the books’ general value to the user and to show how this approach can work for all types of music.
The One + One books are designed to introduce keys and positions in a cumulative way. Book 1 uses the key signatures up to and including one sharp and one flat and the pieces only use the first two positions. Book 2 introduces two sharps and the third and fourth positions and Book 3 adds two flats (and one piece with three sharps) and the fifth position. One piece in Book 3 contains two bars in the eighth position and another has a twelfth-fret harmonic. Such a thorough approach to position learning will improve fingerboard knowledge as well as the vital but often neglected technique of position shifting. Learning to think in position is the key to good sight-reading. To that end, left-hand fingering has been kept to a minimum.
Note values and rhythmic groupings are also dealt with progressively. In Book 1, the quaver is the smallest note value used and dotted crotchet with single quaver the most difficult rhythmic combination. Book 2 contains the dotted-quaver/semiquaver pairing and Book 3 has examples of triplet quavers alongside duplets in simple time—and even a slow piece with some demisemiquavers.
As far as the right hand is concerned, we recommend that passages using the thumb should be played tirando, but those that use the fingers can be played with the apoyando or tirando techniques, according to the teacher’s preference. Indeed, the range of musical options that these pieces explore will hopefully stimulate the teacher to experiment with both types of stroke. At the simplest level, for instance, the apoyando stroke could be used for loud passages and the tirando stroke for the quieter ones.
In Book 1 each piece uses either the upper strings played with the right-hand fingers, or the lower strings played with the thumb. In Book 2 passages for thumb alternate with passages for fingers within the same piece. In Book 3 fingers and thumb begin to combine freely within a single phrase. It is hoped that this approach will help bring a sense of linear independence to both thumb and fingers and so give the pupil the best possible preparation for contrapuntal playing and hearing.
In Book 3 the pupil’s part becomes more texturally complex while remaining non-polyphonic: there are passages in thirds, some other double-stops and one or two easy chords. Left hand slurs (or ligados) are introduced in Book 3. We feel it is more sensible for the guitar student confronting this technique for the first time to do so in a single-line context. That way, the problems that are bound to arise can be dealt with in relative isolation, something much harder to do in polyphonic or chordally-based pieces. Also, by not introducing the left-hand technical slur until Book 3, we have the opportunity in Books 1 and 2 to establish the basic phrasing slur in the pupil’s mind as a fundamental musical concept in its own right.
Phrasing and articulation are often neglected by guitar teachers, despite being of the utmost musical importance, and they figure prominently in the EGTA Series from the outset. The presence of such symbols on our musical texts reminds us to think in terms of breathing and bowing, and to consider how these can become a metaphor for achieving legato and staccato, elision and separation, on our own instrument. We imagine—quite wrongly—that phrasing and articulation are an option, not a necessity, and that guitarists are somehow exempt from these concerns because ours is such a ‘difficult’ instrument. The stripped-down nature of the single-line pieces, where every note counts and there is nowhere to hide, both exposes the need for this kind of attention to detail and creates the opportunity to do something about it. The physical barriers are removed and with them the excuses. It is too easily assumed that the primary value of single-line work is the musical experience gained by part-playing in guitar ensembles and orchestras. In our view the technical benefits are just as significant as the musical ones.
Let us look at some examples.
Example 1 Richard Wright, A Grand Occasion (One + One, Book 1), bars 14–17
© 1994 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission
This ‘thumb only’ extract demonstrates the care with which we have approached the question of articulation. The pupil’s part is designed to enable precise details such as the differences in articulation between the second beat of the third bar and the third beat of the fourth bar to be executed with ease. Throughout One + One Book 1, staccato marks have been given only when the note in question is followed by a note on the same string, thus enabling the right-hand finger or thumb to effect the staccato as part of the preparation for the next note.
Example 2 Stephen Dodgson, Air (One + One, Book 1), bars 1–10:
© 1994 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
This is another piece for thumb alone. It shows how the problem of guitar accompanying guitar can be solved by using extremes of registration. The pupil has to listen—and count—through the introduction and again in bar 7. Throughout the piece, wherever the pupil plays on the first beat of the bar, the accompanist does not—an interesting example of the pupil having to provide the initiative.
Example 3 Schubert German Dance, Op.33 No.7 (One + One, Book 1), bars 1–5
© 1994 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Here, both guitars share the same register and the distinction between them is achieved by their contrasting textures: guitar 1 plays a rhythmically varied tune with a variety of articulations; guitar 2 plays a simple chord accompaniment with a repetitive articulation.
Example 4 trad. arr. Colin Downs, La Danse de Serrelongue (One + One, Book 2), bars 37–54
© 1995 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Bar 42 is the beginning of the coda of this French folk-song setting. Played without the bar’s rests (44 and 47) and in the same register, the three detached phrases in the pupil’s part would constitute the first half of a 16-bar verse. Splitting them up into three different registers which use the 1st, 2nd and 3rd positions in turn makes for a valuable position-shifting exercise, with the bar’s rests providing the time to prepare the shift properly.
Example 5 Edward Grieg, Waltz, Op.12 No.2 (One + One, Book 3), bars 31–42
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Our arrangement of this well-known Grieg piece contains a number of left-hand slurs. The first four bars of this extract end the central section of the piece. The second, third and fourth bars amount to a very effective application of a classic left-hand exercise as slurs between the first and second fingers, second and third fingers and third and fourth fingers occur one after the other. There are more slurs in the recapitulation that follows, including some easy grace-notes—and all the articulation marks are taken directly from Grieg’s original.
Petr Eben: 33 Czech Folk Songs
Petr Eben has written many pieces for children and, following in the East European tradition of Bartók and Kodály, has made many creative arrangements of indigenous folk-song material. The 33 Czech Folk Songs are taken from a set of 100, written for the piano and first published in Prague in 1960. He responded enthusiastically and immediately to our request for permission to adapt his work and, for our part, we are particularly pleased to have such a distinguished composer associated with the EGTA Series.
Apart from their obvious musical qualities, these arrangements work well as a preparation for the various technical elements found in the One + One books because of their brevity and simplicity. Here, in their entirety, are two examples featuring alternate passages for the right-hand thumb and fingers, as in One + One Book 2.
Example 6 Petr Eben, ‘I have black horses’
© 1995 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
In this piece the thumb plays strongly on the third string in second position. The dynamic markings for the central section where the index and middle fingers alternate suggests the use of the tirando stroke.
Example 7 Petr Eben, ‘Oh, love, love’
© 1995 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Here the pupil starts unaccompanied and twice in the course of the piece has to count through a bar’s rest.
Solo Now!
The Solo Now! books are an attempt to provide the elementary guitarist with contemporary solos in which the demands made on the left hand are minimised so that the student can concentrate on the formation of a stable but relaxed right-hand position. As far as the early Grade exams are concerned, we felt that, given that our preference in Lists A and B was for accompanied melodies, List C would have to consist of not just modern solo pieces but ones that functioned, in terms of right-hand technique, as broken-chord, tirando studies.
In Book 1 the range of right-hand applications is deliberately limited: the basic broken-chord formation of one finger per string is the norm. Consecutive notes on a single string require a slightly different disposition of the hand and so are kept to a minimum. In Books 2 and 3 however, this latter technique is used more freely but nearly always in conjunction with the more basic right-hand regime. In particular, it is the sense of placement of p i m and p i m a over a given group of strings that these pieces should help to inculcate—for instance in preparing the fingers and thumb at the beginning of a phrase, returning them to the strings at the end of a phrase, or using them to produce rests and staccatos.
So how have we made things easier for the left hand? In Book 1 several of the pieces require the use of only one left-hand finger at a time, while the remainder allow for the careful sequential placing of an additional finger. There are only two examples in the entire book of two left-hand fingers having to be placed at the same time and they are probably the easiest pairings possible: 4th finger D on string 2 with second finger A on string 3; and 3rd finger A on string 3 with 1st finger D-sharp on string 4. Broadly speaking, this policy is continued throughout Books 2 and 3, though multiple-stops become gradually more frequent. Towards the end of Book 3, where the standard of difficulty has effectively reached Grade 4, there are some half-barrés and simple left-hand slurs. This is consistent with our technical recommendations for that grade. In each volume, the pieces use exactly the same keys and positions as the One + One books.
Example 8 Richard Wright, Toy Soldiers (Solo Now! Book 1), bars 1–12
© 1994 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
The policy of initially allocating right-hand fingers to specific strings is clearly demonstrated here. Up to and including the second-time bar the thumb plays on the third string, the index finger on the second string and the middle finger on the first string. In the following section the thumb plays on the fourth and fifth strings, the index finger on the third string, the middle finger on the second string and the ring finger on the first string. A recapitulation follows in which the right hand resumes its original stance.
Example 9 Vojislav Ivanovic, Evening Tune (Solo Now! Book 1), bars 1–11
© 1994 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
With the exception of Petr Eben, Vojislav Ivanovic and Norbert Leclercq are thus far the only non-British composers to have contributed to the EGTA Series, so their pieces are of particular interest. The third and eleventh bars of Evening Tune show the right-hand fingers moving away from a set formation and playing consecutive notes on the same string.
Example 10 Vincent Lindsey-Clarke, Hopscotch (Solo Now! Book 2), bars 12–23
© 1995 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
This last two lines of this piece, complete with semiquavers, syncopation and use of the third position, are a good illustration of the gradual increase in difficulty from Book 1 to Book 2.
Example 11 Colin Downs, Anna Magdalena’s Dance (Solo Now! Book 2), bars 1–12
© 1995 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Again we have an example showing the increased amount of position changing in Solo Now! Book 2 (this time up to the fourth position and back again). The alternating of the middle and ring fingers in this passage is typical of the attention paid to right-hand development throughout the EGTA Series.
Example 12 Stephen Dodgson, Valentine (Solo Now! Book 3), bars 1–4
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
This is one of only two items that contain the half-barré and they come almost at the end of the entire Solo Now! range (70 pieces in all). In this piece the half-barré is only used at the relatively easy fifth fret and, coming at the start as this example does, it gives the player the chance to prepare the left hand.
Example 13 David Cottam, Fabien’s Flight (Solo Now! Book 3), bars 1–8
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
The only uses of the left-hand slur in Solo Now! Book 3 occur, as in this example, in what are effectively single-line passages—that is to say the only left-hand fingers being used are the ones performing the slur. The following chart summarises some of the joint criteria of the One + One and Solo Now! collections.
Book 1 |
Book 2 |
Book3 | |
Keys |
C, G, F Am, Em, Dm |
Book 1 + D, Bm |
Books 1 & 2 + B flat, A, Gm |
Positions |
I, II | I– IV | I – V (+) |
Rhythmic values |
Semibreve – quaver including dotted crotchet |
Book 1 + semiquavers including dotted quaver |
Books 1 & 2 + triplets |
Left hand in |
Single notes | Single notes | Double stops, ligados |
Left hand in |
Fingers placed singly, and occasionally added to | Two fingers are sometimes placed together | Three fingers are sometimes placed together; half-barrés; ligados |
The Baroque Book and The Classical Book
As I have already explained, these two publications are intended to cover List A and List B requirements for Grades 3 to 5. The EGTA Working Party’s technical guidelines for these grades were quite specific. We felt that the earliest examination level at which good quality examples of the traditional guitar repertoire can be used sensibly and in any quantity is Grade 3, and that solo pieces used at this stage should not contain such relatively advanced left-hand techniques as barrés or ligados. What they should do is test all the basic left- and right-hand skills developed so far and consolidate fingerboard knowledge in the first five positions. Half-barrés and single-direction slurs (e.g. appoggiaturas) should not be used until Grade 4, with full-barrés and multiple slurs (e.g. mordents and trills) coming in at Grade 5. From Grade 4 upwards, the higher positions should gradually be brought into play. The thirty-six pieces in The Baroque Book and the thirty-three in The Classical Book, while being more or less progressive in difficulty throughout, are grouped in equal measure into three distinct categories based on these criteria. It is this precise technical targeting that distinguishes both books from the many other period-based collections on the market. No comparable publications offer the same value for money to their intended users. In fact I would go as far as to say there are no comparable publications.
The Baroque Book contains a selection of arrangements of all the standard dance movements and other characteristic forms, written by French, German, Czech, English, Italian and Spanish composers for instruments as diverse as the guitar, lute, harpsichord, violin, cello, flute, colascione and viola da gamba. As such, it could not claim to be—and should not be regarded as—an authentic edition, though every care has been taken to balance historical accuracy with the broader didactic aims of the book. Here are three examples, one from each section.
Example 14 Reusner, Gavotte, bars 1–4
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Our technical criteria for the first section effectively precluded the use of ornamentation, so special care was taken to find items like that did not require any, or, as in the case of this delightful Gavotte by Reusner, contained sufficient melodic and rhythmic character for the ornaments not to be missed.
Example 15 Logy, Bourrée, bars 5–16
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
This extract contains one appoggiatura and one half-barré. Each piece in the second section of The Baroque Book contains at least one example of these left-hand techniques.
Example 16 de Visée, Prélude, bars 7–15
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Here we see full-barrés, mordents and a trill. The piece also demonstrates the increased stylistic complexity that is typical of the final section of the book.
The question of authenticity does not arise where The Classical Book is concerned as it consists entirely of original guitar pieces from the early nineteenth century. The obvious composers are there (particularly Fernando Sor) and perhaps some of the obvious pieces too—but again, the context in which they are juxtaposed, where the pieces complement each other so logically, makes this book a particularly coherent and useable choice for this important area of the repertoire at this important stage of technical development.
Before looking at examples from The Classical Book, I would like to broaden the picture a little.
By this summer, we will have produced nine volumes of music—with well over two hundred individual items—in roughly three years. This is more than enough to be going on with, but there have already been a number of suggestions regarding possible future publications: music for guitar ensembles, sight-reading books, a beginners’ method, and so on. The Petr Eben book suggests the possibility of inviting other established composers to write complete sets of pieces based on our guidelines and hopefully letting us publish them as part of the EGTA Series.
At the moment though, our priority is to look into the possibility of producing a book of scales and arpeggios. The examination boards usually publish their own scale and arpeggio books, but unfortunately, this aspect of the Working Party’s recommendations has not been as clearly understood as some of the others, and so we feel that it might be a good idea to publish our own.
As it stands, the examination approach to scales and arpeggios represents something of a wasted opportunity. They are treated too much as an end in themselves rather than a technical and theoretical ‘support system’ running parallel to the pieces at a given level. As I have already said, it is not unusual to be given scales in keys remote from those used in the pieces at that grade. At an advanced level this is unavoidable as solo guitar music hardly ever uses keys with a lot of sharps and flats, yet all the scales do have to be learned eventually. However, it is the elementary level that we are mostly concerned with, and here we feel that it would be better to concentrate on the keys that are actually used in the pieces, but explore them much more thoroughly.
For instance, candidates are asked to play scales with alternating right-hand fingers across all the strings, even in the earliest grades where the pieces hardly ever require the use of the right-hand fingers on the bottom two strings. This is essentially ‘thumb territory’ yet we are never asked to play scales with the thumb. How ridiculous it would be if pianists were asked to play full-range scales with their right hand only, never using their left—yet that is the exact equivalent of what happens on the guitar. How can the guitarist cope with polyphonic music without good thumb independence? And, by definition, how can he or she develop such independence without training the thumb in isolation from the fingers?
Furthermore, while examination candidates are expected to play scales with every possible combination of right-hand fingerings, they are not encouraged to play them with both the apoyando and tirando strokes. There seems to be an unwritten rule that only the apoyando stroke should be used, yet the tirando stroke occurs far more often in actual music.
The question of arpeggio playing is equally interesting though somewhat more complex. The way it has traditionally been tested in guitar examinations is, in our view, both inadequate and inappropriate. Every instrument except the guitar not only has exam arpeggios that are played in the same way, with the same fingering, as the arpeggio passages that occur in their actual pieces of music, but is also able to use the same technique and choice of fingering regardless of what musical function the particular arpeggiated sequence is meant to fulfil. For single-voice instruments the arpeggio only has a melodic function anyway, each note giving way directly to the next, making the arpeggio, from a technical stand-point, nothing more than a scale with some notes missing. It is used, together with scales, to help the player locate, execute, and understand the function of certain basic intervals. For self-accompanying instruments such as the piano or guitar however, arpeggios have an additional, harmonic function, in which they usually appear as broken chords. These situations sometimes require the individual notes of the arpeggio or broken chord to ring on under each other until the harmony changes. This creates the rich, accompanimental sonority that is an essential characteristic of much guitar music. If necessary, the pianist can create this effect simply by holding down the damper pedal. On the guitar it is not so straightforward: the sequence has to be fingered in such a way that as many notes as possible (within each harmony) are played on different strings.
For the guitarist, the sustained broken chord is the most frequently applied and easily understood of the two arpeggio types. The concept of an arpeggio being a melodic exercise, an aid to intervallic awareness as it is for the violinist or horn player, is less well understood though it is clearly no less important.
Unfortunately neither type is properly catered for in the present exam requirements. What we have at the moment are arpeggio forms written in the melodic style, but with fingerings which in places make up chord shapes thus tempting us to let the notes ring on beyond their prescribed value. Although it is in the nature of the guitar that the absolute integrity of note values will be unavoidably compromised from time to time, we feel that the basic question of the technical relevance of the harmonic type versus the enhanced linear perception afforded by the melodic type is sufficiently important to try and find a better approach to examining arpeggio playing than exists at present.
As soon as we abandon the idea that all guitar arpeggios should follow a fixed, transposable, left-hand formula with matching right-hand finger patterns, it should become possible to create for each grade an interesting and varied menu that accommodates the two distinct types of arpeggio function described here, using fingerings, keys and positions that fit the agreed criteria for that grade, and combining them in ways that reflect real musical situations.
So how does this approach to scales and arpeggios relate to real musical situations? (By ‘real musical situations’ I mean the authentic, historic solo guitar repertoire that our working party decided can cause problems if it is used before Grade 3.) Two examples from the second section of The Classical Book may help answer this perfectly reasonable question.
Example 17 Sor, Study in A, Op.35 No.9 (Classical Book), bars 1–8
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Here we have a relatively neglected study whose initial 4-bar theme, occurring four times in all, is a harmonised major scale. It is typical of that substantial portion of early 19th century repertoire that we tend to dismiss as broken-chord studies when they are better thought of as self-accompanied thumb melodies. By that I mean the thumb has the principal role, playing on all the main beats and leading us forward through all the changes of harmony. Our chief considerations when playing this kind of piece should therefore be horizontal (i.e. melodic) and not vertical (i.e. thinking in terms of the left hand playing one static chord shape after another). If the thumb line is not played with proper shape and direction (perhaps, in this instance, with the first two bars phrased separately and the next two phrased together) the piece loses all its inherent poetry.
Example 18 Sor, Tempo di minuetto, Op.44 No.14 (Classical Book), bars 1–10
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
Fernando Sor’s Opus 44 is a particularly interesting collection from our point of view as it contains a number of pieces which incorporate scale passages as well as both types of arpeggio. In this example it is clear from the way the different sections are notated that bar 1, for instance, should be played with a note-on-note legato (not laisser vibrer) and that from bar 8 onwards a pedalled effect is required.
I would like to return to The Baroque Book and One + One, Book 3, for two final examples.
Example 19 Abel, Minuet (Baroque Book), bars 16–25
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
This is one of two pieces by Karl Friedrich Abel, originally for unaccompanied viola da gamba, that appear in The Baroque Book. The phrasing slurs in bars 19 and 20 are the composer’s original bowings so we know exactly what kind of articulation he had in mind. The arpeggiation is of the melodic variety so the notes must not be held on indiscriminately, but the pairs of quavers that share a bow must be elided slightly so as to achieve maximum legato. By fingering the bowed pairings across two strings and the detached pairs on the same string, the original articulation can be simulated with relative ease.
Example 20 Purcell, Rondeau (One + One, Book 3), bars 8–10
© 1996 Chanterelle Verlag. Reproduced by permission.
This extract contains the relative major appearance of one of the most famous ‘melodic’ arpeggios in the history of music. A first position half-barré in bar 9 would not do justice to its musical character and would make the transition to the second bar much more difficult.
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As far as the exams are concerned, it is too soon to say what the long-term effect of our initiative will be. To achieve a permanent change for the better, much will depend on the ability of teachers to adapt to a new set of values. On a superficial level the exam pieces may appear easier than they used to be, but there is a trade-off: they will have to be approached with more attention to detail—both technical and musical—than was previously the case. It is therefore important to stress that none of this thinking in any way represents an attempt to give either teachers or their exam candidates an easy ride. Nor will the net result be a lowering of standards (as some people have bizarrely suggested!)—the opposite is quite clearly the case.
The accompaniments provide the teacher with a further challenge. They are not difficult in the absolute sense of the word, but to play them well requires great sensitivity and control. Hopefully teachers will approach the task with a positive attitude—after all, making music with our pupils should be as enjoyable for us as it is for them—and perhaps in return the exam boards will bear with us through what will be a period of transition. Finally, we should not forget that the ideas put forward in the Working Party Report and developed in the EGTA Series are not just relevant to examinations. After all, examinations are only optional tests taken at the end of a specific period of study. The important thing is the period of study itself—what is being played and how it is being taught—and it is here, in the day-to-day context of actual guitar teaching, that these ideas are best explored and evaluated. By so doing, by taking on board, as we have proposed, the kind of uncompromising, music-driven pedagogic principles that are taken for granted in the teaching of other instruments, we may go some way towards fulfilling the first two stated aims in Article 1 of EGTA UK’s statutes, namely ‘to make improvements in teaching standards’ and ‘to raise the guitar’s position within the musical mainstream’.
Copyright © 1996 by Richard Wright