https://www.digitalguitararchive.com/2022/03/repertoire-issues/
From 1986 to 2000 the guitarist and music publisher Matanya
Ophee gave variations of a lecture he called “Repertoire Issues”. His core claims in the lecture were:
1) the guitar has never
been taken seriously within classical music for the entirety of its history
2) this lack of regard
manifested in the absence of guitarists from chamber music festivals across the
world in what is colloquially known as classical music
3) this should not
dissuade guitarists from doing their best to be taken seriously by not only
audiences but other musicians within concert music.
It is with that in mind I want to quote extensively from
Ophee’s concluding remarks about what he saw in the classical guitar scene, particularly
on the relationship guitarists (and their music) had in connection to the
classical music mainstream. Distinct
from the chamber music mainstream scenes of classical music many guitarists
were playing music influenced by (interacting with) non-classical genres and
styles of music. This was a phenomenon
that has emerged since the 1970s or so and has been called “crossover”. Ophee’s comments were as follows:
Repertoire Issues
Published by Legacy of Matanya Ophee on March 7, 2022
…
No doubt, attitudes have changed in the
last ten years [the lecture was given in 2000]. There are more performances of
chamber music with guitar today. I dare say though, that this activity have not
yet resulted in a change of perspective in the general public. I read a lot of
lofty pronouncements regarding chamber music with guitar in many interviews
with guitarists. This is, for the most part, empty lip-service. I do not know
of any leading guitarist-performer today who is willing and able to settle on a
career which is dedicated to chamber music. There are no active professional
chamber music ensembles today, which consist of more than two spouses and which
include the guitar.
In my country, there are some 800
festival each summer dedicated to chamber music. You can see there the names of
Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pinchas Zukerman, Rudolf
Serkin, Murray Perahia, and scores of other leading instrumentalists and
singers. I have never seen there the names of Andres Segovia, Julian Bream,
John Williams or Alexander Lagoya. This unfortunate verity should not deter the
leading guitarists to appear there on a regular basis. The inevitable question
is: what do our virtuosi have to offer musicians and an audience who have been
nurtured for generations on a steady diet of the Beethoven string quartets, the
Brahms Clarinet quintet, and the Mendelssohn Piano trios, not to mention
chamber music by Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Dvorak?
Before we attempt to answer that, we must
shed any inferiority complex regarding our repertoire and realize that even
though the great masters of chamber music have not written for the guitar, we
still have a great deal of valuable contribution to make. In evaluating chamber
music for guitar, we must avoid judging it by reference to the guitar part
alone. What matters in chamber music is the artistic worth of the composition
as a whole, NOT the relative merits of the guitar part. Few guitarists are able
to read a chamber music score, and few publications of chamber music with
guitar, particularly those which date from the time of Heinrich Albert, not to
mention the more recent spate of so-called “facsimiles,” actually have one. A
guitarist who wishes to embark on a career of music making in public, and would
like to achieve anything like the job security offered by professions such as
the architects, engineers, doctors, airline pilots or college teachers, would
better learn the tricks of the trade. Not memorization, but sight-reading,
score analysis, and the ability to breath together, sometimes with total
strangers. Look for those works who would offer your future colleagues
something new and exhilarating. Even if this means that you have to go
oom-pah-pah for a while. That too, can be a valuable and profitable
contribution to your own economic survival and to the future of the guitar as a
viable musical discipline. If we want to actually function “on the first rank,
such as the violin, piano and cello,” we must break away from the restrictive
mold of the solo recital, the guitar master-class, the guitar competition and
the guitar festival and to propel our way into the general society of music.
I cannot leave this discussion without
some words about the programming used by many guitarists today when they play
solo recitals. The old Tarrega/Segovia type of programming has been replaced,
for better or for worse, with a new type of programming which employs mostly
music based on the cross-over phenomenon, that is to say, new compositions
based on the popular genres of jazz, rag-time, tango, and country-western
music. Thus, besides the leyendas and the Villa-Lobos pieces, we also get the
Koyunbabas, the Sunbursts, the Usher Walses and the Piazolla pieces. In
principle, all these pieces are actually very good music. But the number of
times you get to hear them in the course of a guitar festival, makes them into
hackneyed, unimaginative lollipops which might bring a good reaction from a
guitar audience, and might even give pleasure to general public audiences. Many
main line musicians do the same. Thus you get a cellist like Yo-Yo Ma playing
Piazolla. But we must observe that main line musicians do cross-over,
in addition to their
normal serious repertoire. Guitarists do it instead.
[italics original, bold added]
I have observed that in the last few
decades the guitarists who made it to the top of the profession quickly, were
those who came on the scene with a totally new repertoire, entirely avoiding
the standards, the old and the new. There is a lesson to be learned here, and
it is this: the main question the guitarist should place before himself is not
what to play. It, what NOT to play. Think about it.
…
It has been just a few years since Matanya Ophee died and I have
considered his ideas formatively influential.
I have spent decades writing chamber sonatas for the guitar in which it
is paired up with woodwinds, bowed strings, plucked strings, piano, and
brass. I aimed to write a cycle of
chamber sonatas using the guitar the way Paul Hindemith wrote chamber sonatas
around piano accompaniment. It turned
out while I was tackling this compositional project over the last two and a
half decades, inspired by Ophee’s “Repertoire Issues” that the Austrian
composer (and pianist) Ferdinand Rebay had created a big cycle of sonatas for
guitar with woodwinds and strings decades before I was born. This was a happy
discovery at multiple levels, first of all because I have found I generally
actually enjoy Rebay’s sonatas, and because it is a sign that Rebay, forgotten
as he was in the last half century since his passing, has created a substantial
body of work that merits further performance and study.
Yet Rebay’s legacy highlights
all the more Matanya Ophee’s observation that the great composers, or
first-rate composers never wrote chamber music that included the guitar. Sure, this could be a place to voice
exception. Don’t the Four Songs of
Stravinsky include a guitar part? They
do and they are a blast but the point can still remain. There could be an objection that Toru
Takemitsu’s Toward The Sea for alto flute and guitar is a significant work for that pairing much
the same way Astor Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango for flute and guitar is a significant work. But you don’t hear those works at festivals,
do you? Ophee’s point has remained without substantial counter-examples and
counter-arguments.
Let’s say for the sake of
discussion the six-stringed classical guitar that was refined in Spain is only
about 250 years old. That means that the instrument has been around for
centuries and no works written for the guitar by guitarist composers have made
it into the mainstream canon of concert music, often known as classical
music. The most significant canonical
works for the guitar were either written for the instrument by non-guitarists
(whether Rodrigo or Britten or Martin or Castelnuovo-Tedesco or Ponce or
whomever) or were transcriptions of non-guitar music made by guitarists (Johann
Sebastian Bach and Isaac Albeniz).
For there to be no canonical
works in chamber music or solo guitar in the classical music mainstream after
no less than 250 years should force those of us who are guitarists to ask what
it would take for a guitar work to gain canonical status in chamber
repertoire. If we decide the five-course
guitar that anticipated the modern guitar counts as the guitar, too, then the
history of the guitar can go back five centuries and this makes the situation
worse rather than better. If the guitar
is half a millennium old and in all that time not a single work for the
instrument and its variants has been regarded as worthy enough to become a
canonical work of music theorists and historians consider important enough that
non-guitarists have to know them the way singers and guitarists in music survey
courses have to know who Mozart and Beethoven were, well, what are the odds the
guitar and guitarist composers will ever buck the centuries long trend? Ophee advised that we do not have an
inferiority complex about our instrument and its repertoire and I do, frankly,
agree. At the same time, a case could be
made that Ophee’s observation about the bias against the guitar as the
companion of any Spaniard opens up the question of ethnic and racial biases
within musicology and it’s not for nothing this was the topic of a recent book
about the history of music theory and music history.
Since I’m writing in 2024 and in
the United States (citizen born and raised) I probably don’t need to even name
the author and title. But I liked the
book, honestly, and I think guitarists should take Philip Ewell’s often
polemical On
Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone very
seriously. It is possible for
traditionalists and defenders of The Great Tradition version of classical music
to just say that Ewell has a chip on his shoulder or that when he remarked on
the functional erasure of Spanish and Spanish-language derived music from
classical music theory and history that this is part of some sour grapes
campaign. For guitarists, however, the
prospect of functionally expunging Spanish and Latin American music from any
consideration pre-emptively wipes out even the slightest chance that many of
the most beloved works of the guitar literature will ever be taken
seriously. How high and low do you have
to look for a truly detailed analysis of the formal, rhythmic, melodic and
harmonic materials of Five Preludes by Heitor Villa-Lobos that could compare to an analysis of Beethoven’s
Hammerklavier?
Even if Ewell is wrong about
many things he doesn’t seem to be wrong about how marginal Spanish music (and
its adjacents) have often been in music theory and music history. Why discuss the harmonic language of Albeniz
if he’s consigned to having accomplished pianistic feats of post-Lisztian
virtuosity, as a Grove entry put it decades ago? That Britten’s Nocturnal after
John Dowland is a fine piece of music doesn’t
mean that either Britten’s work for guitar or Dowland’s lute music has been
discussed very much in mainstream classical music theory and history. I can’t recall seeing a single extensive
study of Takemitsu’s magnificent suite for solo guitar All in Twilight in the last thirty years.
Discussions of guitarists and their approaches to sonata form have
largely revolved around Sor and Giuliani and, understandably, Ponce. There is room for more work to be done and
that work is being done but what seems unlikely to happen is for a guitarist to
have composed a piece of music so significant to mainstream classical music
theory and education as to merit that nebulous but sought-after status of
canonization. There’s no chamber work
written by a guitarist composer that has canonical status unless we’re going to
go out on a limb and remind people that Hector Berlioz played the guitar. But how has the status of Berlioz’ music held
up in the last century?
So when Ophee said that mainstream
classical musicians establish themselves in the standards like Yo-yo Ma on the
cello and embrace cross-over in addition to the standards, and guitarists
did cross-over instead, that seems to be true, but it also reveals a
possible double-bind at the core of Ophee’s questions and concerns. If the guitar has never made it into the
classical canon over the course of centuries why would it now? If in the wake of 250 to 500 years of guitars
being around literally nothing has been written that fits into the chamber
repertoire of music festivals is the problem with the guitar or with the
chamber music festivals? Is it possible
that the aesthetics and norms of the long 19th century, often
thought of as being the span between 1780 to about 1920, constitutes a set of
standards the guitar could not possibly measure up to?
After so many centuries maybe
the wiser thing for guitarists to keep doing is to cross over instead.
Don’t even bother with seeking mainstream acceptance within classical music in
chamber festival settings. It’s not that
I didn’t hear guitarists at the Ice Breaker festivals in Seattle over the
decades, I did hear chamber music featuring the guitar and I liked the pieces I
heard, but the Ice Breaker festivals show that the guitar has some compelling
music from the Baltic states but you have to search high and low for it. There are niches within niches in classical
music, which is itself a niche.
There may be a case to be made
that crossing over instead is a more rewarding path for classical guitarists.
You and I who play the guitar may have more in common with Blind Willie
Johnson, Luigi Legnani, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Bukka
White, Lightning Hopkins, Fernando Sor, Wenzel Matiegka, Napoleon Coste, Nikita
Koshkin, Dusan Bogdanovic, Angelo Gilardino, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Leo
Brouwer, Elizabeth Cotton, Joni Mitchell, Ida Presti, Nadia Borislova, Annette
Kruisbrink, Rosetta Tharpe, and Bonnie Rait than we will have with Mozart,
Haydn, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Mahler, Webern, Handel, Buxtehude,
Bach, Schutz, Albeniz, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
Medtner and Scriabin. We guitarists have
more in common with each other that we all play the guitar than we may ever
have with the canonized composers of classical music.
John Williams the guitarist has
to be differentiated from the John Williams who gave us soundtracks to the
films Jaws, Star Wars and Superman. A lot of people in the United States know who
John “Star Wars” Williams is even if they can’t stand his music whereas far few
people probably know John Williams as the guitarist who played Nikita Koshkin’s
Usher Waltz, one of those works Matanya
Ophee published and considered was in danger of being turned into a new
lollipop in the guitar literature.
Now I eagerly await the second
half of Koshkin’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar getting a commercially available recording! I
have already written extensively about the first half of this formidable and outstanding
cycle of contrapuntal works for solo guitar written by a guitarist. To go by mainstream classical music theory and
history it can seem as though after a few centuries pianists and organists
regarded the usual suspects as having contributed all there ever was or is
needed for fugues and consigned the genre to the school exam room and the
dustbin of history. Even if Koshkin’s
work merits serious and continued study; even if his work is a substantial
contribution to the tradition of preludes and fugues; I have not seen his cycle
discussed very extensively in the realm of guitar scholarship, let alone in the
“mainstream” of classical music. Ewell
is a Russianist by specialization so I can hope, at least, that maybe one day
he could write about Nikita Koshkin’s cycle of preludes and fugues. If Ewell did that I would so buy that book!
Which is why, in a way, I agree
with Ewell but am ambivalent about aspects of his case. As a guitarist with a fondness for the music
of Wenzel Matiegka I know of literally no significant English-language writing
on his roughly twenty solo guitar sonatas even if I count the helpful essays in
the Stanley Yates edition. The guitar
has not only never been admitted into the musical mainstream it probably never
will be. This is why it may make sense
for guitarists to not only keep crossing over instead but to make that path the
new default moving into the future. We
have more to gain by taking seriously all the styles and forms and genres of
music our guitarist peers have made and are making and will make than to hope
after centuries that somehow one of us guitarists will write something that
gains the status of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata or his late B flat major string quartet. Koshkin’s life and work may be instructive
precisely here since scholars who have discussed his music and work have
pointed out that he steeped himself in Stravinsky and Shostakovich but also
listened to Led Zeppelin. Crossing over
instead is probably what we guitarists have been consigned to having no choice
but to do within mainstream classical music history and theory. If that’s the case, let’s just keep doing
that.
If the last few centuries have shown us how seriously non-guitarists in classical music have taken the guitar we have nothing to gain and everything to lose attempting to create musical works that don’t take seriously all the musics written on and for our instrument by our fellow guitarists in the quest to write something that could ever appear alongside Haydn string quartets and Beethoven piano sonatas. By this I don’t mean to say “Don’t bother”, it’s more like Johann Gottfried Herder’s admonition to fellow Germans to trust in their own regional folk traditions for source materials rather than to continuously and continually make worse and worse knock-offs of the pinnacles of the arts in Greek and Roman antiquity.
We may
have a lot more to gain by taking all the music written on the guitar by and
for guitarists seriously across all styles and genres since the birth of the
modern guitar than we are likely to gain in the centuries that have elapsed
without a single solo or chamber work for classical guitar making any notable
appearance in any festival setting. It’s not that I wouldn’t love for chamber
works including the guitar become staples in the classical music mainstream, it’s
that Matanya Ophee died a few years ago and I read his lecture decades ago and
here we are, and the guitar and guitarists are no less marginal to classical
music’s mainstream than seemed to be the case back in the Reagan years. Maybe crossing over instead is the
only actual path forward we have not just due to anti-guitar prejudices but
also because a whole lot of those canonized works from the long 19th
century were running with Herderian ideas of being true to your people’s folk
roots as the basis for making Art.
Guitarists may need to do more of that and not less before we
collectively make something that “makes history”, and doing “more of that” may
entail taking a whole lot more seriously the kinds of musics that have
habitually been consigned to the influences that go into “cross-over”.
If guitarists, even classical
guitarists, take this approach, it will also be taking up one of the main
points of Ewell’s book and his aims, making music theory more welcoming to
everyone
