Me and my guitar

During my study years I started to study guitar. I took lessons from another student who studied guitar at the Tilburg Conservatory. I owed my initiative to my father who sent me to guitar lessons in Leyden, but like so often happens, I didn’t continue my practice. Guitar, and especially “classical” guitar, is far more difficult than most non-guitarplayers think. What you see on TV and what you listen to on CD’s are the top talents, cherished and nourished by parents and teachers, gifted with great motivation and self-discipline. They were my inspirators, too. I reached a lower-middle class level because other activities and gifts pushed me into another direction. But what I have is the sense of dedication when I’m studying a piece. It’s almost meditation, and that’s the reason why after several years I picked up the guitar again. Attention is the key word. Every note has its own character, and fits harmonically into the series that form the piece. The music must be produced by pure attention. The whole body is involved by this spiritual effort. Islam to music. This way my performance differs to performance of more talented musicians who play as kind of self-expression (they use the instrument and the music to express something of themselves) or as a kind of “interpretation”: they interpret the music and produce it like they feel it. So Alfred Brendl playing Beethoven is different from Bernstein playing the same Beethoven piece, while both are masters. It’s not said that these people pay less attention than I do, but they are far less involved with playing technique than I am. Sometimes my fingers press another string than intended and it is hearable as a loud curse in the church. When this happens I say: shit, and my wife has forbidden me to say it during guitar study.
Like so many hobbies, playing music is expensive: you must buy a good instrument, don’t say to yourself: I’m only an amateur so a cheap one will do. On the contrary, a good instrument is far better to practice on than a cheap instrument.
Years and years ago I fell in love with the lute, and wanted to own one. The problem was that I had no money for it. Well there was enough money of course but I was married and you know the priorities: car, house maintenance, washing machine, TV, all these are more important than a lute. (The same thing I now feel with my new hobby: photography, but that’s another story). What’s so special about a lute as compared to a guitar? Lute tones are clearer, more honest. They sound like crystal. A guitar is, in my opinion, a more convenient-to-handle variety of the lute and this greater convenience has been achieved by compromising with sound quality. It has fixed bars, it’s flat so easier to transport and to hold whilst playing, it has a straight neck, etc. The sound is also louder than the lute sound which makes it more suitable for concerts.
So I wanted to have a lute and decided to build one myself. I succeeded in constructing something resembling a lute, but the sound was far from what I heard on LP’s (the predecessors of CD’s) and performances. I also used guitar strings, and after several months of playing efforts I put it away and now it hangs in our bedroom as a wall decoration. Building lutes is a craft of its own, I learned, although I used selected wood and had consulted a lute building construction manual.
I also discovered the blessing of YouTube where I found several performances by Valéry Sauvage, excellent! I’m almost jealous of this gentleman because he has so much that I miss (that’s mostly the case with being jealous: a splendid view from his window, several lutes and guitars, an outstanding playing technique etc., and also equipment and skills needed to broadcast yourself the way he does. So I need all my philosophical competencies to keep jealousy out of my door. Let’s be happy with such people because jealousy is a form of disrespect, and that’s what it is! I wrote to him (also an Internet blessing!!) a message in which I compared him with John Willams and Julian Bream, but he found them of a much higher level than he. I find him on the same level because these top-artists often over-play their music: the pieces sound more polished and “techniqued” than they used to be played. This holds especially for old folk tunes and non-pretending but beautiful pieces from centuries ago. It doesn’t hold for Bach, his lute pieces or transcriptions from violoncello or violin for guitar cannot be played with enough virtuosity, and it doesn’t hold either for more modern or romantic compositions by e.g. Villa-Lobos, Brahms or the famous “Clair de Lune” by Debussy. Virtuosity is not what it’s all about, E.g. Franz Liszt and Paganini composed many things for virtuosi, but is this music “better” in that it evokes more or deeper musical emotions in the audience? I doubt.
So now I’m preparing myself on playing music with a talented friend playing flute. I look forward to our first study session.