Britishness and the classical guitar after 1950: composers, performers and identity in the contemporary British guitar repertoire

   

Re-worked paper first delivered at the Galpin Society’s ‘Making the British Sound’ Conference in Edinburgh (July 10 2009).

In his essay ‘The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments’, Kevin Dawe points out that musical instruments are ‘as symbolic and emblematic of peoples and places as any other musical phenomenon’ and when they cross cultural boundaries (for example from country to country) their value and meaning are ‘negotiated and contested’ within the new context. In the process of transition between cultures a performer’s conception of the instrument may alter considerably, as for example occurred when the European violin was transmitted via Irish fiddlers to India during the late eighteenth century. Its subsequent re-deployment in South Indian Karnatic music saw a significant re-working of its technique - the player sits cross-legged, the instrument points to the ground and the scroll is held against the right foot. The violin is also re-tuned and the left hand emphasizes index and middle finger glissandi to accommodate the microtonal pitch schemes of the music it is now required to perform. In effect it is absorbed and refashioned by the host culture, establishing a parallel tradition to its European counterpart. Dawe’s ideas bring to mind semiotic theory, as developed by Saussure, in the sense that instruments can be viewed as ‘motivated’ signs, that is, they may appear to possess a single agreed meaning in one context (for example, social, national etc), until this is subverted by a process of ‘re-education’. Central to the communication of such meanings, and the subsequent establishment of a tradition around them, are performers and composers.

The guitar in its numerous guises - popular, folk, classical etc - has long been a ‘motivated’ sign whose meaning has been, and continues to be, re-made by its practitioners. Its identity as an instrument of specifically ‘classical’ music remained undefined even at the end of the nineteenth century and the present perception of it is still very much endebted to the legacy of Andres Segovia. Through his concertizing, public pronouncements and writings Segovia wove a ‘rag to riches’ style narrative around the guitar, depicting it as downtrodden folk instrument which had been left to rot in the gutter with the proles. His campaign, clearly spelt out in his autobiography, was to purge the guitar of its association with street musicians and earn it a place in the conservatoire where it could hang out with the other instrumental nobility. This mission to re-construct the guitar’s place in the instrumental canon could only be achieved by showing that it was capable of playing ‘worthwhile’ music. The question of what constituted such music had already been partially answered by another Spaniard, Francisco Tarrega, who had devoted much of his career to transcribing piano and chamber works from the Romantic repertoire for solo guitar (including Chopin, Schubert and Beethoven) to prove that it could cope with the advanced musical languages of his period. He was also a composer of a huge quantity of miniatures for the guitar in the Romantic vein. Segovia also transcribed a great deal of music, reaching further back than Tarrega to composers such as Dowland, Bach and Rameau as well as the more recent piano music of Albeniz and Granados. He also initiated new repertoire, predominantly from non-guitarist composers and in doing so demonstrated the extent to which performer agenda could drive the construction of an instrumental canon: much of this new music was derived from a group of individuals whose relatively conservative musical idioms matched his own tastes. The Spaniards Joaquin Turina, Frederico Moreno Torroba, the Italian Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and the Mexican Manuel Ponce are among the more significant composers who were central to the sound of the repertoire that Segovia had envisaged for the instrument, manifested in terms of a tonally founded, mildly chromatic Romantic language couched in traditional forms. Segovia was known to reject pieces whose idiom was too ‘radical’ relative to these standards, for example he famously ignored the Swiss composer Frank Martin’s accomplished Quatre Pieces Breves (1933), even though its occasional atonality was hardly life-threatening. This was a repertoire whose musical character was thus very much dependent upon the outlook of a single individual for its definition and publicisation. It also marked the beginning of an important trend where guitar composition was concerned, summed up by Segovia in his remark on the death of Manuel Ponce in 1948 that, ‘Thanks to him the guitar was saved from the music exclusively written by guitarists’.

The British classical guitar scene after 1950 gave rise to a new repertoire of such distinctive musical character that it offered a considerable challenge to the Spanish model established by Segovia and effectively re-contextualized the instrument. Pivotal to this process was Julian Bream, who aimed like Segovia to generate a repertoire from outside the guitar-playing community. In March 1957 Bream published an article in The Score, entitled ‘How to Write for the Guitar’, which echoed the Segovia ethos in its desire to ‘encourage composers to create a literature for an instrument that has been unduly neglected’. Bream’s approach to discussing the guitar’s musical possibilities is tentative, probably because he wished to avoid alienating any one particular musical aesthetic and perhaps also recognizing the conservatism of compositional outlook in Britain during this period relative to developments on the continent (the impact of the Manchester School for example had yet to be fully felt). He thus emphasizes the instrument’s employment in a tonal context with reference to typical guitar keys that the composer might employ- even suggesting that the guitar is a ‘keybound instrument’. He states that ‘atonal works may present certain problems, though they can be entirely successful if the composer has acquainted himself throughly with the fingerboard, and realized the importance of keeping the texture compact.’ He makes a point of encouraging composers to experiment with the harmonic possibilities derived from juxtaposing passages of parallel triads (using Villa Lobos as an example) against the open strings. Arpeggio textures, which characterize much of the nineteenth century repertoire (Sor, Giuliani, Aguado), are highlighted as an obvious resource but Bream also discusses the contrapuntal capabilities of the guitar, drawing attention to the fact that much counterpoint is an illusion on the instrument but can be convincing with careful planning. He advises the study of Bach’s unaccompanied violin and cello music in particular to see how this might be done.

The conservatism of Bream’s article belied the fact that his musical tastes in practice were rather more eclectic and cosmopolitan than Segovia’s. It is significant, for example, that Bream considered the Segovia-rejected Quatre Pieces Breves of Frank Martin among the finest of the guitar works to emerge from the early twentieth century repertoire. Like Segovia, Bream was an autodidact but one whose technique was flexible enough to enable him to assimilate the musical languages of a number composers whose idioms were more exploratory, such as Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies and Michael Tippett. Typically, Bream’s attitude to any new and challenging repertoire was to allow the music to dictate his approach to technique by turning problematic passages into exercises which would then produce new fingerings. By this means Bream increased the compositional possibilities available to British composers and in the process enabled the guitar to be reconceptualized by British composer vision rather than by its established idiosyncrasies. Other guitar virtuousi have followed suit - Timothy Walker, John Williams and Gilbert Biberian, for example, have similarly acted as vehicles for composer experimentation.

While British performer open-mindedness towards new music certainly played a vital role in encouraging an exploratory attitude to guitar composition, to discern what might constitute a ‘British’ sound in specifically musical terms is more easily said than done when one considers the range of contributors that have left works. A number of the following responded directly to Bream’s call for repertoire, although not all: Denis ApIvor, Malcolm Arnold, Richard Rodney Bennett, Lennox Berkeley, Reginald Smith Brindle, Benjamin Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies, Stephen Dodgson, Peter Racine Fricker, Elisabeth Lutyens, Humphrey Searle, William Walton. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the output of some of these figures will appreciate that an enormous diversity of compositional approaches is implied here (compare Bennett’s serialism to Berkeley’s Parisian neoclassicism for example). If British classical music post the so-called ‘cowpat’ school is seemingly irreducible to a set of national compositional characteristics then in what sense then can the works of these composers en bloc constitute distinctly British guitar music?

In his assessment of the repertoire as it stood in 1974, which included consideration of several British works, Harvey Turnbull remarked that ‘In general the most successful recent guitar writing exploits the instrument’s contrapuntal possibilities rather than its traditional harmonic vocabulary. In other words, it has continued the tradition of pseudo-polyphonic writing established on the vihuela and lute’. This is a significant observation. Counterpoint is an aspect of composition for the guitar that is discussed fleetingly in Bream’s article, yet contrapuntal writing has provided perhaps the most important vehicle by which British composers have conceptualized an alternative approach to the instrument. Links to the guitar’s predecessors, the lute and vihuela have been explicit in a number of works produced for the guitar in Bream’s wake, including Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal Op. 70 (1963), which draws upon the tradition of English lutesong in its forms and materials - a reverse cycle of eight variations based on Dowland’s, ‘Come Heavy Sleep’- and its contrapuntal conception, which is felt most strongly in the monumental passacaglia of the work’s concluding section. It is worth noting incidentally that Britten’s association with Bream came via the latter’s lute performances in accompaniment to Peter Pears, which probably enabled him to more easily visualize a work for the guitar. In fact Britten had initially seemed much keener on composing a piece for the lute until Bream had advised that such a work would be infrequently performed due to the dearth of lutenists in England during this period! Commenting on the final section of the Nocturnal, Peter Evans observes that the ‘nature of guitar technique makes of this passacaglia something nearer a dialogue’ because ‘the ground is so persistently at variance with the unfolding argument it interrupts’ producing a ‘dramaticism that may well be unique to the repertoire of this instrument’.  Evans makes an important point here - that the problems of sustaining strict counterpoint on the guitar (which also beset the lutenists in their day) have led composers to particularly unorthodox methods of contrapuntal conception by way of a solution. Fortunately this flexibility is a prerogative of the contemporary composer who can afford to break the rules (and quite often wants to) and the guitar is a most convenient instrument on which to accomplish this! There is also an implication here that works like the Nocturnal, which attempt to overcome the guitar’s contrapuntal limitations in the service of composer vision, contribute a certain ‘intellectual’ rigour to its music which had previously been lacking in its repertoire. It seems to be this desire to push the guitar out of its comfort zone and away from the more ‘superficial’ or stereotypical aspects of its ‘popular’ Spanish musical character that has driven contemporary British composers to grapple with it.

Some British composers have found the guitar’s contrapuntal possibilities wanting however, preferring to defer to its entrenched Romantic aura, although this has not necessarily led to a compromise of musical vision. Reginald Smith Brindle, for example, commented in a 1988 interview in Classical Guitar that he:

 ‘didn’t find the solo guitar itself very adapted to music which is intellectual, that is, the contrapuntal play between the voices. […] You can’t be as rigorous as you would want to be. So you’ve got to fall back on what the lutenists did. They did a few bars that were quite strict, and then they stopped it and went into a freer style, only coming back into the strict thing when they brought in a new theme in the fantasia and so on. I think I realized in my guitar writing long ago that an intellectual approach was not on. The instrument itself has got this romantic glow in its tone. I love the tone of the guitar, so I’ve tended to go for that more.’

Smith Brindle’s El Polifemo de Oro, often credited as the first modern British guitar piece, displays a sympathy with the instrument’s Spanish heritage in its attempts to reflect in musical terms the ‘mystic power’ of the instrument as expressed in the poetry of Lorca. However, while the work employs gestures typically evocative of flamenco - for example, in the tamburo effect at the end of the third movement (Largo) - the harmonic language is rigorously serial and certainly personal to Brindle. John Duarte wrote to this effect that the piece ‘gives an expressive salute to Spain, free from the recognisable hispanidad‘.

Bream has commented on the problem of conceiving music for an instrument whose ‘non-intellectual’ personality can potentially impinge upon a composer’s idiom. He once remarked to Peter Maxwell Davies for example that the guitar ‘can perform intellectual music, certainly, but whatever you do intellectually with the guitar, if it’s well written, it more often comes out sounding naturally spontaneous and that can be in a sense, non-intellectual.’ Discussing the genesis of Davies’s Hill Runes (commisioned by Bream in 1981) he comments that

 ‘…somehow I never felt his musical language would fit naturally onto the guitar…Composers of astringent yet complex textures, like Max Davies, often find the colour of the instrument too personal, too exotic, and not abstract enough for their musical language. But having heard some of Max’s more recent works, I felt he was in a musical period in his life when he was writing music that might be suitable and indeed even work well on the guitar.’

It is clear that Bream gave much thought to problem of compositional idiom in relation to the guitar’s musical ‘personality’ although he was evidently not aware of Davies’s Lullaby for Illian Rainbow, a unique and technically adventurous solo work which had been composed spontaneouly over a decade previously! Interestingly Davies has also commented that Hill Runes was ‘very much influenced by his [Bream’s] style and personality’.

It is notable that with Hill Runes, which is a densely contrapuntal work, Davies had in fact set out specifically to try to countermand the ‘natural’ Spanishness of the guitar’s sound, and indeed to supplant one geographical allusion with another - Orkney, which has informed so much of his musical outlook. His programme note states that

 ‘I set myself the problem of writing a guitar solo quietly evocative in my mind of the almost ‘lunar’ Scottish landscape in which I live, without the overtones of Spain so often evoked by the guitar, while at the same time writing idiomatically for the instrument.’

In practice however, Davies cannot entirely avoid reverting to potentially ‘Spanish’-sounding guitar techniques, for example in the tremolando passage of the first movement in bars 33-38 and the rasgueado passages heard towards the end. In the context of the work’s highly abstract language however, these are gestures without stylistic connotation. Nonetheless, it is clear that Davies felt particularly exposed when dealing with a single solo guitar and the same professed anti-Spanishness is also reiterated in a programme note for his later Sonata, (premiered in 1987), when he states that the guitar was the most challenging to write for ‘not only in the avoidance of any unintended Spanish connotations but in making available tone colours varied and colourful enough to sustain the abstract form.’

Davies is among the few composers to have used the guitar consistently during his composing career and to have maintained a working relationship with one player - Timothy Walker - who provided him with a means of test-running his thinking in the regard to the guitar’s possibilities, but without conditioning his compositional idiom. Initially the instrument features in a number of Davies’ ensemble works of the 1960s and the 1970s, where the English lute tradition seems to have provided a foundation for this thinking. In the Pavan, Alman and Galliard from Shakespeare Music (1964), for example, the guitar is used in a tonal manner, playing diatonic chords and decorative Dowland-esque scale passages. These elements are juxtaposed with more dissonant material played by other instruments in the ensemble, revealing a tension between this traditional aspect of the guitar’s sound and the strength of Maxwell Davies’s’ own more dissonant idiom. In other parts of the same work such reminiscences are entirely absent, the instrument being used to play rather more angular serially derived material. The guitar’s association with the lute is also apparent in the ‘Points and Dances’ section of Act 1 of the opera Taverner (1964, later extracted to produce a suite for ten players) which Davies describes as ‘exploratory in a rather traditional way of using the guitar and lute’. Here the guitar’s textures are more ambitious, for example in the Galliard where the composer explores two-part writing, but the language again is more consistently that of Davies overall. By the time of Lullaby for Illian Rainbow (1972) and From Stone to Thorn (1971) it is apparent that Davies is transplanting his highly developed modernist idiom to the guitar to produce music which is considerably distanced from any preconceived idea of the instrument’s repertoire.

Denis ApIvor, who like Davies used the guitar consistently throughout his career also acknowledged the instrument’s relationship with the earlier traditions of the lute and vihuela. In fact his introduction to the instrument occurred in the context of both the early music tradition  - via Diana Poulton’s performances of the songs of Valderábanno, Mudarra, Pisaro and Luis Milan - and its Spanish folk heritage in encounters with authentic recordings of the Andanlusian cante jondo or ‘deep song’.  ApIvor praises Segovia’s efforts in transcribing Bach which showed ‘the way back to the contrapuntal genius of the guitar which had largely been forgotten since the days when its close cousins, the vihuela and lute, had been the chosen instruments of great composers of the 17^th and 18^th centuries.’  ApIvor was able to translate this into a highly exploitable ‘contrapuntal resource’ for his own increasingly modernist idiom. With  its ‘wide compass, its many strings, its unique chordal ability, its ability to sound several moving parts simultaneously’ the guitar was to ApIvor’s mind a ‘valuable instrument for serial composition of a more serious and contemplative character, which tends to move in space along separated planes and in dislocative melody, embracing wide intervals so easily obtainable on the instrument.’

Like Davies, ApIvor used the guitar of extensively in an ensemble context, acknowledging a debt to the Second Viennese School and subsequent European avant-garde which had effectively re-constructed the guitar’s role in contemporary music as a ‘colouristic’ resource (consider Webern’s use of the guitar in his chamber works for example). ApIvor’s writing for the guitar during the 1960s occurs exclusively in the context of ensemble and rather than being either soloistic or accompanimental in character, provides in a pointilliste fashion one piece of a jigsaw puzzle that comprises the total timbral effect. There is a heightened attention to performance detail, evident in the composer’s often meticulous indications of such factors as string number, fretboard position, fingering and location of harmonics. An important work in this regard is Crystals (1965) scored for an unusual combination of instruments: Hammond organ, double bass, guitar and three percussion players. Each of the work’s six movements is extremely brief, with a combined total duration of only eight and half minutes. ApIvor’s approach in the work is comparable to that of Boulez in Le Marteau sans Maitre (1955), particularly in the first and final movements in which the guitar’s role is to contribute at periodic intervals to the constantly fluctuating timbre of the ensemble.

 ApIvor and Davies are among the few British composers (Dodgson and Brindle have also been prolific) to have maintained a commitment to the guitar over many years. Both decided that the guitar was essential to their musical visions early in their careers and developed their guitar writing across a number of works. It also significant that both produced their mature solo guitar works in the 1970s and 1980s in the light of earlier explorations of the instrument’s possibilities in the context of ensemble, which perhaps served to neutralize the guitar’s ‘Spanish’ connotations for them. This contrasts strikingly with composers such as Britten, Tippett and Walton who had needed to be convinced to write for the guitar and did not explore its use in the broader context of their output. The vast majority of the British guitar repertoire is like this however - comprising a collection of ‘one-off’ (or occasionally ‘two-off’) works produced by composers who turned their hand to the instrument as a result of performer request. While not adding up to stylistic coherence, most of these works are unified nonetheless by a freedom of compositional approach, supported by an openness of performer attitude which has enabled composer individuality and vision to supercede the guitar’s alleged technical limitations and ingrained persona. The result of this has been a repertoire whose ‘Britishness’ has reflected a shift of emphasis away from the Spanish context per se but without writing off completely the guitar’s Iberian heritage (rather re-contextualizing it) and which frequently demonstrates its endebtedness to its contrapuntal ancestry in the lute and viluela.

Bibliography

ApIvor, Denis, An Introduction to Serial Composition for Guitarists (Shaftesbury: Musical New Services, 1982).

Bream, Julian, ‘How to write for the guitar’, The Score, 19, March 1957.

Coelho, Vincent Anand, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Davies, Peter Maxwell, Sonata for Guitar (London: Chester, 1990).

Dawe, Kevin, ‘The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments’ in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction edited by M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton. (London: Routledge, 2002), pp.274-283.

Duarte, John, Sleeve notes for the Julian Bream recordings, Twentieth Century Guitar I; Dedication.

Evans, Peter, The Music of Benjamin Britten (London: Dent, 1979).

Goss, Stephen, ‘The Guitar and the Musical Canon: the myths of tradition and heritage in concert repertoire and didactic methodology’, EGTA Guitar Journal, 9 (2000), pp. 5-9.

Grunfeld, Frederic V., The Art and Times of the Guitar (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1969).

Palmer, Tony, Julian Bream, A Life on the Road (London: MacDonald, 1982).

Segovia, Andres, An Autobiography of the Years 1893-1920 (London: Marion Boyars, 1977).

Turnbull, Harvey, The Guitar from the Renaissance to the Present Day (Westport, CT: Bold Strummer, 1991).

Wade, Graham, A Concise History of the Classic Guitar (Pacific, MO: Mel Bay, 2001); Segovia: A celebration of the man and his music (London: Allison and Busby, 1983); Traditions of the Classical Guitar (London: John Calder, 1980).