The Repertoire - Part III

by George Warren

Nobody ever reviews easy guitar music. There seems to be a rule, and everybody seems to follow it. Well, rules are made to be broken. Let's break this one, right here and now. And, doing so, let's abandon once and for all the notion that nothing but fingerbreakers are worth playing or listening to.

This way, just for openers, we make room for the beginner, the child, and the earnest amateur who started late in life and hasn't the time to work up to the war-horses. These players, too, have a place in music, even if it may not, at any given time, be on the professional concert stage. They shouldn't be crowded aside at student recital or guitar society meeting time, or made to feel small just because the music their fingers can negotiate isn't Grade Eight stuff.

More than this, we make room for ourselves, in a less athletic frame of mind. "Music doesn't always have to be great and serious Art," as the fine German educator Martin Raetz puts it in one of his excellent collections of easy original pieces (see below). "There are also reflective and sociable moments in which one turns gladly to the guitar..."

Pianists know this, even if some guitarists don't; otherwise, who would ever play such gorgeous, but easy, pieces as Chopin's fourth and seventh Preludes? But guitarists need reminding, now and then, of the old Occam's Razor principle that says simplest is sometimes best. Very well: today we consider a repertoire of easy--often very easy--twentieth century guitar music, from a variety of countries. It's neither exhaustive nor definitive. All I claim is that it'll get you started on the road to understanding when easier is better.

Begin with England, then, and Hector Quine's eclectic collection Easy Modern Guitar Music (Oxford): moderately easy, and grateful, selections include John Addison's Illyrian Lullaby and Phyllis Tate's quite easy (if formidable-looking, at first sight) Seascape, while Joseph Horowitz's totally irresistible Siesta, a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the tango, belongs on the concert stage, at whatever level.

Move on to Jack Duarte, whose Within Easy Reach (Ricordi 624) and Youth at the Strings (Ricordi 630) range from simple to very simple. Jack always has a lesson to teach here, and sweetens the pill with little surprises for the ear. Farther along, in A Variety of Guitar Music (Faber) and For My Friends (Columbia CO 193), he buries a pair of gorgeous settings of Black spirituals which almost anybody can play, but which would please as encores if played by a master. (So would his haunting setting of Bushes and Briars in Three English Folk Songs, Novello 19520.)

The teacher who wants to teach serialism at the early stage will find excellent fare in the first volume of Reginald Smith-Brindle's Guitarcosmos (Schott 11387). This three-volume set is meticulously graded and deserves serious study; a special point in its favor is that as much love and care has been devoted to the early pieces as to the advanced ones.

Lighter fare from Poland, by way of France, comes from Alexandre Tansman's two volume collection, Twelve Easy Pieces (Eschig ME 8002/3). These will test the player's ear without working the fingers too hard. The special task at hand is to project melody in the simplest of textures.

Believe it or not, there's actually some easy Emilio Pujol, from Eschig. Try Two Preludes (ME 7236), very easy, and Second Triquilandia (ME 7237), simple but deceptive. For the more technically prepared player, there's a fine pair of folkloristic volumes of mainly Basque vignettes in The Young Guitarist (UME 20875/6) by the shamefully neglected José de Azpiazu; there are serious concert pieces to be found here, written with a master's sure hand and a teacher's understanding.

The rare player familiar with Harold Gramatges's magnificent Como el caudal de la fuente, a roaring Cuban fingerbuster, will be startled at the utter simplicity of his Seven Sketches for "La Dama Duende," from Editorial Musical de Cuba (from Guitar Solo). Anybody can negotiate the notes; there's a real lesson in making it work. The same is true of the first three of Guillermo Flores Mendez's Four Bagatelles (Ricordi Mexicana RM 35, same source), rare works from a neglected Mexican master.

Some of the finest easy guitar music I've ever seen came from the collaborative pens of the magnificent Czech virtuoso Milan Zelenka and his late wife, the much lamented Jana Obrovska. Zelenka, the teacher, would set the musical or technical problem; Obrovska, the composer, would solve it. Supraphon has two wonderful volumes of their studies (Easy Études, H5787, and New Etudes, H5520) which range from moderate to middle-grade. The real surprise is finding what they can get out of the very easy, in First Album for Guitar (H6415), which begins with monody and works its way up to perky and witty character pieces, and which never bores for so much as a moment.

From Brazil, try several delightful collections of lilting, lightly swinging folk songs, all very easy. Ten Brazilian Folk Tunes, by Isaias Savio (Columbia CO 188), please mightily, and the last three, in order, would make a charming suite of concert pieces. Henrique Pinto (Ricordi Brasileira RB 0563) and José Barrense Dias (EMT 15) cover much the same ground, to some purpose; work your way up, via these easy settings, to eventual mastery of Turibio Santos's superb--but difficult--modern versions of the same songs, accessible only to the advanced player. By the time you get to Santos, it'll help to have these simpler settings in your ear.

From Argentina, try for starters two charmingly easy albums by the father of the Argentine guitar, Juan Alais. Six "Estilos Criollos" (Ricordi BA 9906) will prepare you for Llobet's more advanced exercises in the form, Six Easy Pieces (BA 9905); slightly harder, is a collection of charming schottisches, polkas and petits valses, tuneful and seductive and always very much under the hand.

Then try a wonderful teaching book from the excellent contemporary Argentine composer-player Jorge Labrouve, Easy Etudes (EMT 1493). This is nothing more or less than an introduction to musical form (prelude, theme-and-variations, suite, sonata), using delightfully bouncy Argentine folk rhythms and a modem style. Notation and fingering alike are particularly precise; you have to work at it to miss the points he's making here. The real trick, of course, is to make sure the stuff sings and dances, as it's supposed to.

More of the same kind of thing comes from the German master Wolfgang Lendle in Impulses (Ricordi SY 2319); the range is wider, the pieces are shorter. Anton Stingl (Guitar Book for Madeleine, Schott 420/1) stays much simpler, covering comparable ground, and makes his points adroitly and musically.

But the real jewel in this vein is Martin Raetz's Happy Beginning (Hofmeister T4166), a delicious collection of modern pieces for the very early beginner which segues to a fine album of student-recital pieces, Little Serenade (T4161). You'll find much to like here at every level, particularly in the latter book (my own favorites here are the bumptious Rumba and the spare and impressionistic Two Carnival Dances).

Another find is the sharp and apt didactic work of Fritz Pilsl, an inventive Bohemian composer who teaches in Neu-Ulm. Guitar Pieces for the Young (Zimmermann ZM 1963) and Amusing Pieces (ZM 2184) are two of the best volumes in Siegfried Behrend's Guitar Music for the Young series; Portuguese Romances (ZM 2445) teaches tone production and position-changing, always with a certain sly charm.

Other fine works at the very easy level include Gerhard Maasz's Zugegriffen (Trekel T0634: how do you translate that word?) and Hermann Ambrosius's Suite in C (Trekel T680), while there's an excellent pair of technically easy but surprisingly sophisticated suites by Werner Richter in Book One of Ursula Peter's two-volume collection, Contemporary Guitar Music (VEB Deutscher Verlag fuer Musik, Leipzig). If there was ever music which cried out for the student recital, the Richter pieces fit the description: they're full of wit and tunefulness.

More advanced technically, if musically more conservative, is Karl Frieszneg's Ten Little Melodies for the Young Guitarist, Op. 21 (Hladky VH 1515); the pieces are easy without being insulting, and the last two pieces, reversed in order, would make a nice mid-level concert piece: the "Grave" in B minor seems to lead naturally to the 'Presto" in E minor.

Rounding it all off, the adventurous seeker after good easy contemporary music might well consider dipping into Franz Just's impressive two-volume New Guitar Book (DVM 31060/1, Leipzig: available from Editions Orphée), a vast teaching archive of specially composed new music for the beginner, obviously conceived in the spirit of Bartók's Mikrokosmos.

Just, to be sure, isn't Bartók, but then neither is anybody else. What he is is a fine teacher and composer, one from whom a lot of more advanced players could learn a musical thing or two. I'm learning from him right now, going through a page a night just for curiosity. You could do worse than to follow me down that road.

This is the third in a series of articles adapted from "the repertoire" columns by George Warren, published in Guitar Review. This article first appeared in Guitar Review #82, Summer 1990. George Warren, a Carmel Classic Guitar Society member, has written music reviews for American Record Guide, Record Review, and Guitar & Lute.

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