The Struggle With Segovia.

Andrés Segovia. He set the stage like no one else.  Guitar would not be the same without him. His obituary was on the first page of the  freaking New York Times. That’s president-level. In this video, we’re going to look at what we  inherited from the “daddy of all guitarists”. What do today’s masters think of him? What’s  inspiring and what can be left behind? For many people outside the guitar world, for many decades, the guitar was Segovia.  It’s very difficult to get beyond that. However, yo

unger guitarists don’t think  much about Segovia anymore. To them, he’s the guy on the string packets. If you know a bit more, maybe heard some gossip  at festivals you might think he was a grumpy, self-serving maestro, someone long superseded  by more advanced generations of players. As it turns out, there’s more to him. Sometimes  really surprising, some of it rather disturbing. It’s good to understand Segovia if  you want to understand the guitar. Don’t worry, this video is not going  to be y

et another boring biogra… Segovia was born in Linares, Spain, and  his family wanted him to become a lawyer. He said “nope” and became the first person in history to prove that playing guitar  all day is a great financial decision! He moved from being the talk of the  town to being the talk of every town. On the way there, he took the guitar from  being modest and simple to GREAT and SERIOUS. To kids learning the instrument now, Segovia  is as much of a distant historical figure as Tárrega or So

r. In fact, his birthday is  closer to Paganini’s than it is to today! What sets him apart is that Segovia  got old, really old. His career as a musician spans over almost the entire  20th century, and he was teaching, writing, arranging, and playing concerts  until the very end, to massive audiences. Segovia didn’t perform like your usual classical  solo guitarist. He sold out the big theaters, thousands of people gathering to witness him. The venues were often comically out-sizing  the musicia

n and his instrument, which was un-amplified whenever possible.  Segovia hated using microphones. His concerts relied on skillful projection,  immense amounts of expressiveness, a strong stage presence, and a disciplined audience that  had to remain quiet no matter how large it was. From what I’ve heard, this worked  more often than not. The concerts, especially during his prime, are held in  high regard and considered memorable events, recalled with fondness even a lifetime later. Segovia was a

huge cultural phenomenon. In fact,  more than once I talked to older folks that might not even know anything about guitar, and they  will still remember visiting his concerts. For example, a friend of mine from  Minnesota recalled being at a Segovia concert when she was little. I looked up Segovia’s concert calendar from that time and found  a newspaper article announcing the event. Even back then, 63 years ago, Segovia was  described as the grand old maestro with an endless career behind him,

expecting  to retire in four or five years. Good grief! In reality, he ended up  spending another twenty-six years on stage! In between that concert and  Segovia’s eventual death, other „very nice young men“ had  their entire careers happening! ..and some of these he wasn’t too fond of. The newspaper article closes with this line: Does he ever play contemporary music?  “No, never.” He likes some folk music, he said, but not professional folk  music which is “only for show.” I knew that Segovia h

ad a traditional  outlook and strong opinions, but reading such a confident  condemnation of popular music, here in this random innocent newspaper  article - I still found it surprising. As it turns out, Segovia didn’t just  oppose popular music, he also turned his back on Flamenco, the very roots  of Spanish folklore he grew up with. One of the key things about Segovia is that  he is a man of the between wars period. The aesthetics and historical context was all  very, very different. At the sa

me time he absolutely detested  a large part of what was developing in contemporary classical music. At this  point, we’re cutting options left and right. I mean, he was a very complicated  character. And you know, it was the era of the great man, of the maestro,  and he certainly played up to that a lot. All these sorts of iconic performers  largely performed music from Bach to the early 20th century. This was the  kind of calcified canon of piano, violin, cello and voice. It basically still is

. But I think what he did, the  sort of major achievement was to bring the guitar into the classical mainstream. Segovia’s main concern was that the guitar didn’t  have a classical tradition. And so he made one up. Yup, you’ve heard that right. What is today taught as the canon of classical guitar  music, did not grow organically. To a large extent, it was imagined by this  marketing genius, the first guitar influencer. How is this possible? He did it through his transcriptions  and he did it th

rough his commissioning. It’s amazing when you think that Dowland, Bach, Albéniz, Granados never wrote  a single note for the guitar. What Segovia did was try to convince  the public that the guitar had a rich classical tradition and it was  a serious classical instrument. The reality is that it’s all basically a  bit of a fake repertoire. It’s something sort of fabricated and sort  of filled in historically. That’s not a criticism, it was just  a brilliant way of Segovia bringing the guitar int

o the musical mainstream.  Fantastically imaginative and successful. Nowadays, Segovias arrangements  are notorious for being highly idiomatic. They’re loose translations  rather than strict transcriptions, merging the music of varied centuries  into one romantic, expressive style. Decades of research and historically informed  practice make us smarter in hindsight, but we easily overlook that Segovia was  often the first to popularize certain works. Case in point, the Bach prelude we  heard at

the beginning: Segovia likely did the first commercial recording of  this piece, across all instruments! Countless other melodies we consider standard  today were brought to public attention by Segovia. What about his commissions? He wasn’t really commissioning for the future of  the instrument or to have contemporary music for guitar. He was fabricating a past, a romantic  past. Nearly all the composers he commissioned wrote in a style that was essentially  neo-romantic. As opposed to neo-class

ical, neo-classical would have a little bit  more critical engagement with music of the past. But Segovia’s taste was for a  kind of nostalgic style that would then give the guitar some kind of romantic  tradition that might compare with the important instruments. One of the things he did when he  commissioned composers was to keep them away from the instrument, from the  idiom, and not to let them loose on it. Because of course, if a composer  starts to discover the guitar, they get very excite

d by things  like rasgueado, open strings, and the kind of idiosyncrasies that our  instrument has, which a lot of music of today really celebrates. Whereas Segovia saw these  things as ways of cheapening the instrument. His idea was that they would just simply  write music and then he would make that music work on guitar. And that was  the deal. All the composers knew this. You get the impression, certainly from reading  the letters with Ponce and the letters with Castelnuovo-Tedesco, that Sego

via was incredibly  dictatorial about exactly what he wanted. The first half of the 20th century  was a time of constant turmoil, politically, culturally, socially. In Spain, tensions erupted into a full-scale civil war - an immense catastrophe in  so many areas, including music. While touring in the Soviet Union,  his house was looted by supporters of the Republican government.  Through fortunate circumstances, he managed to get away from Spain and  chose to live in exile in Uruguay. From there

, far away from the danger and  to the dismay of many, Segovia voiced his support for General Franco and a lot of  later animosity towards him stems from this. Fellow artists were killed or imprisoned  by Franco’s nationalist-authoritarian revolution. Many more suffered from the  oppression that Segovia chose to side with. Whether it was from a deeply held belief, or just  out of opportunism, is difficult to determine. There’s a wonderful Jean-Paul Sartre quote  from his novel Nausea, where he s

ays “A man is a teller of tales. He lives his  life as if he’s recounting it.” And I get the feeling with Segovia that  he was basically writing a story, writing a narrative, which has him as the main  character, him as a sort of central figure. A lot of the early 20th century figures  and a lot of the way that the sort of history was painted at that time is about  these individuals, these sort of great men. Yes, he sided with Franco, but  he kind of identified with this notion of this great sor

t of Spanish tradition. It’s kind of summed up more than  anything else in the Fantasia para un gentilhombre, because it kind of  looks back at this kind of golden age. But actually, you know the golden  era for guitar is right now. The amount of activity and the number of  incredible players and compositions and things that are being written at the moment.  It’s the best time the guitar’s ever had. That’s in part due to Segovia, it’s in part  due to John Williams, Julian Bream, but it’s also to

do with a huge cultural shift, that, you  know, rather than the piano being at the center of music making, the guitar has become incredibly  central through popular music, through folk music. It’s an instrument that can cross stylistic  boundaries very, very easily, very quickly. The technical level now, compared with when I was  studying as a student, you know, has gone through the roof! This kind of level of technical control  is something that was just not there before. To sum things up, we

can be grateful for  what Segovia has achieved for our instrument. While after him, there might never again  be a guitarist of such singular importance, the instrument itself is more popular than ever. At the same time, we can also be grateful  that his ideas and methods no longer dominate. Nowadays, crossing stylistic boundaries  is the norm, not the exception. The standard repertoire is evolving and growing  faster than ever, organically and with modern compositions becoming accepted to the ma

instream  a lot quicker than for other instruments. More than anything, teaching styles have evolved, emphasizing individual qualities over the  authoritarian master-apprentice approach. Tonebase is the next step in this evolution,  democratizing the access to methods and knowledge that was until now sheltered behind  the doors of universities and conservatoires. Many thanks in particular  to Professor Stephen Goss, whose contributions to  tonebase are already immense. If you sign up for a 14-da

y trial period  now, you get immediate access to our entire library, including dozens of excellent  productions by and with Professor Goss. Researching this topic was particularly touchy, as some of the battles surrounding  Segovia’s legacy are still being fought to this day. Of course, there are also many more  things about Segovia we didn’t discuss, like his teaching and his involvement in  the development of guitar construction. Almost looks like there’s more stuff coming! Let us know in the

comments what your thoughts  on Segovia are! If you enjoyed the video, consider leaving a like and a subscription. Cheers, and see you next time!