I know its difficult ot compare styles but I wonder if classical guitarists in general are better than their rock counterparts in terms of dextarity and simply just play more notes more cleanly than their rock counterparts. Any opinions on that?
Just saw this today. There is no better, first of all. You do your best for the
style of any music. Whether its flamenco, jazz, classical, rock, folk, whatever, there are different things that are called for. Overall, classical is the most technically challenging, IMO. But, I sometimes view them the same way I view all instruments: every instrument and every music is the hardest, lol. Some disagree with me, of course.
Technically gifted rock guitarists have very dexterous left hands. I guess Im talking more about speed-demons. The best make many a classical player quite jealous. I think dexterous is not the right word, its more "coordinateed" as far as minimization of wasted movement, and complete coordination with the right hand, er, pick. The instantaneous relaxation of the muscles after exertion, which in of itself should only be the minimum required.
As far as cleanly... well I think its a lot easier to play an electric more cleanly than a classical. "Clean" is everything for the better pro's With the best, you can't hear a squeak, not the finger on the string, any harmonic from a string off a fret, any nail noise on the string, no unwanted over-lapping fundamental or harmonic in any particular moment. Its just different kinds of difficult. However, my friends that are versed in both say that classical is way harder. I don't think its the instrument, but the music being played that dictates this.
Even some very old music, say early-late 16th century, requires simultaneous, multiple voices. Its tough for various reasons on a piano, but lets take a guitar. It is very, very hard; way more difficult than people would expect to have a continuous crescendo or decrescendo on just a single line (I mean without any lull by having the same volume for two consecutive notes). Especially on today's modern classicals, when the strings change from nickel-wound (or tungsten or whatever) to nylon (or vinyl or whatever). Then if you practice on old dead strings, you're screwed when you put on new ones, since not only the volume of the bass strings change so much with it, but also any harmonic warmth, given any instrument. If you are working towards a big performance, having new strings on all the time during practice is recommended for particularly contrapuntal music.
Now try taking 3 simultaneous lines. No, lets just try 2. Can you imagine how hard is to have one line get continuously quieter and quieter, while another line gets louder and louder. Of course, its your right hand's fingers that determine this. Nevermind that the left hand probably looks like a deranged octupus. Well, even music that's 400-500 y.o. can have many simultaneous lines, often 4, if not more. Anyways, when I first tried working on this stuff, usually the best I could do with total utter concentration was to have one good crescendo/decrescendo, but with the other was at a static volume. Even that is way harder than you think.
So two lines in contrapuntal music. I’ve only hit upon gradual dynamics. What about articulation? It is damned difficult to produce a staccato note in the middle of one line (perhaps desired to bring out a particular musical affect of any given subject/theme), while “smoothly” playing another. At least is it is on the guitar. So, your right-hand finger hits the string being plucked immediately afterward, w/o creating any unwanted extraneous noise… meanwhile your free fingers from your left hand are purposefully touching other strings to stop over-ringing from previous notes. Its quite the choreographic event. Add more voices, or more speed, even tougher. This even for 500 y.o. music.
Once you get into tougher material, you'll see a lot of works written on multiple staves, just as it is with piano. I've even seen 6 staves, one for each string. Usually just two, and sometimes the lower for more simplistic purposes, like a passacaglia, etc.
I personally find that having strong crescendos in the inner line is the most difficult, by far. Paul Galbraith can do this extremely well, and it makes me just sick. Some actually use a rest stroke, while outer voices are as free-stroke, and I've never succeeded with that.
Then, there are others who cheat at the recording studio. I leave that to the jury to decide. There is an interesting article by Glenn Gould, I think it was probably the Prospects of Recording, where he is rather fine with that. His philosophy also led him to forgo public performances altogether, in preference to the perfection he could find in the studio. IIRC, he talks about the A-minor fugue from the WTC I, and takes two completely different emotional takes on the same work, cuts out the entire middle of the more joyful take, and just drops it straight into the more serious take. Its a pretty sick and difficult fugue anyways. I remember once playing the recording for a very talented jazz guitarist during my college days, at the end he just took off very quickly without saying a word as he was quite mortified.
Gould also spoke of an opera singer that could not hit some really high note. They stuck in a note from a different person’s recording! (The Glenn Gould Reader is a very fun read, a compilation of all of his published writings). One super-cool idea he had for the classical music audiophile is to have a 4.0 system, for a 4-voice fugue, one speaker per voice to get the full effect of their individuality. He wrote that he never got around to trying it. I’ve used his idea in past rehearsals and had other musicians in the corners of a room, hehe. Tough exercise in getting the same level of “togetherness” that a group might be used to.
Continuing the whole “cheating” thing, Christopher Parkening had his Allegro from the PFA as we call it (Prelude, Fugue, Allegro) extremely manipulated by EMI. See, back in the day Van Cliburn was
the American pianist. They were trying to promote a similar thing with guitar, or perhaps an Americanized Segovia. Now, I am not a fan at all of Parkening, but anyways they took every single attack of the hundreds of notes from the Allegro, and snipped off every single “attack”! Ton of editing. Uncannily smooth, like a clarinet. How’s that for cheating?!
There’s a ridiculously virtuostic guitarist named Tilman Hoppstock from Germany, who I believe heads the famous composition department, or at least some important aspect of it, of the Darmstadt school, of Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen, Berio, etc, fame. Also an excellent cellist having recorded Rachmaninoff with his father. Anyways, yet another “cheater”… he takes some Paginini caprices and has his ultra-fast hammer-on scales getting louder, which is a virtual impossibility. Undoubtedly, he is taking part in Gould’s philosophy.
Wow, how the heck did I end up here? Lol……
