Alan Plummer Guitarist

Read Chapter 1 from Expression and Fingering Techniques

Setting the Stage, the Musicians Job

The musician’s job is to convey emotion. Everything that follows is towards this end; left-hand fingerings and musical expression go hand in hand because different fingerings can aid the expression of different ideas. The guitar music of Sor and Giuliani was published essentially unfingered, whereas since Tárrega’s time fingerings have become integral to guitar music.[1] Slurs, glissandi, the tone colours of particular strings, and the wider use of the fretboard made possible by more modern instruments, can now come to us from the composers themselves.[2

Making music, along with arguably every human sphere of endeavour, needs body, mind and soul: hands, head and heart. There being many books about the guitarist’s hands already, our business here concerns the head and the heart. Heart is not to be taught, but the musical language of it can be. The fifth-grade student may already know all the words of that language but expressing it with a musical instrument can be the goal of a lifetime. We want the way cleared and the player emboldened. Regarding the head, left-hand fingering options need considered thought: recognising problems, options and choices. When we approach our best, and most importantly, do not play repertoire that is too difficult for us, technical problems vanish leaving nothing but the music and what we wish to say with it.

When it comes to fingering it seems that the student—we are all students here—is expected to do as they are told by a previous and possibly unknown editor. Our literature can be flawed: unplayable transcriptions abound; books of professional repertoire ‘classical favourites’ are marketed to beginners; others yet are presented in tablature or with no indication of fingering at all.[3]

Duets with arranged guitar parts warrant mention; in particular, Baroque flute suites. This repertoire is the ‘bread and butter’ of flute players and was mostly written to be fun to play in small settings, not to fill concert halls.[4] No guitar part for such was expressly written; all are arranged, or ‘realised’ from basso continuo lines that were largely intended to be improvised by lute or harpsichord players over a bass line provided by a viola de gamba or cello.

In recent years much progress has been made in good duet editions toward playability, however, practical guitar parts can still be the exception. A guitar part can look beautiful at first blush yet require virtuosity at the required tempo, have flawed or even non-existent left-hand fingering, and have unfriendly page turns. One frequently seen and often professionally used book of flute and guitar duets is both simplified and flawed to the point of caricature.^[5] It is a joke. For this reason, there is a complete four-movement flute suite by Telemann with the continuo part arranged for guitar presented in Part 2 below. From now on, at every point we ask: who has done this arrangement, this fingering? Can we do better?

The dots and words on the page are not the music. Rather they are instructions on how to play the music—often sparse and ambiguous at that. For example: what does andantino mean? Look it up—it is unlikely to help. Mahler wrote extensive performance notes on his manuscripts, but debate over the interpretation of his music continues today. Open a copy of Manuel de Falla’s Homenaje, pour le tombeau de Claude Debussy and you will find very detailed performance instructions. And the question remains: what can you say with it?^[6]

It is very important that the reader plays and listens to the excerpts and examples that follow. Beware: our imaginations can trick us. Just because we think we are playing expressively—loud, louder, soft, softer, sweetly or harsh, using all the musical contrivances described below—does not mean we actually are. Time and again I have said to teacher, peer, or microphone, “But I was doing it!” Apparently not enough to reach the other side of the room.

We remember that we are not merely talking to ourselves, as we are when practicing, but rather to the listener. Moreover, we can consciously show the listener a particularly beautiful note or phrase: ‘listen to this part!’