I was a classical guitarist. I performed and taught extensively in the 2000s and early 2010s. After more than a decade of time spent on the instrument, I decided I would stop performing and leave the music industry entirely. This was roughly in 2014, and I did a video almost 10 years ago talking about my reasons for that. I had, at that time, gathered a small following of people who liked my guitar content (a good deal of which I have taken down), but I felt like creating instructional content (the original purpose of my YouTube channel) was a bit of a dead path. It wasn’t popular, and with the copyright system that YouTube implemented, it was all but impossible to teach popular tunes, even those in the public domain, without a legal budget.
I already wrote a re-visitation of that video that I will post later, but for this essay, I wanted to deal with something tangential to all that, which is the concept of “classical guitar” itself and its many problems, in both the style and the form of the instrument itself.
“Classical guitar,” like any other area of art, is a human invention whose boundaries are enforced socially more than objectively. Jazz music is Jazz because of the people who play it and the people who listen to it. In musicology, we focus on definitions so that we can put lines around styles and identify them, much like how biologists define species according to common traits in populations, but it is less precise or rigorous than biology (which itself is looser than people usually realize).
Classical guitar, therefore, is roughly defined by classical guitarists themselves, classical guitar instructors and professors, and the audience’s expectations for what a “classical guitar” album or performance ought to be. Related to this is the form of the instrument. There is a tradition of the form and materials that make up a classical, or Spanish, guitar, and while the boundaries can be pushed by ambitious luthiers, they virtually never discard them and innovate with something truly original, a massive contrast with electric guitar, where the quest for new and unique improvements is more like the space race.
What casual listeners often do not understand about the form of the guitar is that its arrival point was fairly recent. Calling the instrument “classical” automatically demands that it be placed in the same category as violins and other orchestral instruments whose forms have been standard for much longer. To make my point, here is a recording of a guitar made by Stradivari, the famous violin maker in the 17th century:
Notice that it does not look like a modern classical guitar at all, and if one is observant, one will find that it does not even have the correct number of strings. This is the baroque form of the guitar, which has 10 strings strung in double courses, and was often reentrantly tuned (one of the higher courses is tuned with a higher note, like a banjo). The guitar didn’t have six single-course strings until roughly the 19th century, and it was still then a much smaller instrument than what we have today, which is much closer to the vihuela (Spanish lute) than the baroque guitar.
Through the decades, we eventually arrived at the form made popular by the great Andres Segovia and his famous Herman Hauser model, a guitar which was built on the Spanish forms of the 19th century (notably Torres). At this point, the classical guitar became “fixed.” What is interesting is that the Spanish guitar also became, in the context of the culture, the proper instrument for playing all things classical and guitar. Classical music for guitar is for the classical guitar. Classical music, new or old, ought to be played on the classical guitar.
These points are obvious and perhaps pedantic, but the enforcement of this by the academic culture has produced oddities that most people are unaware of. It’s not uncommon to see JS Bach as part of a classical guitar recital, but Bach never penned a note for the guitar, not even the baroque variety. He wrote some lute suites (and believe it or not, there is academic debate as to whether these pieces were written for lute at all), but one needs only look at a baroque lute with its 24 strings to understand that these things are not at all the same. Bach pieces on guitar are always transcriptions, but somehow, when someone is playing Bach and a guitar is involved, it somehow ought to be played on a classical guitar. It’s the appropriate instrument, according to the culture.
This is why I love and miss Michael Chapdelaine, who pushed and eventually disregarded the boundaries of classical guitar. He was a virtuoso who was famously able to win competitions in both the classical and folk fingerpicking realms. He would play steel-string guitars in “classical” concerts, including playing Bach on them. He was able to transcend the “classical guitar” world and truly be himself. He played a variety of innovative instruments, and the results were always more special than if he had simply put them on the Spanish guitar and used all the standard techniques and tones therein.
Here is playing on a Ken Parker archtop (one of the most innovative guitar builders of all time):
Understand that all of this is not to say that I dislike the form of the classical guitar. I love it, or I would not have played it as long as I did (and have – though I gave up regular performance I still perform from time to time on the instrument). It has a special sound and feel that is perfect for many sorts of pieces.
However, it is not always ideal, and I have discovered this truth, even when approaching “classical” music.
I have recently been developing a large-form guitar work (a sonata) and all the initial ideas I came up with on electric guitars, since that is where my current creative focus is. It’s still played with classical technique (fingerstyle), but when I went to play the material on one of my Spanish guitars I wasn’t very pleased. I had written in many shifts and portamentos on the bass strings, and the string noise was very obtrusive compared to an electric guitar, especially my archtop which is strung with flatwound strings similar to those on a violin.
Creatively, I like the idea of a classical guitar sonata on electric guitar because it opens up new possibilities of tone, technique, and effects. Why not lean into that and still say, “Yes, this is classical guitar music”?
I want to take a line before my standard plug to let you know that Ken Parker, one of the most innovative guitar makers of recent decades, is facing a huge hardship due to cancer and has a GoFundMe open. As an independent guitar maker, his livelihood depends on his health, which is now gone. You can hear one of his archtop guitars above, and you might have seen me playing my green electric Fly guitar on my music channel. In your charity, consider a donation for one of the most unique voices in the music world.
I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.
