Alfredo Escande

* Published by Brecha (Montevideo), Gitarre Aktuell (Hamburg), Gendai Guitar Magazine (Tokio)

Special thanks to my friend Blue O'Connell ( Virginia, U.S.A.) who generously revised this english version.

Maestro Abel Carlevaro’s physical life ended suddenly in Berlin, last July 17th at dawn because of a heart attack. At the age of 84, he was fully active as an interpreter (in the following two weeks he was expected to give two concerts in Germany and one in the Royal Festival Hall of London), as a Master-teacher of the instrument (starting on Sunday 22th and for one week, he was going to lead an international course in the German city of Erlbach –for the ninth consecutive year-) and as a composer (last May he had premiered in Zürich his last work: Milonga Suite in homage to his brother Agustín). Now there is another life which will go on, the one that will survive him for a very long time, through his relatively few but masterful recordings, his musical compositions, his books and his teachings. He will also remain living in our memory as an exceptional person through the example of his humble generosity and other human qualities. That is the life which won't fade and will be reborn every day in those who directly or indirectly have received the fruits of such a fertile existence, or still enjoy the indelible memory of his concerts, or have the possibility of listening his recordings, playing his music on the guitar, or who have received his teachings and have enjoyed his friendship.

Abel Carlevaro indelibly marked the second half of the twentieth century in the guitar’s world. Since 1942, when Andrés Segovia introduced him to the public with the occasion of his first great concert, followed by his astonishing recordings at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties, his first international courses in Paris in 1974, the publication in Buenos Aires of "Escuela de la Guitarra" in 1979 and the premiere in 1984 (also in Paris) of the guitar-model designed by him, this cosmopolitan Uruguayan man, who was always coming back home and always refused to live outside Montevideo, never stopped making revolutionary changes which altered the whole guitar tradition forever.

His first revolutionary contribution had to do with the guitar technique. By reading the reviews of his concerts and listening to his early recordings, it is evident how the young guitarist who had studied several years with the great Segovia, clearly moved away from the way of playing of the Spanish Maestro and opened a completely new path, in which prevailed a serious musical solidity, a luminous clarity in the articulation, the most absolute technical cleanness, as well as rhythmic and stylistic rigor. As it was said by Maestro Ruben Seroussi (Composition, Theory and Guitar teacher at Tel Aviv University): “Maestro Carlevaro was in my opinion one of the highest exponents of our instrument in the last century. First of all as a performer: I always felt that his recordings, dating since the late 40s, were not enough known in the guitar world. His seriousness and solid musical performances were much ahead [of] his time. No approximations, "good intentions" or other uncertain features: with him everything was clarity, conviction, and above all, a rich paletta of colours and sonoric resources. Aesthetic tastes may vary, but these attributes are undeniable, and the ways in which he managed them were outstanding”.

Carlevaro also revolutionized the aesthetics of the guitar. Though he possessed a prodigious technique for playing the instrument, he never flaunted his technical ability. On the contrary, he always discarded any “virtuosity” and eliminated the excessive use of speed, any unnecessary “portamentos", arpegiated chords and other guitaristic techniques that were so fashionable at that time. He focused his attention on the timbric richness of the guitar, on its "orchestral" presence, on its polyphonic capacities. When so many guitarists of his time had (and in some cases still have) volume and speed as the main objective of their concerns, he has always placed the priority in the quality of the sound and the variety of its colours, the clarity in phrasing and the clear conduction of the voices.

But one day Abel Carlevaro realized that his way of playing, his instrumental technique, was transferable, was formulable and transmisible to others so that they could understand it, learn it and then apply it. And so he also revolutionized the guitar pedagogy: he gave it an Instrumental Theory, an organic and logically structured group of explanations and solutions to each one of the problems presented by the mechanics of the instrument, so as to be able to express the musical ideas without any obstacles. At first he taught it, in his University classes, in his private studio, at international seminars in several parts of the world. Then he exposed it through the writing of several books. The first one and most important: "Escuela de la Guitarra. Exposición de la Teoría Instrumental", published by Barry (Buenos Aires) and then translated to English, French, Chinese, German, Korean, Japanese and some other languages. Afterwards, he enlarged those concepts in several other books. It would exceed the intentions of this article to make a detailed description of this theoretical revolution. I’d rather advise any interested person to read the Maestro’s texts. (For those who can understand Spanish, there is a brief summary in a lecture given by the author of this article. I include below some fragments in English). Let’s only say that Carlevaro practically subverted almost every one of the principles which guided the execution of most guitarists up to those times and which were presented in nearly all the published methods.

Restless, free of prejudices, an innovative man, Carlevaro didn’t agree with the way in which guitar building had evolved. Convinced that musical instruments are always perfectible, he searched, investigated, he even conducted his own experiments, until he also revolutionized the construction of the guitar. He designed a new model for the instrument, based on completely new principles, not only changing its external aspect but also its interior architecture. Of course, that he didn't look for a bigger sound volume. He remained cognizant of his aesthetic principles, and tried to design a guitar that would clearly show the colours, that would always give a good balance of bass and high tones, that would allow a clear emission of the voices, and would give a faithful response to his "orchestral" idea of our instrument. Being as he was an eternal perfectionist, he was never totally satisfied with the various instruments that several renowned manufacturers made for him. But over time, success of his invention validated his vision of a better instrument and during the last seventeen years of his life he only played on “Carlevaro-model” guitars.

The life and the example of Abel Carlevaro won't have been in vain if guitarists are able to learn from his capacity to ask and to wonder, from his not accepting anything until a deep analysis allowed him to be convinced of its truth , from his infinite energy for searching, creating and giving until the last day of his life, from the permanent good humour and warm humanity in his pedagogic work, from his enormously solid artistic and intellectual honesty.

The theoretical revolution of Carlevaro

(fragments of a lecture given by Alfredo Escande)

This english version has been generously revised by Blue O'Connell, from Virginia, U.S.A.

There is a general way of playing the guitar that came before Carlevaro and his teachings, and which is still used today in many places of the world. That "traditional way" is not completely homogeneous, but shows however a certain number of ideas which are repeated with few variants:

- the exclusive work of the fingers of both hands, with the smallest mobility of the arm;

- the use of the “apoyando” as the only way for dynamically standing out the notes;

- the movement of the right hand toward the bridge or the sound hole as the exclusive way for obtaining timbrical changes;

- the use of the "guide-finger” in the transfers of the left hand over the fingerboard and, in general,

- a way of sitting down and holding the guitar that shows annoyance and accuses a permanent effort for maintaining the stability of the instrument. -

Of course that we know that there have existed and still exist very great guitarists, exceptionally gifted, whose playing attains a musical and artistic high quality by means of those methods.

.... One of the fundamental ideas of Carlevaro’s new conception is that the guitar is not only played with the fingers. He says that the fingers are only the final actors of an coordinated work of the whole “motor apparatus” which includes the hand, the wrist, the arm and even - sometimes - the body sustained on the feet, its motor elements…

In order to illustrate, we will show the clearest examples for supporting the statement that Carlevaro has revolutionized what has before been considered as school of the guitar. -

In the first place, what is the starting point of his “Exposition of the Instrumental Theory”: how to sit down and how to hold the instrument. Carlevaro has demonstrated for the first time that the pain of the guitarists' back comes from an incorrect way of sitting down, using the muscles of that part of the body to sustain the balance of the whole, also twisting it in a forced way, adapting the body to a wrong placement of the guitar. And he discovered the solution: the balance is sustained with an appropriate location of the feet, used as motor elements of the body, being the right foot placed behind it. Also, and contrarily to the traditional teaching that the guitar should lean on the left side of the chest, he has taught that the instrument should be slanted respect to the body, more near to the right side than to the left one. In that way, with "the guitar accomodating to the body and not the body to the guitar", the right shoulder avoids to be forced forward in a noxious posture, and the left arm, the one which has to move, will have freedom and enough space to do it, as well as the body, who participates in an active form in certain transfers to the sharpest areas in the fingerboard. It is discarded, therefore, any idea that the left arm should remain "stuck" to the body. -

We have mentioned the transfers. Carlevaro has made a comprehensive conceptual innovation of this subject too. He has completely discarded the ancient concept of the "guide-fingers” in the changes of position over the fingerboard, having exhaustively explained why any transfer should be made by the arm, without any active participation of the fingers, and "by the air", avoiding the close contact with the string (except, of course, in the case of the portamento, used only by expressive reasons, and which, anyway, must have its origin in the action of the arm)..... The left hand thumb must allow a total freedom for the movement of the arm, not only in the transfers but in any other action of this motor apparatus. It is also discarded, then, the traditional idea which presented it opposing its force to that of the other fingers on the fingerboard, with a central location respect to the hand.

...... Concerning to the right hand the revolution has been maybe even more deep. In the first place, the theory of the attack and the restraining of the impulse: Carlevaro says that the guitarist should not conceive the action of a finger on a string without having previously prepared the contrary muscular force which will stop the movement in the exact moment and place. The different dynamic levels are obtained applying -by means of different fixations - a larger muscular mass to the attack of the string, provided that the speed of the finger should be constant and always as high as possible, to reduce the time of contact to the minimun...... This conception of a very wide range of dynamic “toques” with its corresponding restraining of the impulse leaves totally aside the traditional dichotomy among "apoyando" and "tirando", since the dynamics and -as we will see next- the quality of the sound depends on the muscular attitude of the finger which attacks the string and not on what it does a posteriori of the attack. Besides, the restraining of the impulse makes unnecessary the use of the adjacent string to stop the uncontrolled movement of the finger.

A second point among the concepts referred to the right hand, approaches the topic of the timbrics, the color and the quality of the sound. Traditionally it was used to change the location of the right hand (towards the bridge for the most metallic sounds and towards the sound hole for the sweettest). In Carlevaro’s conception, the colour of the sound depends on the way and the angle under which the finger attacks the string. Acquiring the corresponding technique will allow us to use simultaneous different colours just varying in a subtle way the conformation and the grade of fixation of each finger, as well as to obtain similar tone quality in different strings, which grants a larger freedom at the moment of fingering a piece.

The way of performing with the right hand thumb is also an absolute innovation in regard to what has been traditionally taught. First, because the flexion of the phalanges is discarded, and the thumb acts as a unit, from its origin, being the finger laterally separated from the hand. In addition, due to a special shaping of the thumb’s nail, it is possible to obtain different sonorities with this finger, having the freedom of acting either with the flesh or with fingernail and also with what Carlevaro has called double attack (beginning with flesh and ending with the nail) in two or more strings. -

It would be too long for this occasion to deeply analyze such important contributions to the guitar school as they are the new conception of the pizzicato, the detaching of intermediate notes in chords, the mechanics of the support point, the whole theory of the presentations of the left hand on the fingerboard, the different ways of playing descending slurs without affecting the adjacent string, and so many others.