John Williams: Changing the Culture of the Classical Guitar

Performance, perception, education and construction

Michael O'Toole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367001889
• eBook ISBN: 9780429683992
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música de guitarra

This book assesses the influence and reception of many different forms of guitar playing upon the classical guitar and more specifically through the prism of John Williams.

Beginning with an examination of Andrés Segovia and his influence upon Williams' life's work, a further three incisive chapters cover key areas such as performance, perception, education and construction, considering social and cultural contexts of the guitar over the past century. A final chapter on new directions in classical guitar examines the change in reception of the instrument from the mid-1970s to the present day, and Williams' impact upon what might be termed 'standard classical guitar repertoire'.

With in-depth discussion of the cultural and perceptual impact of Williams' more daring crossover projects and numerous musical examples, this is an informative reference for all classical guitar practitioners, as well as scholars and researchers of guitar studies, reception studies, cultural musicology and performance studies. An online lecture by the author and a transcript of the author's interview with John Williams are also available as e-resources.

1 Andrés Segovia and John Williams

The influence of Andrés Segovia (1893–1987) upon the culture of the classical guitar has been immense. However, it is important when analysing any figure of great stature that a balanced picture emerges. This chapter aims to examine both positive and negative aspects of Segovia’s approach to the guitar as well as discussing John Williams’ reaction to the enormous shadow cast by his former teacher. It is important not only to establish the opportunities available for Williams but also the deficiencies and ‘gaps’ that presented in a culture built so much around the achievements and ideals of one individual.

Segovia, a self-taught guitarist, from the village of Linares in the region of Andalusia in southern Spain, exerted an enormous impact upon the perception of classical guitar in the twentieth century. He debuted in Granada in 1909 at the age of 16 and over the next two decades established himself as a successful concert artist throughout Europe. Segovia developed a highly influential network of friends and admirers in the early part of his career, which included Manuel de Falla, Pablo Casals and Pablo Picasso. Indeed Casals is said to have organised Segovia’s official Paris debut in April 1924, which was enormously successful.¹ The approval of such luminaries was of great value to Segovia as he sought to establish relationships with music agents and promoters, who were initially cautious about placing a guitarist on the great concert stages of the world. Segovia worked with Cuban impresario Ernesto de Quesada, the British firm Ibbs & Tillet and New York-based promoter Francis Coppicus throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, in 1943, he began to work with Sol Hurok who, according to Robert Bailey, ‘helped build a lifelong audience for Segovia in North America’.²

Segovia: career, tributes and reception

The availability of recordings, along with Hurok’s skills as a music manager, altered Segovia’s status from being something of an unknown quantity within the classical concert world to being cherished as an exotic rarity. When he performed, the image that Segovia portrayed was one of old-world Spanish nobility, and his desire to produce a beautiful sound seemed to outweigh more virtuosic tendencies. As one reviewer described:

Segovia cares as little about flamboyant showmanship as a master wood-engraver cares about seeing his meticulous designs blown up into bill-board poster size. His is an intimate art, balanced on the toes as gossamer-light as any sprite out of Shakespeare or Shelley.³

Although many factors contributed to his enormous success, the sound that Segovia produced left an enormous impression on all who witnessed him perform. Julian Bream has described Segovia’s sound as ‘ravishing and magnificent’ and comments that ‘you could recognise Segovia’s way of playing instantly: too many guitarists today would be unrecognisable after a whole concert’.⁴

Already an established celebrity in Europe, Segovia began touring America in 1928 and his first appearance in New York’s Town Hall on 8 January 1928, elicited the following response from Olin Downes, of the New York Times:

The appearance of Mr. Segovia is not that of a trumpeted virtuoso. He is rather a dreamer or scholar in bearing, long hair, eyeglasses, a black frock coat and neckwear of an earlier generation.⁵

This review highlights the importance of Segovia’s image, which was carefully cultivated. However, although Downes was generous in his praise for Segovia, he also stated that the Spaniard could become the ‘trick player’ of the age, and focused heavily on the guitar’s perceived lack of quality:

Saying all this, it must be added that Segovia cannot succeed in removing the limitations which will always surround his instrument. He has far outdistanced himself from the ordinary twanger of strings. Nevertheless, the guitar remains the guitar, with limits of sonority, color, dynamics. These limitations make Bach less impressive through its medium than on the piano or harpsichord. They reach their utmost effect and their entire significance in music less sculpturesque and contrapuntal than Bach’s and with warmer harmony and more elementary rhythms.⁶

The same concert was also reviewed by Samuel Chotzinoff for The World and although generous in his praise for Segovia, he seemed to be bizarrely fixated upon the fact that the guitar was not in fact a piano, stating that the guitar was ‘an instrument with one fatal limitation, or rather two – it is plucked and has no sustaining pedal’.⁷

Segovia’s career entered a crisis during World War II because of his support for Franco, and Robert C. Powell mentions boycotts outside his concerts in New York during the 1930s and 1940s. This led to his temporary banishment from the American concert scene for much of the 1930s, leading him to focus on European and South American territories during that time. It has also been said that his relationship with former friend and artistic ally Pablo Casals, deteriorated because of their contrasting political beliefs. Paul Elie refers to Segovia as ‘Casal’s Spanish opposite – Andalusian, self-taught, royalist in politics’.⁸ However, after the war, circumstances combined to revitalise his career in the USA. The promoter Harold Shaw, who worked for Sol Hurok in the post-war years, has spoken of the subtle changes in perception, which had such an enormous impact, both specifically upon Segovia and more generally, upon the guitar itself:

Segovia was managed by Sol Hurok and it was my job as sales representative to arrange bookings and dates for Segovia. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to make the promoters understand what I was talking about. I would go to different cities – Kansas City, Topeka, Denver – and talk to promoters about their concert series. When I mentioned that we had a guitarist, Segovia, I got a very sharp answer which was essentially, “Look fella, we’ve got guitar guys playing and singing around here all day, all night, every day of the week. We don’t need any more thank you very much.” That isn’t precisely what people said but that’s what they were basically saying. Until they could actually hear Segovia play, they wouldn’t be able to understand. Fortunately Decca came out with a Segovia recording and when I played it for the promoters, it really opened up their ears … You see most promoters at the time took it as a rather elite novelty to present to their people – but it helped build Segovia’s career.⁹

Thus, Segovia established himself as a genuinely successful concert artist against a backdrop of indifference towards his chosen instrument and his career continued to prosper until his death in 1987. Taken from a Danish newspaper, the following is a typical example of the type of reception garnered by Segovia throughout his career:

We have never heard anyone who can possibly be compared with the way he plays his guitar. With his incomprehensible virtuosity and his sense of taste, proving the high level of his musical culture, he makes the guitar an instrument on which proper music can be performed.¹⁰

There are many reviews of this nature and a similar narrative can be detected throughout. In an echo of the type of reviews elicited by the performances of Viennese child prodigy Leonard Schulz, a hundred years earlier, it seems as though critics were trying to outdo each other both in terms of praising the young Spanish virtuoso and in their lack of respect for his instrument.¹¹ As Segovia’s star rose, a certain degree of respect gradually emerged for the instrument on which he performed. And yet, in his early career the accepted view was that his great technique and artistry were achieved in spite of the guitar rather than because of it. Indeed, the celebrated composer Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) was quoted as saying that before Segovia’s arrival as a concert artist the guitar was ‘regarded as a piece of romantic stage furniture’.¹²

Segovia became, in a very tangible way, a personification of the Spanish guitar and his rise to popularity within the refined classical music world is a good example of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has referred to as ‘embodied cultural capital’.¹³ A sense prevailed during the early part of the twentieth century that Segovia, by his talent, his rarity and the sheer force of his personality, had ensured that his career seemed inexorably linked to the popularity of the instrument, as the two rose proportionately in terms of status and profile. Unlike the great players of other instruments, who might have to content themselves with the consideration of having reached or, in some cases marginally improved upon the standards of past masters, a perception existed that he had raised the level of performance to such an extent that he had all but invented the modern classical guitar.

Segovia also contributed in many practical ways to the betterment of the guitar, for example his advocacy of the use of nails over flesh of the right-hand fingers and his consultancy with Albert Augustine to aid with the design of the first nylon string, an innovation that greatly benefited the instrument, both in terms of temperament and consistency of sound. Indeed, both these innovations can be said to have radically changed the sound of the twentieth-century classical guitar and had an enormous impact upon audience reaction to the instrument. Segovia’s practical responses to the problems of tuning and sound projection represent vital moments in the evolution of the instrument.

Segovia’s autobiography, covering the years 1893–1920, gives an interesting insight into how he viewed his own achievements.¹⁴ It is clear from this publication that Segovia himself enjoyed basking in his role as a sort of messianic figure in the history of the instrument. In the preface, he emphasised this narrative by stating: ‘I found the guitar at a standstill – despite the noblest efforts of Sor, Tarrega, Llobet and others – and raised it to the loftiest levels of the music world.’¹⁵ Later, he concludes with another profession of his own self-belief: ‘I pride myself only in having been a daring, tireless prober of the subtle beauty of the guitar, in conquering for it the love of millions in the world ahead.’¹⁶ The use of the word ‘only’ in this remark is quite redundant, as the reader might reasonably ask the question: for what else could Segovia have wished to take credit? In one typical passage from the main text of the book, he describes playing for a noted violin professor at the workshop of luthier Manuel Ramirez in Madrid. Segovia recounted the episode as follows:

‘Bravo, young fellow, bravo! I like your temperament and your technique,’ he said ‘What a pity such skill should be wasted on the small and undeveloped world of the guitar. Beautiful, perhaps but solitary and wild, few men of talent have ventured there and you have chosen to spend on it ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Andrés Segovia and John Williams
• 2. John Williams’ approach to the classical guitar
• 3. ‘Putting the guitar out of classical music’
• 4. New directions in classical guitar
• Bibliography
• Index