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AN INTRODUCTION TO ABEL CARLEVARO’S SCHOOL OF GUITAR By JAD AZKOUL DURING THE SUMMER OF 1975, I had the opportunity to attend a two-week guitar festival in the lovely city of Arles, where Vincent van Gogh had once lived and painted, and where Leo Brouwer, Abel Carlevaro and the Flamenco guitarist Manolo Sanlúcar were giving masterclasses. Because I did not feel that I had the necessary level to attend the Brouwer course, I opted for the one by the Uruguayan virtuoso guitarist and composer, of whom I had barely heard, Abel Carlevaro. During the academic year I was on a French government scholarship in Paris, studying with Nadia Boulanger and Pierre Petit, as well as with guitar masters. Paris was a hub of guitar activity with Robert Vidal organising the international guitar competition for Radio France as well as many other events. Normally, I would have gone to visit my parents in Lebanon, but a raging civil war prevented me from making my annual summer visit there. On the opening day of the festival, all of Carlevaro’s students auditioned for him. After a few of us performed, the Maestro’s only observation was, ‘Each one of these players has the same problem.’ When the next group played, he made the same comment. I was perplexed, and even more so when after hearing everyone, about 20 of us, ranging from middling to excellent players, he again said the same thing. We came to understand that he was referring to the almost exclusive reliance by all of us on the strength, speed and agility of our fingers and only the very occasional use of our wrists, forearms, upper arms and torsos. I later learned that the limited use of the body not only reduces the guitarist’s potential but also causes unnecessary fatigue and sometimes injury.1 During the course of the two weeks, we were given a panoramic view of the School of Guitar, which Carlevaro had developed and which was new to us in France at the time. This went from an ergonomic sitting position through, for example, effecting left hand shifts without undesirable squeaks and unintentional glissandi, to producing different colours with the right hand without always having to go to the bridge. One of Carlevaro’s cornerstone principles of his guitar playing and teaching was ‘fijación’, a term which he coined to refer to a momentary and voluntary blocking or immobility of one or more articulations. For example, correctly done, the immobilisation of the fingers or the hand can permit more powerful elements, like the forearm, or even upper arm, to produce the desired action on the strings. During the masterclass Carlevaro substantiated the concept of fijación by comparing it to the same principle in piano technique as developed by Karl 20 Abel Carlevaro, Robert Vidal and Paco de Lucía. Leimer and made famous through his renowned virtuoso student Walter Gieseking.2 It is thanks to the subtlety of the action of the arm that through fijación guitarists can, just like pianists, produce a fortissimo with ease, as well as execute a pianissimo with a most delicate touch.3 Fijación is of course also relevant to the left hand, as for certain displacements and some types of trills. With regard to the momentary and voluntary aspect of this procedure, Carlevaro insisted, ‘that nullifying an articulation never implies a state of rigidity. Furthermore, fijación must not only begin just when necessary, but must stop immediately when its need has terminated, with the articulation in question resuming its flexibility and readiness for any other mechanical demand.’4 Carlevaro illustrated these and numerous other technical devices, all the while emphasising the importance of using minimal physical effort to achieve maximum musical results. This was the beginning of a long musical voyage that would eventually lead to my mastering of his technique, to being his teaching assistant, and to becoming a teacher and concert guitarist in my own right. Of the many compelling pieces of advice that I retained, there was one related to practising: rather than practise for eight hours a day, one should play for one hour and think for the rest of the time. Another was the necessity of analysing the work and meticulously respecting the indications in the score in order to best determine the composer’s intentions. And because Carlevaro subscribed to Classical Guitar Magazine the similitude between a guitar and an orchestra, he advocated the use of different colours to enhance the interpretation of a musical work. After this enlightening experience with Carlevaro, I returned to Paris where I had been studying for two years with Alexandre Lagoya and his main assistant at the Paris Conservatoire, Carel Harms. I decided that I couldn’t continue with their teaching method that essentially consisted of a particular way of striking the string, known as ‘attaque à droite’, meaning attack to the right. This was a prescription to make the nail glide slightly to the right (towards the bridge) so as to avoid a harsh sound, which according to Lagoya was produced by flamenco guitarists when they strike the strings at a perpendicular angle. In order to achieve this, most students tended to bend and fix their wrists, with respect to the forearm, rigidly to the right. Apart from this, there was nothing particularly distinctive about his teaching except perhaps that Lagoya would often repeat to the students the importance of relaxing (‘décontractez-vous!’), but without necessarily being able to teach them how. It was clear that I needed to change teachers. At that time, there was another renowned Uruguayan guitarist in Paris, Óscar Cáceres, and I assumed that his approach would be similar to Carlevaro’s. During the year I studied with him, it became increasingly apparent that my assumption had been naïve. He may well have been a fine guitarist, but the ever-increasing conflicts during my lessons (probably caused by my incessant demand for explanations) led me to terminate our relationship at the end of the year. I was further convinced that I had made the right decision after attending my second summer masterclass in the city of Castres in southern France with Abel Carlevaro and was able to learn more of his School. Upon my return to Paris I continued my search and changed teachers once again, this time to Alberto Ponce who was a prominent master in the ‘City of Light’. Although I knew his method was not what I was seeking, I thought I could somehow continue my quest under his guidance. Ponce’s right-hand approach was the exact opposite to that of Lagoya. Now I learned the ‘attaque à gauche’, whereby one should allow the nail to glide slightly to the left, towards the fingerboard.5 I found this new position of the hand more natural than the ‘right attack’, and I was able to continue with Ponce for another year. During the 1960s and 1970s, guitarists who wanted to improve their sound used to flock to Paris to study one of these two approaches because it is a fact that gliding the fingernail slightly to one side or another did produce a rounder tone. So to which ‘political’ stroke of the finger did Carlevaro subscribe? – in fact, to neither. After a full year with Ponce, I attended my third masterclass with Abel Carlevaro, and became more and more aware of what, back in Arles in 1975, he meant when he said, ‘everyone has the same problem.’ For Carlevaro the solutions lay elsewhere. To understand the difference between the traditional approaches to the right hand and the Carlevaro School, whether this concerns the left vs right attack, or whether it refers to the free-stroke/reststroke dichotomy, a paradigm shift is indispensible, an important subject that will be dealt with in one of my future articles in this magazine. Another distinction deals with the two possible strokes of the thumb, nail vs flesh. While the majority of guitarists use the thumbnail most of the time, there are some who frown upon its use. Carlevaro, however, taught how to produce a full-bodied sound using either, and even both simultaneously! For me, the turning point came in 1978 when I enrolled in my fourth masterclass with Carlevaro, this time in Madrid. There the Maestro proposed that I attend his ten-day workshop in Montevideo in October of that year and stay on there until Christmas. I was truly overjoyed at the prospect of this opportunity. So I finally packed my bags and left Paris for Montevideo to re-learn how to play the guitar. Given all the masterclasses I had taken with the Maestro, I thought that the proposed stay there “rather than practise for eight hours a day, one should play for one hour and think for the rest of the time.” Abel Carlevaro and Jad Azkoul in Castres in 1976. 22 Classical Guitar Magazine Bartolomé Díaz, Abel Carlevaro and Jad Azkoul. for three months would suffice. As it turned out, I stayed for three years. During this extended period I was able to study the foundation of the Carlevaro School in greater depth, beginning with how to use his four exercises books (known as Cuadernos) more efficiently. Unlike other maestros that I had before, he insisted that even the simplest Carcassi Etude was to be treated as seriously as a Beethoven sonata in order to merge the musical and mechanical skills from the outset. This training helped me to listen in a different way: more than being able to distinguish the actual pitches of notes and when they should be struck, I learned to hear the true colour and the actual duration of each note, the silence between the notes, and any extraneous noises that do not belong in the music. He taught me the importance of the vital role of the right hand not only in producing different types of sounds through the use of fijación, but also in stopping strings and avoiding harmonically conflicting resonances. I learnt how to have better poise when I sat to play, how to use my whole body when necessary, how to change positions with precision and ease, how to change colour, and how to practise creatively and productively. It was while I was studying with the Maestro that I collaborated on the translation from Spanish to English (and later to French) of his book, The School of Guitar, a task that certainly helped my understanding of the Carlevaro School. This monumental work is comparable to the 1830 publication of La Méthode by the great guitarist and composer, Fernando Sor. Rather than being a collection of exercises or studies as are most method books, each of these two works is a comprehensive treatise on how to play the guitar. Carlevaro was one of the most important figures in the guitar world and since the 1970s his popularity increased immensely in Europe. In France he was hailed by Robert Vidal6 as the guitarist with the most perfect technique. He was invited to Classical Guitar Magazine give masterclasses in North and South America, in Asia, and in many countries of Europe. Since that time, the technical level of guitarists has improved and continues to do so, directly or indirectly through the influence of Carlevaro. His legacy is due not only to his all-encompassing technique and his readiness to re-examine established approaches, but also to his compositions (some of which have entered standard guitar repertoire), to his virtuosity as a performer, and even as an inventor of a new concept of guitar construction. While guitarists can quickly benefit from using some of the principles and ideas of Carlevaro, the in-depth assimilation of his School has some similarities to the learning of a martial art, requiring dedication, self-discipline, confidence and fearless motivation. The whole purpose of Carlevaro’s method is to permit the guitarist to achieve his or her greatest technical capacity and musical potential through an understanding of the music to be played and the means to achieve this. It is a holistic and healthy use of the body, or to paraphrase an Alexander Technique term, an improved use of the – musical – self. Notes: 1. In fact, there is little doubt in the medical profession that the exclusive use of the fingers favours injury, such as RSI, Carpal tunnel, tendonitis and bursitis. 2. Walter Gieseking and Karl Leimer, Piano Technique. (Dover Publications: New York, 1972). The original German edition was published in two separate volumes: one in 1932 and the second in 1938. 3. Interestingly, in the French and English translations of his iconic work School of Guitar, Carlevaro requested I use of the Spanish ‘fijación’ rather than its French or English equivalents ‘fixation’, perhaps to dissociate it from the same term in Freudian psychology. 4. Abel Carlevaro, School of Guitar. Trans. by Jad Azkoul and Bartolomé Díaz. (Boosey and Hawkes: New York, 1984), p. 23. The original Spanish version was published in 1978. 5. The political terms left vs. right were born after the French revolution. It is therefore not so surprising that these same terms used by guitarists were also born in France. 6. Robert J. Vidal (1925–2002) was an exceptional figure in the classical guitar world for over 40 years, presenting programmes on French radio and television, recording for RCA and ERATO, and establishing the Radio France international guitar competition. The Lebanese guitarist Jad Azkoul has been teaching at the Conservatoire Populaire de Musique, Danse et Théàtre (CPMDT) in Geneva since 1984. From 2010 he has also been on the music faculty at the London College of Music. He regularly gives masterclasses throughout the four corners of the world. Jad Azkoul, is writing a series of articles for Classical Guitar Magazine about Carlevaro’s School of Guitar to follow on from this introductory article. The guitarist and composer Abel Carlevaro was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1916. He died while on a concert tour in Germany in 2001. 23