The Concept of Structural Delineation

And so it is not uncommon to hear recordings of the Chaconne where the beginning and the ending sound almost identical in intensity.

Beginnings and endings must be differentiated.

Especially in material that is similar.

A beginning must sound like a beginning and an ending an ending.

Like a good movie, you know when it’s the end, even before the credits have started rolling.

How do you know?

Because there’s a sense of conclusion, a sense of resolution, a sense of finality.

After a long conflict ridden saga, the end comes as a relief, a wrapping up of things.

Especially for long scale works, structures should be articulated in the same way as melodies. The beginnings, the middle, and the endings should all be differentiated.

This differentiation can be done at all the basic levels—dynamics, timbre, and articulation.

—May 18, 2003

First installment of random notes penned a while back, finally seeing the light of day.

One of the recent developments in guitar has been this movement to sanitize it. And so new codes of ‘clean playing’ have been drawn up. Certain tone colors are declared verboten.

The end result of this has been an increasing tendency towards limpid playing—endless soft mellow strumming on strings which gives new meaning to the word ‘monotone.’

I ask myself in the face of all these innovations and ‘refinements’ – Where is the passion? Where is the fire? Where is the energy? Is music only meant to sound this way—clean, sanitized, mellow?

If this is progress, I would rather remain in the dark ages where music is supposed to say something, where passion and fire is synonymous with the guitar. One note from Segovia is worth more than all the notes from these ‘born again’ exponents of the sanitized guitar put together.

A personal aside—It has become fashionable in some quarters to attack Segovia and his legacy as idiosyncratic and antiquated.

My own philosophy has always been—here’s a guy who single-handedly resurrected an obsolete instrument, put it on the concert map, established an entire generation of great players and played into his nineties.

Is there any one who can claim to have accomplished half as much?

Rather than criticize him, perhaps we should stand back and try to understand not just why he was such a phenomenon, but how he developed such a fluid and effortless technique.

—May 11, 2003

Unlike the Bach CD, my Chopin CD was recorded in a small studio and close-miked. Close-miking has its advantages, but it also has some disadvantages including a certain boominess in the bass. Since its release, I have always felt that the recordings need a little tweaking sonically. Last year, I managed to locate the original 24-bit files and was able to get John Strother of Penguin recordings to remaster them.

Here is the remastered version of track 4 on the CD, Chopin Nocturne No. 5, Op. 15, No. 2.

The principle of generating effortless energy lies in three basic components.

The first is to position yourself optimally, to allow energy to flow in your body unimpeded, with as little resistance as possible.

Martial artists refer to this body state as the rag doll.

This means holding your body with complete looseness (AOV principle 1), like a rag doll, allowing all the joints to relax with gravity, maintaining just enough energy to stay upright.

It also means not forcing your body in any way.

If the wrist wants to drop, let it drop; if the fingers want to rest, let them rest.

The rag doll state creates a well-oiled super efficient machine in your body and enables you to operate with freedom and maximum efficiency.

No energy is wasted fighting unnecessary resistance in the body.

The second component is in to connect your actions so that each action sets off the next in a continual loop.

Instead of thinking in isolated individual actions, think groups of actions, all interconnected, each one setting off the next.

The simplest way to understand this is to think of the piston action.

The piston consists of two actions—up and down.

The two actions work against each other. As one comes down, the other one is going up, the energy in one action producing the energy to drive the other one forward.

Transfer the concept to playing the guitar.

Let’s say you have two elements that you have to alternate quickly, we’ll call this the index and middle fingers.

Now you can try to move them individually as fast as possible or you can make them work with and against one another.

The first way produces tension, the very action of getting them to move as fast as possible will create tension that will ultimately slow you down.

The second way is the effortless way.

Instead of thinking of them as individual actions, you use the energy in one action to drive the next one forward, creating an endless loop of actions, each one driving the next one forward.

In the case of playing the guitar, as you move one finger down, you’re using the energy in that action to drive the other second finger up.

It takes a little practice but once you know how to produce energy this way, it’s effortless.

The actions almost play themselves, you just let them go.

But what if you have more than two elements?

You apply the same principle, except that instead of two alternating actions, you have three consecutive actions which we’ll call elements a, b, and c.

As you execute element a, use the energy in that action to drive element b forward, and as you execute element b, use that energy to drive element c forward, and as you execute element c, use the energy in that action to drive element a forward.

By working in this cyclical way, you’re connecting one action to the next, producing the same stream of interconnected actions.

Now take this further and bring in a more powerful source of energy to generate the initial energy.

This brings us to the third component, that of involving the core elements.

Core elements are stronger than secondary elements.

For example, the legs are stronger than the arms, the arms are stronger than the hands, the hands are stronger than the fingers.

This principle is mostly employed in performing groups of actions together.

For instance, if you have to pluck a series of chords, use the hand to perform the actions.

Instead of just moving the fingers, base your energy in your hand and arm, and let the fingers do the detailed work such as locating the strings and displacing it.

Playing this way will result in a bouncing action in the hand.

To the observer, it will appear as if the fingers are plucking the strings but in reality, the hand is behind the actions, the fingers playing only a passive role in the actions.

But the principle is also effective in producing an even stream of notes, especially useful in techniques such as the tremolo on the guitar.

The fingers on the hand are all of uneven lengths and strengths.

How do you get them all to produce an even touch?

By activating the strings with one entity—the hand— as opposed to four fingers, you’re able to apply the same force to each plucking action, resulting in even pressure and even tones.

This principle is the basis of the bouncing hand exercise which I have described elsewhere.

The difference in how energy is generated is the difference between those operating in virtuosity and the initiated.

The uninitiated sees the world in simplistic terms.

If you want more power, apply more force.

If you want more speed, make your body move faster.

The virtuoso understands that the reality is more complex, that there’re myriad ways to harness the hidden (hidden because it’s not immediately apparent) power in your body and sometimes, the straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

Another track from the Laredo concert.

A few weeks after I played a recital in Laredo in 2005, a DVD arrived in the mail. They had apparently recorded the concert and streamed it live, without asking me.

Here’s one of the pieces on my program—Chopin Nocturne Op. 48, No 1. I think I’ve only played the piece twice in public; this was the second and last time.

One thing about guitar playing (and most things in general) is that nothing operates in isolation.

Everything operates as part of a whole, everything we do impacts something else.

For example, how we hold the hand impacts the trajectories of our fingers.

How we hold the wrist impacts the way our thumb and fingers work.

Over the years, I have played in almost every conceivable way possible, sometimes in experimentation, sometimes to try out other ideas, and sometimes unwittingly.

And I’ve found that to create the engine at the fingertips, you’ll have to focus on playing at the fingertips.

First, because the other alternatives of playing from the knuckles or middle joints do not give you the fine control you need at the fingertips.

And second, because generating the engine requires that you play off the fingers against one another and this occurs at the fingertips.

As you bring one finger down to pluck, you’re using that movement to produce a counter action in the next finger.

In the case of two finger “i m” picado, as you bring down the ‘i’ finger, that movement is producing a counter action in the ‘m’ finger to reposition it.

The two actions are working in tandem, like in a dance, all occurring at the fingertips.

That’s why the focus of your actions must be on the fingertips.

It is important to note that the action occurring at the fingertips is only part of the picture. As I mentioned in my earlier articles, the hand is also very much involved in the total playing action.

So yes, it can get overwhelmingly complex if you were to try to analyze what’s going on in the hand and try to micromanage every part of the movement.

To avoid getting bogged down with details (and the centipedal quandary), I would break it down to two things.

First, focus on playing at the fingertips.

Then consolidate your movements by basing your movements off of your hand.

Finally, a little Zen story I read.

There was a young novice in a monastery who was seeking enlightenment.

Everyday, he would ask the Zen master how he could gain enlightenment.

The Zen master soon got tired of his constant questioning and one day, without warning gave the young novice a whack on the head with a stick.

With that whack, the young novice gained instant enlightenment.

Consolidating your fingers in free-strokes is easy compared to doing it in rest-strokes.

Playing a free-stroke arpeggio usually involves three fingers and thumb and it’s easy to work them together as a group.

With rest-strokes and I’m talking abut conventional two-finger rest-strokes, the problem is that you’re only working with two elements—the two fingers.

How do you consolidate with two fingers?

This was the problem I set out to solve when I decided to try to understand Paco de Lucia’s picado technique.

The key lies in “pushing” into the strings with the hand and letting the action release the fingers.

In free-stroke arpeggio playing, the way to employ the hand in the plucking is to pull it back slightly.

In picado playing, it is to push into the strings.

This is the source of a common misunderstanding—that you have to play rest-strokes from the knuckles.

When you push the hand and fingers in, all the joints are naturally locked against one another to form a small arch from the hand to the fingertips.

When you press in, to the observer, the movement in the knuckles would make it appear as if the you are playing from the knuckles.

In actuality, the action is originating from the entire hand, not just the knuckle joints.

You can try it by playing rest-strokes with your ‘i’ and ‘m’ fingers from the knuckles as fast as possible.

Not only will you tire yourself out quickly, you will probably not get much speed.

To find out how this works on the guitar, here’s a simple exercise.

Place the ‘m,’ and ‘i’ fingers on the second string. (I find the second string easier to practice on than the first string.)

Now, gently push the fingers through the strings. Let the pushing action come from the whole hand. This would include the fingers.

Do this several times.

The important thing to note is that you’re pushing the two fingers through together in one action, as if the two fingers are one.

Next, do this exercise again but this time, release the ‘m’ and ‘i’ fingers separately, while still pushing them into the string in one action.

As you do this, the two fingers should produce a kind of “blam, blam” effect. This is because you’re playing them one after another in quick succession.

It sounds simple but this is really the secret to fast rest-strokes.

You do not try to play the notes individually; instead you play them in groups of twos.

Again, in real life application, there’re other factors that come into play. For example, to connect the two-note groups and make them occur seamless, you would have to apply another principle which involves creating the ‘engine’ at the fingertips.

This principle is a little complicated so I will leave that for another article.

But the fundamental principle of pushing in the hand and allowing the two fingers to work as one remains the same.