Publication of ¡Oh Guitarra!

This autumn saw the publication of my second piece for solo guitar, ¡Oh Guitarra! The publishers are Tre Media of Karlsruhe, the same company that released my first guitar work, Nana del insomne, a few years ago.

¡Oh Guitarra! was composed at the request of the Swiss guitarist Christoph Jäggin. Its broad theme is carnival, and the various meanings and associations it carries for somebody with my background. 

To mention first the associations my piece does not concern itself with, carnival is, of course, a time of lavishness, abandon and extravagant fun. In its religious connotations it is the season of wanton recklessness preceding the austerity of Lent. 

Although these generic meanings are, no doubt, somewhere in the background, this guitar piece is more specific in that it explores two instances of music associated with carnival. One is the taquipayanacus, a tradition of my native Cochabamba, where groups from the surrounding valleys come down on the city to compete in dexterity and wit on one genre. A pithy musical phrase in lively tempo and triple rhythm is repeated for as long as the singer has inspiration to improvise couplets to go with it. The irreverent piquancy of the lyrics makes up for the repetitiveness of the melody. The words are in Quechua, but somehow one line in Spanish passed down to me from my father: estos carnavales quién inventaría. In my experience, although the sound of taquipayanacus pervaded the atmosphere during carnival time, my ignorance of Quechua gave these four words the value of an emblem. In my piece I subject the classic four-bar phrase to intervallic manipulation that probably renders it unrecognisable, and there is no repetition. 

The other specific nod is in the direction of eastern Bolivia, where a popular genre bears the name of carnaval, or sometimes carnavalito. The tempo and metre are the same as in the western taquipayanacus, but the character and style are a world away. In ¡Oh Guitarra! I extract and distil some of the elements - especially rhythmic ones - that make up this style. I do not expect the average reader of this blog to be interested in the technicalities, so I leave it at that. 

Although I had not intended it that way, the resulting piece of music is something of an east-meets-west specimen. So am I, born in the Andes but brought up, at least for part of my childhood, in the lowlands. By rights the piece should have been titled Estos carnavales, but at days before I sent it off I changed my mind. Completing the work had been an exhausting experience, because I find it hard to write for a solo instrument and because the guitar, in particular, has so many technical variables that progress had been excruciatingly slow. I remembered García Lorca's poem La guitarra and its final words:

¡Oh guitarra!

corazón malherido por cinco espadas.

The line that for the poet conveys mesmeric reverence seemed just as good to express my feeling of exhaustion. 

¡Oh Guitarra! can be obtained from Tre Media, who are contactable by email or by telephone +49(0)721/26023 or by post at the address below.

TRE MEDIA Musikverlage 

0700 TREMEDIA 

Amalienstr. 40

D-76133 Karlsruhe 

  

Première of ¡Oh guitarra! in Winterthur

The guitarrist Christoph Jäggin. In the other image, me, the composer Harri Suilamo and Christopher Jäggin.

¡Oh guitarra!, the piece that took an eternity to complete and nearly put me off the guitar for life, received its first performance at the heroic hands of Christoph Jäggin, last weekend, Sunday 11 November, at Theater am Gleis in the town of Winterthur, near Zurich.

Christoph is one of those phenomena of the musical world who is not deterred by difficulty but, quite on the contrary, relishes a challenge, and, it seems, the hairier the better. When, having played extensively my first guitar work, Nana del insomne – a rather vertiginous affair – he suggested that I should write him a new one, caution suggested it would be best not to meddle with this fiendish instrument again. But caution’s voice went unheeded and a new piece was promised. It took years to materialise, but Christoph waited. When I finally completed it, in January 2006, he was busy writing a magnum opus of research, a history of Swiss music for the guitar, and he was taking a break from performing. It was my turn to wait, and wait I did. The première supervened last Sunday, nearly two years after completion, so justice was done.

On arrival in Christoph’s house in Turbenthal, I found that he had produced his own copy with fingerings and corrections of guitar technique. I had spent endless hours working out how best to realise my ideas on this complex instrument, but all the same Christoph had come up with more effective solutions in a number of places. I agreed gratefully in almost every case. In a couple of cases I begged to differ, but was no less grateful for his dedication and attention to detail. I wished I had had him nearby when I was writing the piece, so he could have helped to shape it with his technical advice. As it is, ¡Oh guitarra! has, I am sure, some of the awkwardness typical of the non-guitarist writing for the guitar, but less of it thanks to Christoph Jäggin, and less of it than it would have if I hadn't spent uncountable hours trying to work out with my own fingers how one might play each chord, line and combination of lines if one were a guitarist.

Christoph’s programme was remarkable in depth of expression on the guitar. I was particularly struck by Harri Suilamo’s Eidola, Fritz Voegelin’s Nombres and another with a forgotten title by the composer Zelenka. The former two composers were at the performance, and I learned much from talking to them. Luckily for me Suilamo speaks fluent English and Voegelin fluent Spanish, having been a conservatoire professor in Colombia for several years.

A well as being wonderfully taken care of by Christoph and his wife Sayuri, I was accommodated by their daughter Misa and her husband Tenzin, both English speakers, intelligent, knowledgeable and inexhaustibly kind with me.