----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Pleijsier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Early guitar list" <early-guitar@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 9:40 AM Subject: [EARLY-GUIT] Re: Odp: Sor's technique (was pinkie discussion)
I have many times tried to understand what was going on here, in this review, how to understand, interpret it. All was well between Fétis and Sor in the beginning, and then the grapes turned sour. In his dictionary, under the entry "Sor", Fétis not even mentions that Sor played the guitar. Fétis was never really convinced about the guitar (having heard Carulli, Sor etc.) until he heard Zani de Ferranti. Only here, Fétis began to rave. Zani "never played an open string", as Zani said himself. Zani liked the warm round sound. He was a 'poet of the guitar', that kinda type, looking for magical sounds everywhere in the box. This romantic thing must have appealed to Fétis. But where does that leave Sor? ----------- Hello Paul, ..and Fetis had more to say about Sor's sound: "a pure and elegant harmony...seemed to us most difficult to play...but we regretted that the sound of the instrument was not fuller ...Sor seems to have neglected too much this essential aspect of the instrument...Sor has talent, the music which he plays, almost always written in four parts, is prodigously difficult; but he gets a poor sound from the instrument...often making it sound like a mandoline by his persistence in playing with a sharp sound" (Revue Musicale, 1828). Fetis, axe to grind or not, is not wholly scathing of Sor, only of his sound. Glowing reviews of Sor's technical brilliance are hard to find (are there any?), certainly compared with Giuliani, Ferranti, Legnani and others. Sor was a highly intelligent, highly educated, gifted individual, and I don't think anyone would argue that as an educated musician and skilled composer he was without rival among guitarists of his time. But his music often creates a tension between almost academically-obsessive correctness and idiomatic elegance. Despite his undoubted executant abilities in the area of refined musicianship and expression, I wonder about his ability to play his own music with legato (still often a problem for us today)! The Method doesn't help us too much, I think. He appears to have created his playing technique almost in a vacuum, taking little from other guitarists. The purpose of the Method, surely of no use whatsoever to anyone wishing to learn to play the guitar, seems to be as a kind of manifesto in which Sor asserts his intellectual and musical superiority over his rivals. His ego gets the better of him, however, when he opens the door to another guitarist - Giuliani, laying side-by-side the two versions of La sentinelle. Here, Sor explains an obvious inability to deal with Giuliani's right-hand tecxtures as a reluctance to deviate from the technical "rules" he established for himself (not on musical grounds)! Looking at Sor's music, the right-hand textures and patterns he employs are indeed restricted to his "rules" (with the exception of the early Op. 14). But this limitation (it surely cannot be intellectual, merely physical) places him behind not only contemporaries such as Aguado, Giuliani (even Matiegka and Molitor) but also behind many earlier guitarists (Doisy, LHoyer, Merchi, even Lemoine and Gatayes). But brilliant technical display is not the reason we look to Sor; we look to him for outstanding compositional skill and refinement. (However, the lack of notated expression in such carefully constructed music is perplexing!) As for the use of the right-hand little finger, I can make no comment since I haven't experimented with it. Still, as they sometimes say about a convincing performance: correct technique, correct instrument, corrent interpretation, 5%; imagination, 95%! Best regards, Stanley To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
