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Estevan -> RE: A q for the advanced flamenco players - your ability to tackle CG repertoire (Nov. 8 2010 2:41:14)
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Hi Pim, I meant to reply earlier, but got busy elsewhere.
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quote [Estevan]:
The real reason classical players generally don't study flamenco rasgueos is a practical one: they simply don't need to.
[Pimientito]
Im not sure I totally agree. Ricardo posted a while back the difference between Julian Bream and Paco de lucia playing the concierto D'Aranjuez and the end of the cadenza definately sounds better with a flamenco rasgueo than the classical attempt that Bream gives it.
Yes I remember well Ricardo said that he meant no disrespect to Bream and then went to some effort to make him look bad. Yes Paco sounds better than Julian in this passage, but so do other classical players. Anyway, this is just eight seconds of (badly written) music out of the whole repertoire.
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Secondly, a lot of pieces have had the rasgueos edited from the original editions so of course it would seem like they dont need that technique.
Unless you have plenty of hard evidence (which would come as a big surprise to anyone familiar with the repertoire) that statement is pure fantasy.
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EXAMPLE- Im working on La danza by Ruiz Pipo who was a guitarist from Granada....therefore it seems reasonable to assume that he at least would be familiar if not proficient with rasgueos. The Yepes revision of that score has the rhythmical parts scored as a,m,i downstrokes instead of a flamenco triplet which frankly sounds cr@p IMO. The finale to my ear should be played with flamenco triplets. Im having to rearrange it to suit a flamenco right hand. My point is that whist I agree that folk songs dont equal flamenco, I still think that the flamenco technique is the best way to get a rythmical section out of the guitar...I mean thats the point of flamenco technique!
Sorry to say but you're labouring under a misconception, mate. Antonio Ruiz-Pipó was a pianist. Evidently he was fond of the guitar as he wrote a good number of works for it, but if you read through much of his guitar music it's immediately obvious that he did not play the instrument at all. He relied on guitar-playing editors to try to make the stuff practical, with varying degrees of success.
You don't say which of the (at least four) pieces called "Canción y Danza" you're referring to, but I'll assume it's the first one which is the only one of Ruiz-Pipó's guitar pieces that is well known. Perhaps because it's the anomaly amongst his guitar works - a straightforward folky piece which is relatively easy to play.
In this case, as you suggest, you can blame Yepes for any fingerings that you don't like. I don't have the score of that piece, but judging by available Youtube performances those are all upstrokes with a,m,i. I'm sure that the composer just hammered out repeated chords on the piano and didn't worry about how a guitarist would handle it; that's just Yepes's personal solution. It sounds bad when Yepes plays it (at least on the performance I saw - the whole piece sounds bad - really dreadful) but it sounds allright when Villadangos (for example) plays it. If it works better for you with some other fingering, by all means go for it. (With very few exceptions I hate music that is cluttered up with other people's fingerings.) Although there's nothing flamenco about the piece at all, you may find that flamenco technique sounds better in that section.
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I was at a classical recital last night where the millers dance was played by a good classical guitarist and again, the finale had much less impact with the classical fingering. I think that playing those pieces with a more flamenco right hand generally would evoke a more authentic feel to those classical themes.
That's a transcription of an orchestral piece that doesn't really make a very good guitar piece. As for rasgueos, obviously there were none in the original [;)] and there's about two beats worth at the end where you could use them. Of course it would sound better if they were played 'properly'.
This does not change the fact that actual rasgueo passages are extremely rare in classical pieces, and it's quite possible for a CG player to build up a susbtantial repertoire without ever coming across a rasgueo. This is the reason why most CG players never learn to do them. (Besides, they sound like crap on a classical guitar anyway, and they wreck your nails). And there has been no conspiracy to de-flamencoize the repetoire by editing out the rasgueos!
Having said all that, I do feel that for those rare occasions where a CG player might need to do a rasgueo, they should really spend plenty of serious time learning to do them properly, so we certainly agree on that!
There are, by the way, a few teachers who have caught on to the fact that it's a good idea to practise rasgueos for purely mechanical reasons, in order to develop the extensors and thereby a more efficent (and healthier) right hand technique.
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