Miguel de Maria -> RE: The picado bible! (Apr. 13 2006 15:08:29)
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Jon, I agree... and he has stated that his goal is not to make great players, but to just help bad players have the opportunity to get good--a laudable one in my opinion. His unwavering optimism are endearing enough to make the borderline dishonest self-promotion palatable. But it's all good. He sends out a newsletter and I get something out of his essays, so it works for me. John, this subject is so hard to talk about that I'm not even sure if I agree. I used to think that there was such a thing as basic technique, in that if you practiced your 101 arpeggios, scales up and down, hammers, etc., that after a few years you would have "mastered" "basic technique" and could then spontaneously and easily apply it to Bach Lute Suites and Paco de Lucia. In fact I spent a couple of years primarily practicing scales and technical exercises a la Ricardo Iznaola's Kitharalogus. One time I mentioned this philosophy to another guy, saying I wanted to master technique and then learn to apply it to music, and he boldly said, "Do you really think it works that way?" Well, I did... But the further I go (and judging from your bulerias, I am not as far as you and keep that in mind), the more I think that this is a reductionist fallacy. This came from the fact that although I had good arpeggios, pretty good picado, and could do barre chords, etc., that I played pieces quite sloppily and never really felt in control of them. I now believe this is because the "basic techniques" are only the barest facsimile of the actual music. In certain cases you can "plug them in" to a piece, but in most you cannot, and end up learning, in effect, a new technique for each song. Chang's book on piano technique (google it, it's free online and very good), supports this belief. It certainly matches my experience, despite a couple years of basically pure technique practice, when I started to play Torre Bermeja, Recuerdos, Capricho, let alone Panaderos., etc., there is a sense of starting over after a very rough level. I now believe that the technique of playing real music is far too fine and varied to be covered even by a book of 500 exercises like Kitharalogus. Although perhaps "pure technique" does have a minor place in that it can help develop certain important motions in isolation and can be used as warmup, the best technique practice is just working on songs, probably in ascending order of difficulty. If you look back to skill acquisition in music, you see an idea of graded difficulty music--etudes such as the Sor lecciones followed by the Etudes. In flamenco there is the way of learning falsetas, each one encompassing a technqiue or two to master, and of course with the simultaneous rhythm/ear training of playing along with the maestro at the dance academies. What does this have to do with Bach? Well, first I think more people can sight read it than you think. Todd told me he saw Elliot Fisk do some ridiculous sight reading, and he is hardly one of only one or two great guitarists in the world. Second, all the scales and arpeggios in the world are going to get you only so far in playing Bach, but if you thoroughly learned a couple Cello Suites and a couple Lute Suites, how hard would the next one be? I don't know, but I do think that you might have picked up enough "basic technique" mastering these incredibly varied pieces that you might be able to sight read it! Thanks for the conversation, John. :)
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