Baroco: Transcriptions and Pastiches for Guitar

In his History of the Baroque Age in Italy (first published in 1929, Bari: Laterza), Benedetto Croce traces the etymology of the term “Baroque” back to baroco, one of the words coined in the Middle Ages as mnemonic devices and found in logical treatises such as Peter of Spain’s Summulae Logicales. Croce writes: “As for its origins, there seems little doubt that the word is connected with one of those artificially constructed mnemonic terms by which the figures of the syllogism came to be designated in medieval logic.” And again: “The understandable distaste for these terms of the schools and disputants, intensified by the development of anti-Scholasticism and anti-Aristotelianism, subsequently led people to disparage pedantic or clumsily captious arguments by designating them with the one of the two representative terms that sounded not only the more bizarre but also devoid of any assignable meaning; and thus a bad argument came to be called an ‘argument in baroco’” (pp. 21, 22-1967 ed.). Thus, according to this etymology, baroco was used disparagingly to characterize the pedantry of certain forms of scholastic intellectualism. Hardly a complimentary usage. Likewise, the other famous (though now superseded) etymology holds that “Baroque” derives from the adjectives used in Spanish, Portuguese, and French to designate irregular, and hence supposedly less valuable, pearls. In both cases, then, the Baroque is associated with imperfection, understood as formal irregularity.

Yet it seems paradoxical that precisely the style that is, architecturally too, the most complex, ornate, and variegated should harbour within itself the seeds of imperfection. Excess and imperfection thus seem to go hand in hand. It is not difficult to see why: the Baroque, as a style of addition rather than subtraction, clearly contravenes the norms governing the austere symmetry of classical art. This view is expressed, among others, by Winckelmann and, in the musical sphere, Rousseau.

It is equally evident that the additions, especially ornamental ones, typical of Baroque music are freely chosen by the performer (within, of course, frameworks laid down in writings such as Tartini’s Treatise on Ornamentation or Couperin’s L’Art de toucher le clavecin). Such a sense of freedom, at both the compositional and interpretative levels, is rarely encountered in music, so that Baroque music lends itself to comparisons (meaningful, provided they are suitably qualified) with total serialism, aleatoric music, and jazz. The constitutive indeterminacy of the musical work in the Baroque repertoire also emerges at the organological level. To cite but one example, recent musicological research has even advanced the hypothesis that the Ciaccona, probably the greatest work in the entire history of music, may originally have been conceived for the lute rather than the violin, or at any rate without a rigidly defined instrumental destination: a hypothesis that would lend support to its transcriptions for guitar (from Antonio Jiménez Manjón and Regino Sáinz de la Maza to Segovia’s masterly transcription).

It goes without saying that one must be careful not to overemphasize the freedom that seems to belong to Baroque music. In the modern era, philological approaches have sought precisely to shape and constrain the interpretative spontaneity exercised by late-Romantic performers, allegedly insufficiently respectful of historical stylistic conventions and the characteristics of period instruments. This does not mean, however, that philological approaches were in fact justified in undertaking this kind of operation, which is anything but conceptually neutral, in an attempt to “bring instrumental practice back down to earth.” Such an approach rests, perhaps even unwittingly, on an anti-ontological conception of the musical work, itself the offspring of an exacerbated empiricist historicism (hermeneutic historicism is quite another matter and would never endorse certain philological prescriptions in the artistic sphere). Philological purism, therefore, is not an uncontroversial achievement of musicology; rather, it is a highly debatable philosophical position that musicians accept, and have accepted, because of their inability to elaborate an alternative conceptual framework and because of a kind of cultural inferiority complex vis-à-vis musicology.

The Baroque is therefore perhaps the musical style best suited to investigating the essence of the musical work. Within it, notions such as the authenticity of the work, interpretative freedom, philological fidelity to the text, the relationship between culture and creativity, and much else become entangled. It is, in short, a skein that can be unravelled only from the standpoint of a theoretical reflection that informs instrumental practice while being informed by it in turn.

The guitar repertoire, in particular, is even better suited to this purpose than that of established concert instruments with a long and complex history, such as the violin and the piano. It developed over a relatively short period and around a small circle of figures of exceptional importance, including Francisco Tárrega and Andrés Segovia. They, together with a handful of others, devoted a large part of their musical activity to raising the guitar repertoire to the level of that of the other major concert instruments. Yet although the lute and vihuela literature is substantial, it still struggles to rival the violin or harpsichord repertoire. This made an extensive programme of transcription necessary, pursued with remarkable tenacity above all by Segovia, who was thus compelled independently to construct, and reconstruct, the aesthetic language of the modern guitar. It was therefore inevitable that, in establishing the guitar as a mature concert instrument, Segovia’s voice should sometimes overlap with that of the composers he transcribed.

The guitar, moreover, is an extremely complex instrument for non-specialists and, more generally, for anyone attempting to transcribe music originating in other instrumental traditions. The fundamental element in guitar transcription is fingering, which can, in every respect, determine the success or failure of the transcription itself. Yet fingering can also stand in the way of philological fidelity to the original score. This is the case, for instance, with portamenti, rubato, and vibrato on the inner strings, which some regard as incompatible with a musical discourse shaped by the limitations, or peculiarities, of the timbre of period instruments. To what extent are such interpretative “freedoms” acceptable? And are they still acceptable when encountered in the styles of a Heifetz, a Casals, or a Segovia? (Whatever the answer, it should not be supplied by musicologists, but by musicians, preferably cultivated, talented ones who are not excessively timid.)

The guitar, however, offers an interesting shortcut that spares the guitarist many philological scruples (though not, for that reason, musical ones). Segovia took pleasure in devising, together with his friend and versatile composer Manuel María Ponce, works “in the style of” earlier composers, which were then attributed to other authors. This occurred, among other instances, with two celebrated suites that Segovia presented in concert as though they had been written, for lute and harpsichord, by Sylvius Leopold Weiss and Alessandro Scarlatti (Domenico’s father). It was not especially difficult to detect the harmless little joke, since Ponce’s pen lingers over harmonic combinations and lyrical gestures whose twentieth-century provenance is fairly recognizable. Yet these suites, in A minor and D major, are splendid pages of the guitar literature, irrespective of the artifice devised by Segovia and Ponce. Equally successful are two short pieces, a Preludio and a Balletto, composed by Ponce in 1931 and initially attributed to Weiss. In 1936 Ponce subsequently produced a version of the Preludio for guitar and harpsichord as a wedding gift for Segovia and the pianist and composer Paquita Madriguera, a pupil of Granados.

The scores of the Preludio and the Suite in A minor in the style of Weiss also have a rather adventurous history. They were destroyed in the looting of Segovia’s home in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Segovia thus turned to the recordings in order to reconstruct the original versions.

In the CD, then, I have chosen to focus on the “false” Baroque, juxtaposing Ponce with other composers who reworked seventeenth-century airs. Prominent among them is Regino Sáinz de la Maza, whose Danzas Cervantinas in a sense transfigure a number of airs by Gaspar Sanz in a musical language poised midway between reharmonization and transcription. These dances also attest to Sáinz de la Maza’s extraordinary knowledge of the guitar’s timbral palette, together with its resources for effects and expression in the broadest sense. The programme is completed by several historically significant transcriptions. A Passacaglia by Louis Couperin and Scarlatti’s Sonata K. 11, both transcribed by Segovia, bring us back to the problems mentioned above: should early repertoire be reconceived in the light of the character of the modern guitar, or should the latter bend itself to the organological structure of instruments with a more restricted dynamic and timbral range, though extraordinarily fascinating ones, such as the lute or harpsichord? Alirio Díaz goes further still in his version of Les Barricades Mystérieuses, exploiting a sonority that projects the harpsichord into an almost folk-like sound world, reminiscent of the free-flowing, rhythmic arpeggios of instruments such as the arpa llanera, which would so profoundly influence Antonio Lauro in the composition of a piece such as Seis por derecho.

The Baroque, then, is ultimately an age that makes us think. Or perhaps it is an age that compels the musician to think better and differently from what a certain kind of musicology teaches him. Herein also lies the fruitfulness of the well-conceived fake, which may originate as a joke, as did, in Italy, the Tuscan hoax of the Modigliani heads, but which, precisely for that reason, deserves to be taken very seriously.