Alfaro Company Las Seis Cuerdas per chirarra, second edition.
Published by Berben. E.832 B.
Angelo Gilardino’s very helpful foreword offers us a way into this difficult music. Angelo suggests that Alvaro entered “the realm of the guitar with the wisdom of a scientist and the innocence of a child”. Its lasting significance is probably Alvaro’s efforts in defining and assigning symbols to many different right hand techniques. The six pieces are prefaces with 5 pages of new vocabulary for the player to learn, as he explores every nuance he can think of. There are symbols telling us to brush the windings of the strings, different amounts of ponticello( how far we move towards the bridge,) which side of the fingernail to use to strike a note, speeds and width of vibrato…..there are dozens of new symbols.
The musical language is without a tonal basis. The label “dissonance” is not only subjective – it also implies a straying from a tonal path. Dissonance has been a useful tool to create tension in consonant music – but when the intention is to paint colour in sound and timbre rather than harmony, the term starts to be problematic. This music is liberated from tonal shackles and in performance sounds quasi improvisatory. Very rarely is a pulse discernible and yet the rhythmic notation is of the utmost precision – indeed that phrase utmost precision is a fair one to describe Alvaro’s attempts to re-codify guitar language. Berben and he have expended considerable effort to produce a mind-numbing complexity with extreme clarity. The first of the seven movements has six staves – one for each string. Walton’s 4th Bagatelle used two staves to explore the polyphonic nature of the voices. This is less to do with polyphony and more about creating a space into which microscopic detail can be poured.
It’s difficult to know, (chicken and egg like,) which came first – the system of code for nuance, or the music. Was Alvaro inventing music which could employ his new lexicon, or was it that he realised that his expressive playing tools had outgrown the guitar’s language? Either way, it is contentious in a world where interpretation is usually a matter of discussion between pupil and teacher and that in itself is probably reason enough to explore this work.
There may be a few students who will have interest in this music. As an exercise in pushing the frontiers of notation this could be introduced to advanced players. It is certainly of academic interest and doubtless some will see other merits – there will be some students absolutely ready for this publication; students who speak a similar tongue and can embrace it whole-heartedly. There will be others who scratch their heads. Music is after all an individual experience, and we cannot apologise for liking or disliking what we do.
Thankfully, for those who need a helping hand into this work, the publication is accompanied with a CD of Alvaro performing it.
Colin Tommis
