Classical music is a dying art form. As the pandemic rages across the country, classical music is in a stage of hibernation. Many classical guitarists are beefing up their social media, hoping it helps them return to the concert scene when large public gatherings are permitted again. But social media doesn’t make money for most classical guitarists: it costs money. The bigger the artist or organization, the more money they throw around to drown out competing musicians. This is not a lament about how “big money” influences music. Social media alone cannot give classical music the exposure that it desires and deserves. We as classical guitarists and musicians must change our behavior in order to create the change in classical music (and the music scene as a whole) that we seek. Classical music is not dying in a vacuum; As it dies, the niche classical guitar will be one of the first to die with it. There are many interrelated factors surrounding the death of classical music, and I want to talk about 2 complex and strange phenomena in the classical guitar world that I believe have simple solutions: an unhealthy obsession with Johann Sebastian Bach and Competition culture.
Bach Worship
“I believe in Bach, the Father, Beethoven, the Son, and Brahms, the Holy Ghost of music.” — Hans von Bülow (1830-94)
It seems like every week another white man releases a full Bach album, a Bach music video, a Bach re-arrangement. Bach’s music is also a required audition staple of many guitar programs across the globe. What makes him so important? A quick google search of Bach will tell you his is regarded as one of the top composers of all time. It will tell you that he wrote 1128 pieces of music. It will tell you that he wrote about his compositional process in a book which was used to train the following generations of Bachs. Gramophone.uk calls Bach “the supreme arbiter and law-giver of music”.
What mainstream classic music promoters won’t tell you is that other composers like G. P. Telemann actually wrote hundreds more pieces than Bach. Fewer will explain that the compositional style of Bach lent itself to being reused and recycled, and many of his compositions are the exact same with only minor changes and different titles. Even fewer will admit that some of Bach’s writings may not even be his own, and allegedly belong to his wife Anna. His relationship to guitar is nonexistent, completely imagined and fabricated.
Bach never even wrote a piece for guitar, because guitar in its modern form did not quite exist yet. Every Bach piece on the guitar is an arrangement, even the famous so-called “Lute Suites”, now a staple of every guitar undergraduate’s repertoire. Why do we even call them lute suites? They were not written for lute. At best they were written for a “lute-sounding harpsichord”, of which there are no surviving copies or illustrations. Think of it this way, if I am a guitarist and I purchase a harp-guitar, is it because I hope a cult of future harpists will make me their pedagogical genius? No! It’s just a cool guitar. Do all keytar composers secretly yearn for a guitarist’s recognition? Do organists dream of having their music played by a flute choir? The point is, it’s a stretch to call a collection of organ music a “flute suite”, and it is a stretch to call funky keyboard music a “lute suite”.
People like to say that until Bach’s revival by Mendelssohn in 1840, Bach was almost completely forgotten about. This is also untrue, and there are many complimentary references to Bach by other famous composers like Beethoven. But everyone loves an underdog, and everyone likes to feel like they are harboring secret genius inside. That’s why so many white men record his music, because an irrational patriarchy will seek an irrational, musical “golden boy”, just like the Nazis touted Wagner in WW2.
So many classical guitarists are playing Bach now, that it almost seems we have split into many different Bach factions. We have several schools of thought run by the top classical guitarists of our time, and all of them have intricate, deep-seated beliefs about how to play Bach. Yet we have very few facts to back up these styles of playing. If you play music by Bach for an audition, competition, or concert though, you better be prepared for backlash. Play with too much or too little tempo variation, dynamic contrast, articulation, tone color, with or without nails, rest stroke or free stroke, cross-string trills, you will inadvertently offend some college professor or competition judge. This in-group/out-group mentality creates the perfect narcissistic perch, where one can be too lazy to seriously embark on the path of historical performance, but still turn up their nose and act superior towards those who are not in their “in-group”.
Competition Culture
“Audiences do not attend concerts to compare previous performances with
the current one. In many ways, a concert resembles many aspects of a love
relationship: it is the unique attractiveness of your artistic message and
personality that will make you successful. Audiences are, in this context,
“promiscuous”; they have an unlimited capacity to “fall in love” with all
possible unique artistic messages and personalities.
The old truism still applies: you are only competing with yourself.
We should alter our motto from, “today, here, now”, to:
“Me, today, here, now.”” – Ricardo Iznaola, On Practicing (1994)
Iznaola’s books are something I read and reread every few months. We can all use reminders like this in our daily lives, and few technique books for guitar discuss mindset so in-depth and in plain, clear language. However, as this was written 27 years ago, this quote should be taken with a grain of salt. If artists are not striving to make unique and distinct artistic messages/personalities, will audiences still have an unlimited capacity with which to “fall in love” with them? Is playing the Bach Chaconne 20 different ways unique?
Competitions have a lot to be criticized for, although they do serve a real purpose. Some people (especially children) have a hard time getting high-stakes performances elsewhere. Competitions can show you what’s trending in the guitar world near you and beyond. The problem with music performance competitions is that music is not entirely based in facts and so there cannot be a clear winner. This is not to say there are no musical experts, but at some point we’re all at the same level. Nearly every Guitar Foundation of America competition semi-finalist is at the same level of technique and musical interpretation. Guitarists these days pretend like we live in The Queen’s Gambit‘s universe, where there are chess grandmasters who have clearly defeated every other competitor to come there way. In chess there is checkmate, one person wins and one person loses. This is not what music is about at all.
Competitions, much like college auditions, also have a profound affect on the repertoire of a generation. If you want to succeed, you must play the music they suggest. I previously mentioned how divisive playing Bach can be, but what if you choose to play your own composition, arrangement, or just a rare piece you found? Then a judge must choose between a perfect performance of a song they know, versus a perfect performance of a song they don’t know. If the judge takes a risk by highly rating a performance of something they do not know, then they are opening themselves to possible criticism later. So they will more often choose to highly rate what is easiest for them. Judges also subconsciously rate students on things that do not have to do with music, like their gender, age, appearance, relationship status, instrument or choice of music. A lot of times the person who wins a competition is simply a person who frequents that competition. Also, the more people win a competition, the less valuable having won becomes. It’s better to be the first GFA winner than the 50th. Many times rich students from a wealthy state/country will purchase bougie plane tickets to compete with less fortunate guitarists who have few resources available. Many times 35 year old professionals with a full on career and management team compete with 18 year old college freshmen. The list of problems goes on and on.
Competitions encourage an unhealthy attitude towards music. There is no one great master of any style or genre of guitar. We should not all be playing the same music to pit guitarists against one another, we should not be judging other guitarists for missing a note here or there. Competitions encourage a course of music study that is performance-centered, and contains little-to-no music theory, music history, arranging, composition and so forth. They encourage an attitude that is black and white. New music and informed historical performance have been pushed to the side, in favor of the new mainstream: laymen interpretations of expert standards. The whole core message behind the old greats of music history is that it is exciting to be on the cutting edge of music, to boldly go where no one has gone, play what no one else has played. To become the Johann or Anna Bach of your own time, or to create and fall in love with a beautiful piece of music, or share a story that has yet to be shared. That’s what music is all about!
Conclusion: we may be doomed
Competition Culture and Bach Worship are both strangling classical guitar and classical music. Together these attitudes have created and pervaded cultures across the world that are just plain wrong. In some ways it’s a feedback loop: competitions get a steady stream of participants to label “losers” or “winners”, and teachers/students get a taste of some prestige and confirmation bias. But what is the cost? Guitarists everywhere are being taught that winning a competition can bring you success in your career, yet in almost every way today’s competitor mindset is in exact opposition to Iznaola’s ideal artist mindset. If we all play the same pieces, there will simply be less artist voices to “fall in love” with.
An old professor once told me that “critique without action or answer is just lazy intellectualism”. So here’s my answers. First, stop playing Bach. If we stop playing Bach 2 things will happen: Patrons will increase payment for the performance of Bach music because supply of it will shrink as demand stays the same for a while. Then, people will play other things. Music is a like body, it takes up space. We must make room for the next great guitar pieces. Second, competition rules must change. Competitions should create a “banned composers” list, just like how video game and card game competitions ban certain cards or characters that become overplayed during the tournaments. Competitions should accept a larger diversity of repertoire and types of guitar, and introduce stricter limits on the ages and experience levels of the competitors they accept. There should be more competitions that are created by underrepresented groups of composers. The solutions are simple, but they stand in direct opposition to some of the classical guitar/music greats who directly benefit from these problems. Creating change begins with talking about the problems.