The Spanish Romance Mystery Unveiled? (ft. Scott Tennant)

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Күн бұрын

In this video, tonebase creator Jakob Schmidt explores the elusive origins of one of the most iconic and universally recognized pieces in the guitar repertoire. Despite its widespread fame, the true composer of this melody remains a complete mystery. We are also joined by Scott Tennant who will give us his insight into how to approach the piece from a practical perspective.
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Пікірлер: 46

@uneedtherapy42 7 ай бұрын

I thought it was written by Arthur Nonymous aka A. Nonymous

@JasonMcGuireElRubio 7 ай бұрын

Smoke on the water for classical guitar students ❤

@terrymarshall6664 7 ай бұрын

Twenty first century guitar students would do very well indeed to examine the work of Narcisso Yepes, and build upon that to develop their own expertise, and then to explore new avenues in music (as did Yepes). Create a new future that is technically challenging, that works, and that engages true scholarship and talent/ability.

@havardrivansson7902 6 ай бұрын

Please explain how and why "21st century guitar students would do very well indeed to examine the work of Narcisso Yepes."

@TheRealColt 7 ай бұрын

I think it’s most likely Fernando Sor whom composed this tune as I find it’s most similar to his own style of music. You need hear study no 17 or op.6 no 11 e minor another

@tommypreludio6566 6 ай бұрын

True. I finally learned this piece and there are many similarities in the way its composed :)

@havardrivansson7902 6 ай бұрын

This piece contains many measures Sor would never have written.

@tommypreludio6566 6 ай бұрын

@@havardrivansson7902 haha, why?

@tommypreludio6566 6 ай бұрын

@@havardrivansson7902 I have spent over a decade with my instrument playing Sor, Coste, Tarrega, Llobet, Barrios, Brouwer, Giuliani, Aguado and many other outstanding guitarists, and it seems to me that Anonymous's Romance is a piece that is absolutely in his style, it perfectly matches his sensitivity and ingenuity, which I experienced while playing his other compositions. at the same time breaking the myth that he didn't use his ring finger and had no idea about inverted arpeggio...what a bullshit that theory is.

@mamesushi136 4 ай бұрын

Some very butthurt people in the comments lol People take things way too seriously at times. Classical guitar is fun to play but the community can be very obnoxious

@mottusta3702 5 ай бұрын

Holy hell, Segovia refused to play this piece, but yet he claimed SOR wrote beautiful music for the guitar. I would wager that Segovia would have definitely recorded this piece if he thought it was written by SOR. That is a valuable lesson on sociologic influence.

@danielherskovic2103 7 ай бұрын

Great video. Your English is perfect!

@10String 7 ай бұрын

As someone who has spent most of his life in academia, I'll say that the bar for what passes as scholarly research in faculties of the humanities has dropped risibly low in recent decades. Here are 2 small but representative examples: Some years ago, while I was living in Shanghai, I received an email requesting information from another South African guitarist who was writing an MMus dissertation on the classical guitar music of South African composers. Long story short, I made this individual aware of most of the entries in a repertoire list she published as an appendix to her dissertation, and I supplied her with information about certain pieces with which I had been closely associated, including premiere dates and so on. To my astonishment, I read in said dissertation that (according to me!) I had given the "world premiere" of a particular work when, in fact, my correspondence to said 'scholar' clearly indicated mine as merely the "Australian premiere." Then, more recently, a young American guitarist approached me about information concerning the life and work of another South African guitarist-composer, David Hewitt. After I supplied him with a lot of archival documents, he expressed his gratitude, saying that until then the only "reliable" information he had been able to acquire was the abovementioned dissertation. ("Reliable"? Not quite.) Second example: Some years ago, since no-one had ever done so, I compiled a pamphlet expounding the 'rules' of Narciso Yepes's revolutionary right-hand approach to playing scales, with particular emphasis on his approach to string crossing. I also maintained a website concerning Narciso's 10-string guitar. One of its pages was a transcribed interview with Narciso's friend and student, my friend and teacher, Fritz Buss. (Fritz, of course, has written a set of 30 studies on Narciso's right-hand approach, was once Narciso's teaching assistant, and was publicly acknowledged by Narciso to be one of the 2 best teachers of his approach.) And in that interview, Fritz touched on Narciso's right-hand technique and the way in which the latter's teacher, Vicente Asencio egged him on to discover a way of playing not just very fast scales but fast, *legato* scales. Skip ahead a few years and along comes a DMA thesis by an American guitarist, using my website and interview as a reference, omitting Asencio's stress on *legato* playing (if I remember correctly) and, more to the point, asserting (wrongly) that string crossing was not an important consideration in Narciso's approach. Now, as someone who myself once investigated over 700 books and articles towards a mere MMus dissertation, I'd think that a DMA candidate writing on Narciso's "AMI" scales would at least make the effort to consult with someone like Fritz Buss or Godelieve Monden before jumping to the (wrong) conclusion that string crossing is not an important consideration in Narciso's approach to the right hand. Nevertheless, this nonsense has been published and, no doubt, will long continue to misinform guitarists who assume that, because something has been printed in the so-called academic publications of the classical guitar that, thus, it has been established as factual data and, therefore, any counter narrative must be "entirely fabricated." Those are just two examples among many, but suffice it to say that people make mistakes. People take scholarly shortcuts. People have misunderstandings. Opinions, speculations, and misconceptions get published, even in academic works. And then more people come along who assume that those opinions and speculations are "reliable," factual data, and they get more and more ingrained and harder to correct. (I'm reminded of those case studies in the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist who, when given the syllogism "Monkeys climb trees; The porcupine climbs a tree; Thus, the porcupine is a monkey" would argue that *of course* the porcupine is a monkey! "It says so right there!") Now, as someone who has investigated this topic more than most who all-knowingly run their mouths about it on guitar forums and KZbin videos, let me say here that I've seen nothing that would pass as conclusive evidence in any of the serious sciences and, more tellingly, not even an attempt to be transparent about the methods (if any) by which dates like "1900" were derived. No doubt there are people far more knowledgeable than I when it comes to "an ancient wax cylinder," i.e., people who could rattle off all manner of historical factoids concerning the invention and usage of such contraptions. But the implicit 'reasoning' behind the 1900 attribution seems to me based entirely on a logical fallacy, namely: Here is this [digitized representation of an] "ancient wax cylinder" (which obviously sounds awful so it must be ancient); such contraptions were manufactured around the year X; thus, "the porcupine is a monkey" or, rather, the recording dates from around the year X. And this conclusion is drawn despite the fact that the only thing our "ancient wax cylinder" connoisseur can definitively tell is that the recording couldn't *predate* the year X, and regardless of all manner of other considerations, e.g., the style of the music. (To say that "Sor's Etude Op. 6 no. 11 has many similarities to the Romance in the way it's composed," based on nothing more than an analogous figuration, is like saying many later compositions by Philip Glass are similar to Mozart or even Giuliani because they feature Alberti basses, 'thus' Glass plagiarized them. Absurd.) But now, let's go further and imagine that a Generation Z-er finds an *ancient* cassette tape recorder from around the 1970s in her grandpa's basement. She plays around with it, to see what it sounds like or whether it still works, and sings something into it. Some decades later, a musicologist happens upon this tape at a yard sale, listens to it and hears "Can't read my, can't read my / No, he can't read-a my poker face..." Should said musicologist conclude that Lady Gaga plagiarized "Poker Face" (2008) from a song that existed in the 1970s? Of course not. Yet this sort of thing is what passes as scholarship in the world of the classical guitar. No wonder Narciso once said that this world is "a morass of ignorance" in which everyone is forever drowning.

@10String 7 ай бұрын

A far more interesting question than this hackneyed and ultimately irresolvable one about the origins of the Romance would be: Why is the classical guitar community so hateful towards Narciso Yepes? Why do they find it so exceedingly difficult to understand this sui generis genius of the guitar? Why are they so terrified of this avuncular, kindly little old man that they must at every turn try to undermine him, ignore him, or deny him almost any credit that he might possibly be due? Of course, someone will come along and say I'm too close to the matter to look at it so-called objectively (as if they themselves or anyone else could occupy this mythical "objective" stance towards anything whatsoever). Another logical fallacy. To that I say: I never knew the man. I don't refer to him as "Narciso" instead of "Yepes" out of a sense of closeness. I do so out of contempt for all forms of sickening hero worship (people lying on their stomachs, as lowly as possible, licking at their Maestros' feet), of which the world of the guitar is already overfull. And I've said before (and I'll say it again): I have no vested interests when it comes to who wrote the Romance. Like Narciso, I don't think highly of it as a composition. Not at all. It's naive: something a gifted child might well have written, in a popular idiom of the early twentieth [not nineteenth] century. I personally gain/lose nothing from its attribution one way or the other. Sure, the Yepes Estate might gain/lose something, but I have nothing to do with those people. Besides, I'll admit, the goody-two-shoes public image they've cultivated of "Narciso Yepes" reminds me of a line from the great J. M. Coetzee, where David Lurie (the protagonist of "Disgrace") says, concerning "Christians of a certain kind," that: "Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some [...]ing and pillaging. Or to kick a cat." Frankly, Narciso would cut a more interesting figure if it could indeed be conclusively established that he fabricated his account of Romance's origins. (The scoundrel!) Then the question (another, more interesting question) would become *why* (but seriously, why) because "for money" or "ego" doesn't fit the personality of a man who was very free with money and embarrassed by his association with the Romance, nor does a lapse of memory sit well with the formidable memory of a genius who always, at any given moment, had 5 or 6 totally different, large-scale recital programmes committed to memory, besides several concertos. Another, more interesting question would be *why* there is so much emotional, clearly biased resistance from the classical guitar community to people like myself merely asking questions that any serious scholar/scientist in another area would be not only entitled but *expected* to ask in similar situations, like, e.g., What forensic/scientific methods (if any) have been used to establish the age and origins of the alleged pre-1934 recording(s) or text(s)? Incidentally, the inaccessible, original method/anthology allegedly containing the Rubira-attributed version doesn't even have a table of contents and has been reissued with changes to its contents over the years. If most people who've all-knowingly talked about this text have even laid eyes on it, which I doubt very much, then it has probably been an altered reissue, not the original, knowing for myself how much trouble (indeed how near-impossible) it is to get hold of the former. More importantly, the year that has been touted as the Romance's publication date is actually the date appended to some introductory essay, not to any particular piece of music or to the method/anthology as a whole, which (as far as I was told by its curators!) bears no dates.

@terrymarshall6664 7 ай бұрын

This is a balanced, scholarly, and well researched response. I would also appreciate knowing how the wax cylinder and the recording were dated in order to determine the validity of the rather dismissive claims made in this video.

@terrymarshall6664 7 ай бұрын

Dating an artifact is not a precise science. Dating when it was used to make a recording is even harder in the absence of verified contemporaneous records having been preserved. What evidence is there to prove that this recording was made prior to Narcisso Yepes birth?

@nidhishshivashankar4885 7 ай бұрын

This comment is a massive W, one of the best KZbin comments I’ve ever read. 🤜

@isaacbeen2087 6 ай бұрын

@@10String and here we have one of the biggest knobs on youtube

@havardrivansson7902 6 ай бұрын

I don't know who wrote the piece, but Vicente Gomez seems to have been the first to publish it. His "Romance de Amor - (Cancion Tema)" with an added passionate "Introduccion" was published in 1940 by American Academy of Music, Inc. 1619 Broadway, New York, N.Y. (BTW, although the publishing date on the score is 1940, the catalogue dates it at 1939, in which year Yepes (b. 1927), would have been 12 years old.) Hear Vicente Gomez play it here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mYbJkJidYtx2lZosi=NFPDtrESa5QQ440F

@josephbasar5382 5 ай бұрын

Even though this piece seems to be thought of as a more basic piece in the world of classical guitar (it even appears in some earlier study method books), it really is far from it. Along with the right hand hurdles that Mr. Tenant addresses, the left hand has quite a workout as well -especially in the B section. The jump from the iim to the V is very difficult to articulate cleanly in the accompaniment. I heard many guitarists drop a note or two of the triplets to accomplish this move. This is followed by a tricky move to the E chord with the 6th degree in the melody (a tight squeeze, indeed). If you happen to work your way up to the high E on the first string without flubbing a note in the accompaniment, bravo! But wait, you can't get overconfident with your success, for navigating your way smoothly to the IV chord is right in front of you. Trying to get from the E7 partial barre on the 9th fret to a partial barre on the 5th fret while maintaining a singing melody and smooth accompaniment is a circus trick indeed. Oh, and one final full barre awaits you on the V7 chord. How many barres in a row was that? It is no small feat when you hear any guitarist play this piece without you, the listener, being aware of any of these hurdles.