Location: Cafeteria El Pilar Del Potro
Listening to: The video I'm trying to upload of two of my friends playing some kind of jazzy Brazilian thing (great description, I know).
Sorry about the title - only chorale kids will get that. I love this city. I've talked a few times about the diversity of Spanish history – who conquered who, where, and when – and no region has a history quite like Andalucia. I'll save talking about this until tomorrow after I've seen La Alhambra, considered by most to be the finest piece of Moorish architecture on earth, but you should definitely take a look at the “Cordoba” folder on the Picasa page to see the Roman ruins I found about 100 yards from my hostel.
I came to Cordoba for the guitar festival, and last night alone was absolutely worth the trip. I saw David Russell, who recently won a Grammy for Best Solo Instrumental Album, from about 10 feet away for €10. He gave a concert that went well over an hour with the intermission, and then we pulled him out for three or four encores. It was unreal – as I said to several people last night, it was somehow both incredibly inspirational and utterly discouraging. I know full well that I will absolutely never have the ability to do what he did, and knowing the kind of effort he must have put into it I'm not sure I'd ever want to. The number of hours that guy's put into his fretboard has to be well over Levitan's magic 10,000 mark*, if not double or triple that amount. He is considered (according to my program) to be one of the greatest technical guitarists in history, and after last night I believe him. I could write for half an hour about the aspects that impressed me, but there are two that really stick out in my mind. If you aren't at least a little bit of a music nerd, you'll probably want to skip the next two paragraphs.
The first was his total effortlessness. It was as if the music were playing itself and his hand just happened to be floating over the fretboard at the time, which is exactly what every classical guitarist I've spoken with has told me it should look like. I can't even comprehend that kind of nearly perfect confidence and mastery. That isn't to say he never messed up – he actually made several noticeable errors, showed just enough disappointment to pacify the audience, and then dropped our jaws with some other insane lick. You could tell he was a perfectionist; he was obviously upset with himself anytime he slightly buzzed a string or let a bit of fret noise creep in, and I seriously doubt he ever made the same mistake twice over the course of that performance.
The second was his voicing. We're always impressed when others don't share our weak points, but he took multiple voicing to a level I've never experienced on any instrument (including piano or organ). It wasn't just the distinction in volume – each voice clearly maintained a distinct tone and color throughout beautiful crescendi and decrescendi within its own line. He would do this with up to three voices, one of them often being a tremolo line, and his right hand would hit each voice on a different part of the string to achieve the tone he wanted over a span of five or six inches. One time he did the best double voicing with a pinched harmonic line I've ever heard. The harmonics were so clear and equally balanced with a substantial bass line – it was mind blowing to someone like me who struggles more than enough with multiple voicing on piano, let alone on guitar.
The thing that may have impressed me most about David was how he comported himself after the concert. He was gracious and smiley, like most performers, but afterwords he came to a bar with all of us and just talked. Some of it was about music, but most of it wasn't. He was so down-to-earth. Pitchers of beer and various tapas kept coming, which is a relatively normal thing in Spain (someone keeps ordering for the group and you split it up at the end), but when we tried to pay David just smiled and shook his head. “Did you buy a CD?” Thank God a few of them had. The camaraderie between us, between students and masters and even a guitarist as terrible as I am, reminded me very much of the Celia Morales concert (keep reading).
Ok, no more music major for the rest of this post (or at least I'll try). Well, no. There's one more thing I have to talk about. Last night I saw David Russel, but the night before I saw Celia Morales. She's a native Spaniard (Andalusian, maybe?) flamenco player and composer, and it was truly a unique concert compared with anything I've ever seen for a couple of reasons. First, I'd never seen a flamenco concert centered around the guitarist. In this performance, there were no singers and no dancers, though there were two palmeros (professional clappers). At first, I found them a little odd and out of place since that was all they did, but they quickly demonstrated that two real percussionists can make incredible music with only their hands. They must have worked with her quite a bit in the past, because I think they only performed on her original compositions (almost half of the concert, actually). The second was that I'd never seen a professional-level artist have a complete breakdown during a song. On one of her own compositions, she clearly lost her place and began doing muted rosqueados to try and stall long enough to find it again. After a few attempts, she swung away the microphone, stopped completely, and almost started crying on stage. The audience, to my surprise, exploded into supportive applause. They – we – were behind her the whole way. It's interesting to see a guitar concert with an audience comprised almost entirely of professional-level guitarists because they want the performance to be perfect as much out of sympathy (real sympathy, meaning what most people would call empathy) as out of their own desire to hear it played well. She took a moment, managed to say “Lo siento. Voy a intentar, voy a intentar” (I'm sorry. I'm going to try, I'm going to try), and launched back into the piece with the tenacity, fire, and confidence that had been noticeably lacking until that point. She had looked nervous, like she afraid of what inevitably happened, and now the duende anyone needs to truly perform flamenco was back with a vengeance. It was one of the most inspirational experiences I could imagine, especially for someone who's forgotten as many words on stage as I have.
Well I've scrambled up the order of my Cordoba experience up pretty well, but I think you get the idea of why I came. I'm actually finishing this post right now in Paris, but I'll explain that in the next post.
TTFN (tah-tah for now)
*From This is Your Brain on Music by Robert Levitan. If you are at all interested in the science behind music and its effects, you have to read it. I'm really excited to use it in class again next semester.
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