The music of Leo Brouwer came to me when I was in high school. I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who pushed me to take lessons at a local university with a reputation for a strong guitar program. The teacher that I worked with there did a great job of preparing me for conservatory life. He also introduced me to some of the more intense pieces of repertoire and brought me to the 20th century. He gave me a list of pieces to buy from Guitar Solo in San Francisco. They still exist. I still order music from them. It’s nice to have some things that don’t change. In any case, one of the books I was assigned was the first five of Brouwer’s Simple Etudes. They were a revelation to me.
The first piece in the series is fast moving. Nothing that is over the top or any of the crazy shredding of the Villa-Lobos etudes. It just moves quickly. It makes the thumb earn its keep. What was most striking to me was the use of the open strings and the dips into dissonance. The rejection of a sense of key in favor of the droning strings and the quick, often percussive, rhythms.
The reason these pieces have stuck with me is that they made a deep impression. Nothing that I had played to that point was as driving and rhythmic as that first etude. The harmonic language, frankly, challenged me then. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It was such a far cry from the I - iii - vi - ii - V - I of the studies, chorales, and exercises I spent the first few years of my training learning. Being introduced to new things for the first time was mindblowing. I still love that sensation of coming across something that I have never considered. Something truly New. That’s what Brouwer was to me.
In the intervening years, I met a lot of composers whose work was far further afield, but Brouwer was a great way to step outside of the world of Carcassi and Sor and into the 20th Century. It was also a late high schoolers gateway to things like Bossa Nova and Cuban jazz. That would come later, but it was a point of origination for me.
I’ve been spending time on the Guitar Solo website lately. Back when I first ordered the tattered copy of the first five etudes that is even now on my music stand, there was only the paper catalog and the phone. The other day, I ordered the remaining studies. I had only ever worked on the first five. It’s high time I got into the rest! I sent my online order and got a phone call! The Max Eschig editions I’d ordered were no longer in print. Instead, they offered me a complete collection of the studies with a couple of other pieces for good measure. Things like Parabola which will require some real study on my part if only to understand his approach to notation at that time. It was nice to hear a human voice and to talk, even briefly, about the music. I should do that more.
An exercise I’m doing for myself as a part of my newly restored practice is the creation of a fantasy recital program. A line up of pieces that mean something to me that I might play for an audience. No such recital will ever occur. I don’t have the ability to practice enough to be comfortable with such a performance (my elbow is only getting worse). I do have the ability, however, to play pieces in a particular order for myself and arrange them on a piece of paper for my amusement. If nothing else, it gives me an order for my practice sessions where all I do is play through pieces. The Brouwer etudes are up there on the list. There are 20 in all and I’m starting to enjoy playing through the later ones. I may develop an affection for the collection as a whole. Perhaps I could cherry pick 5 of them for my “recital” and see where that leads.
The more I read about Brouwer, the more interesting he is. Cuba is a wild place and has produced some very important art. Politics being politics has kept far too much of their art locked away until recently (if you’re in the states).
And so the music stand is a bit fuller today than it was a week back. More time with the instrument and always more music to learn.