The Techniques of Guitar Playing by Seth F. Josel and Ming Tsao (review)

Hector Berlioz famously commented on the shortcomings of the guitar, among them a “weak sonority” that greatly restricted its use in ensemble (Berlioz’s Orchestral Treatise: A Translation and Commentary, trans. and ed. Hugh Macdonald [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 86). Even though the instrument as Berlioz knew it would give way later in the century to a larger, more sonorous design, the dynamic range of the guitar would never be extended (prior to electrification) in such a way that would satisfy the romantic appetite for vast soundscapes and extreme dynamic contrasts. This limitation relegated the guitar to a peripheral place in the classical tradition of Western music until shifting aesthetic philosophies and compositional techniques provided the instrument a more hospitable environment in the first half of the twentieth century. Several factors contributed to this improvement in the guitar’s fortunes. First, the early decades of the century witnessed an increase in the number of touring soloists, among them Andrés Segovia, who rose to a level of international fame unprecedented for a guitarist. His manner of performance exploited the guitar’s palette of tonal colors, captivating large audiences and drawing attention to what is arguably the instrument’s chief virtue: a great richness of timbral variety that allows for specific musical effects in the absence of a wide range of dynamic contrast. A second factor in the guitar’s rise to greater musical prominence was its inclusion in ensembles, primarily for color. Influential in this regard was Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 7 (1904–5), which combines the guitar with other plucked instruments, to striking atmospheric effect. Alban Berg also employed the guitar in the “Bühnenmusik” from his opera Wozzeck (1914–22), as did Arnold Schoenberg in the Serenade, op. 24 (1920–23), and Anton Webern in Fünf Stücke, op. 10 (1911–13), Drei Lieder, op. 18 (1925), and Zwei Lieder, op. 19 (1925–26). Yet a third factor in the development of the modern guitar and its literature was the stylistic upheaval of the 1950s that shifted compositional focus to the elements of musical texture. The resulting emphasis on the distinctive qualities of sound and on timbre as a significant component in musical composition favored the guitar, and music for the instrument proliferated. This period of guitar history was the first in which most of the music composed for the instrument was by non-guitarists, a phenomenon that transformed the repertoire. John Schneider’s landmark publication, The Contemporary Guitar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), examines this repertoire, surveys its requisite techniques, and urges a musical approach grounded in an awareness of guitar sound in terms of the parameters of timbre. The need for a worthy successor to this volume has long been apparent.

The Techniques of Guitar Playing, by Seth F. Josel and Ming Tsao, addresses this lacuna. It is a reference work for the guitar as used in art music, primarily that of the last three decades, a period that has seen expanded use of the guitar and a significant extension of its techniques, as well as an increase in the number of small chamber ensembles that include the instrument and the growth of guitar studies as an academic discipline. The nylon-string “classical” guitar figures centrally in the book, though a variety of steel-string guitars and related acoustic instruments are considered in the final chapter. The electric guitar is excluded, the authors explain, as it represents a vast, technologically complex subject that merits a volume of its own. While The Techniques of Guitar Playing is neither a systematic method nor a comprehensive history, it draws effectively on key pedagogical and historical documents in service of its evident purposes: to provide a comprehensive guide to the sounds of the contemporary guitar, to present the techniques guitarists might use in generating these sounds, and to supply the notational resources composers might employ in...