October 18, 2002 7:34 PM Joe Coluccio

Is Fernando Sor?

I don’t have one useful idea in my head to start. So I thought I would think about the fact that I have Andres Segovia playing on the cassette machine. The Legendary, it says Guitar Etudes it says. One side composed by D. Aguado and the other by Fernando Sor.

Now, I have over the years been through almost every guitar method, from Aaron Scherer to Carcassi to Mel Bay. Lately I’ve even been picking my way through a rather pleasing set of books by Christopher Parkening. (My one true Guitar Idol, John Williams, chooses to play rather than instruct). Segovia has, of course, revitalized and made important the Classical Guitar (sorry, Aaron, he insists that it should be called Classic Guitar) in the last and into this century. But I have always found his playing, although precise, to be less than emotionally satisfying.

So when I hear one of the Sor etudes executed, that have haunted and challenged my own playing over the years, by Il Maestro, I think, well, hell, Andres, I can play that as well as you. (I can’t even play it as well as I can). I think what I am responding to is the precision and the lack of emotion that his playing exhibits. Mine on the other hand, when not a terror of failed technique and just plain clumsy, has an emotional connotation that pleases at least me.

I am not a fanatic. I don’t wear gloves (excepting during a severe snow storm or weeding the prickle bush). I keep minimal care, with emery board, my fingernails. The fourth finger on my right hand curls up in a way that is useful to the struggling guitarist in me. I was first base in a pick up softball game on the blacktop playground at Thaddeus Stevens School, a nickel throw from the Eastwood Shopping Center which was a hop skip and a jump from the East Hills Shopping Center. Third base threw hard across the pitchers mound, a bouncing ball that he caught on the heel of his glove. It drilled straight at me and collided with my outstretched finger. Yow! Or something like it. I yelled. “Ow, I broke my finger.” Someone more pissed by the batter rounding second base stated emphatically. “It would really hurt if you broke it!” Kids and their theories! “It really hurts!” I yelled, as the play continued on and around me. Into the next day it throbbed and hooked in a graceful curve upward. Broke it was and broke it remains as I type some forty years later. The consolation is that it puts my finger and sometimes my self into the right attitude.

Oh, let me explain, you neophytes to the world of the Classic Guitar. Every thing, because of the influence is writ in Spanish, ethsepcially the finger, (notice my fine Castilian pronunciation. p = pulgar = thumb, i = indice = index, m = medio = middle (yes, that fickle finger of fate), and finally a = annular = ring finger. I certainly check surreptitiously this digit for a sign of commitment on a woman. Mine yields the pale anguish of two tries and a bad softball throw. (Sometimes c = chico = little finger, Mr. Pinky). P, I, M,A capable to produce a fine Guiliani arpeggio or a Terregan Cancion or a Villa Lobos Brasileiras.

O! Cisco! – O! Pancho!