Eliot Fisk
On Being Active and Eclectic
Part 2
In conversation with Nadia Sartori
Nadia Sartori: How do you think we could persuade society to listen to the classical guitar?
Eliot Fisk: I think that the only medium that counts is television. Probably one of the great achievements of Julian Bream and John Williams in England, is that they have captured the imagination of the mass media. They seem to be on television with a degree of frequency. And I think that anything on television has automatic acceptance. I'm not sure about how you would go about getting the guitar on television but that is a very superficial way of looking at it. Another way is education: You teach as many people as you can. I know that every time that I give interviews, or travel any place I try in my own small way to get people to listen. I think if you’re a dynamic person or an exciting person then probably you can make a few people get excited about it and that's what I think we should be trying to do with students. With the students that we are teaching, we should really look at them as future missionaries for the guitar. We should try to get them to liberate the great forces inside them so that these very forces can be used in a positive way to inspire other people and to give joy to other people - that's the responsibility of the teacher. That's one of the reasons that I think teaching is so important. I often wish that I had more time to devote to it than I do right now. I’m sort of doing a triple balancing act between concerts, teaching and family – all three are very important to me. My own arranging has taken a real back seat in the last year or two along with commissioning new pieces. As far as getting society to listen I think that what will do it is a lot of people banging on doors. Forty or fifty years ago there was no string quartet circuit either, but through the years there were enough good string quartets and enough people banging on doors - enough private insistence going on, that finally there came to be a string quartet circuit and I think with the guitar this is slowly happening. Basically, it’s a lot of selfless volunteer work by a lot of people who have got nothing to motivate them outside a love of what they do, love for the instrument, love for music. And that’s what it's going to take. How did Christianity get started? It got off to a pretty rocky start. Somehow enough people believed, enough people cared and enough people worked on it so that it became a very big factor but did not happen overnight, so I think that with the guitar it will be the same thing. Probably a lot of people are going to be fed to the lions also in various ways until it gets started but we have to keep persevering - we have to believe.
N.S: But even among musicians it's a struggle to get them to accept it.
E.F: I haven't had that problem very much. Any place that I have been able to get to somebody who was a musician that I really respect and was able to play for them, I almost always could get respect for the instrument - with the exception of a very few stewed prunes - generally, almost every fine musician. If you as a guitarist play Bach beautifully, you will impress anyone. Bach is a composer very well suited to the guitar; if you played Bach beautifully, any musician would respect it. All you have to do is play Bach beautifully, that's all. You play Bach beautifully and play a few pieces that use the instrument well - any of the Segovia repertoire. A few of those pieces were fantastic for the instrument; they make the instrument sound so beautiful. If you play Bach and Villa Lobos for somebody and you play beautifully, they are going to respect you as a musician. And guitarists shouldn't think that they're the only ones who are bad musicians. I have heard in our school in Cologne so much bad playing. In fact, some of the better playing I have heard has been from some of my students. Even if I do say so, really, some of the most musical, most intelligent, most passionate playing. I think there is a funny attitude toward music-making; again it's this so called literalist school which is just like making a literate translation of a book from one language to another. You don't translate literally - you would end up with hogwash. You would end up with something absolutely absurd that sounds like a dictionary. Nobody would ever read it. Any translator knows that it's necessary to take certain liberties with the original in order to translate into another language. The goal of the interpreter in music is to translate these messages that come from the great composers and to make them communicate to people who maybe don't have the luxury of studying music. Take some guy who has been working eight or nine hours all day. He comes to a concert, he's tired, he wants to be not just entertained but also edified. He wants to go home with something more than a MacDonald's hamburger. He wants some real spiritual nourishment. And that's the goal of classical music. That's why classical music exists. That's the only reason for playing classical guitar and not playing any of the other forms of guitar. It's the only excuse for doing it. It's the only excuse for breaking your head every day over these tiny little subtleties that are the cause of sleepless nights. The only reason is to produce a quality product. This thing can be said of the guitar makers who work so hard. No matter what they charge they are underpaid. They are underpaid because guitarists are underpaid and so the whole cycle goes. So the guitar functions only on love and only on morality - that's the only way it will ever function, and this again is the heritage of Segovia who was the living embodiment of morality and love.
N.S: Can you tell us what you think about transcriptions?
E.F: Segovia always said it and I agree with this. He said, "I will only play transcriptions if I think it's as good as or better on the guitar than it was in the original." Personally I am intrigued by transcriptions that relate to history in an interesting way; for example to transcribe Frescobaldi onto the guitar I think is fascinating, because Frescobaldi is a composer who had the sound of the lute and guitar very much in his ear. I think there was certainly a lot of lute playing, a lot of guitar playing going on in Italy during his day. And I think it's fascinating to make these connections. Scarlatti is also a fascinating connection because of his relationship to the guitar and that he lived in Spain. Granados and Albeniz, the same thing. Or Paganini, historically who played the guitar. It's fascinating to play the Paganini caprices on the guitar because you can see the places where he obviously developed guitar technique from the transcribed violin. Some of those caprices are nothing more than transcribed guitar pieces. Particularly No 2 in B minor or No 12 in A flat - they sound like guitar pieces. The guitar technique developed more to the violin and it's fascinating to stretch ones guitar technique by trying to do things that are idiomatic to the violin. So I always like some sort of a historical tie-in. I don't particularly see the sense of playing an orchestral piece on the guitar where you have to drop out half the original notes in order to play it. You end up with some sort of parody of the original. I'm not interested in doing that. I know it can be done and maybe can be quite sensational in a guitaristic way but I could never accept a transcription that does not satisfy me on purely musical grounds. Usually that entails having some sort of historical connection. Almost all the transcriptions I have done can be justified in musicological terms by having an historical connection somewhere to the guitar. Even the complete Bach violin sonatas and partitas can certainly be justified by everything we know about baroque performance practice, plus the fact that Bach owned one lute and two lute harpsichords. Therefore he loved the sound of the plucked strings or he would not have had these instruments hanging around, plus the fact that his students included the lutenist Strauber.
Sometimes when you do a modern piece you are making a form of a transcription because you have to change many little things in order to, (again I get back to my analogy with translating a book from one language into the other) make the meaning come out. We are dealing here with meaning not with some sort of literal mechanical transfer. Any transcription is an interpretation and therefore I think it's really best that people do their own transcriptions, although it's very helpful to learn from the transcriptions of other people. Another composer I have transcribed a lot is Soler who again was a Spanish composer who I think works very well. The large number of pieces that I have transcribed have really been Scarlatti, Bach and Paganini. I have dabbled a lot with other people. I did a couple of Divertimenti by Mozart. I did an early Beethoven piano piece -I threw it out because I didn’t like it - I didn’t believe it worked. I did the Valses Poeticos by Granados (all of it) and didn’t like it so threw it out. I did a lot of Songs Without Words by Mendelssohn and was discouraged by the transcription. I didn't think that it worked. I think this is another important thing that should be emphasised that people need in the realm of art. The possibility to experiment and not to think that everything has got to be a masterpiece. I think it's very important to experiment.
N.S: What about commissioning pieces?
E.F: I do a lot of it, directly and indirectly. I guess the most important composers that I have worked with have been the young American composer, Robert Beaser, who has written two big solo pieces for me and a piece for Paula Robison and myself called Mountain Songs which is for flute and guitar. I worked of course most recently with Lucianio Berio. He wrote for me a Sequence 2 for guitar which I think is going to be a historic turning point in the history of the guitar. It's certainly a very important piece, a fabulous piece full of surprises, very virtuosic and yet very deep. Working with Berio has really just been a great experience. Having the experience of participating in all Berio concerts in various countries of the world has been a great one. I think it has taught me more about what the great composers of the past may or may not have been like than anything else because you really experience a great living creative spirit and just seeing the variety in his work and the way that he programs his work is fascinating. I have got two more pieces coming soon. One is from Nicholas Muore which will be Metamorphosis on a theme by Mendelssohn from one of his string quartets, and a piece from the American composer, George Rauchberg, for flute and guitar, commissioned by Carnegie Hall in honour of the centennial of Camegie Hall in New York. So I am trying to be very active and very eclectic in working with as many composers as I possibly can. I should also say that a lot of times it doesn’t work out. I tried Lutoslawski, I tried Jacob Drackman in America, I even tried Stockhausen and they were all too busy or didn't feel like what they wanted to do right now was a guitar piece. So a lot of times what you have to do is bang on the door and get no for an answer but at least you try.
N.S: What about the trend in composition for guitar I where do you see that heading?
E.F: I think in general, the guitar will be advanced most by people who don't play the instrument, writing for it. Just getting the sound of the instrument in their ears and writing by ear. I mean Berio wrote so well for the guitar, although he had never written for it just because he is a great musician with a perfect ear - same with Robert Beaser; he wrote fantastically well for the instrument without every playing it, without really ever bothering to work with a fingerboard chart or anything. I think a great musician with a great ear will be able to write for the instrument and I think it's a myth that you can't write for the guitar if you don’t play it. An interesting thing I think Bream said when he was working with Henze on the Sonatas was that sometimes when things wouldn't work, Henze would completely rewrite the passage and it would then merge into a completely different form from that which Henze had originally written. So that just shows that there are more than two ways to skin a cat. That's one of the fascinating things about working with living composers - you see how many times they are flexible and how many possibilities there are sometimes to say something; it enlarges your perspective. it broadens your horizon and that's something that can only be to the good. I sometimes get a little sad when I see people playing pieces that are composed of nothing but guitaristic effects. They don't have any deeper meaning and aren't anything more than a sort of little lexicon of guitar effects, without any basis in counterpoint, without any foundation in the art of composition. Because composition comes from two Latin words meaning to put together - put together so they have to put the right note against the right note at the right time and that's very very delicate and that's not something that should be overly influenced by the clique of the guitar. I think we need to get away from the clique of the guitar and arrive at the point that we really have a repertoire of music by Philharmonic composers. You don’t want to get into the position of having a lot of repertoire composed of Mertz and Tarrega and Giuliani; maybe each of them had a good day now and then but you can't compare them to any serious composer.
