Andres Segovia: Style of interpretation and Arrangement

Andres Torres Segovia (1893 –1987) was a self-taught Spanish guitarist who was a virtuoso Spanish classical guitarist from Linares, Jaen, Spain. He is widely considered to be one of the best-known and most influential classical guitar personalities of the 20th century1. He was the first to popularize the modern Spanish classical guitar encouraged composers to write for the instrument and arranged many other works such as Bach’s Chaconne, Frescobaldi’s Aria detta la Frescobaldi, and Handel’s Sonata: 8 aus Aylesforder stucke to extend its repertoire. 
This repertoire can be called the Segovia repertoire since it would not have existed without him.2 His repertoire mostly includes a patchwork of transcriptions from baroque keyboard music sources (Frescobaldi, Scarlatti, Purcell, Handel, Couperin), late Spanish romantic pianists and composers (Albeniz, Granados, De Falla) and music dedicated to him by com-posers such as Torroba, Ponce, Tedesco, and Tansman.
In 1939 the Schott Company published the book Andres Segovia; the finest pieces of his repertoire which mostly contained a collection of Segovia’s transcriptions from keyboard music. Today and after about Seventy years from the first publication Schott still publishes this collection on an annual basis and it remains Segovia’s bestselling book.3This essay will discuss Segovia’s interpretation and arrange-ment of the first piece from the book; Aria Detta la Frescobaldi by Girolamo Frescobaldi. 
This was originally written for the keyboard in 1627 and published in Frescobaldi’s second book of toccatas; Il secondo Libro Di toccata in 1637. This piece is in D minor and consists of four variations on an original theme, considered as the earliest known of this kind.4 it also has a significant place in Segovia’s reper-toire because he arranged it in 1939, almost nine years before the modern keyboard edition was pub-lished.5 He often performed it as an opening piece in many of his concerts as was the case in his final concert held in London on 17 March 1987, four months before he died.
The first part of this essay will compare Segovia’s arrangement of this piece with the original score to determine how faithful he was to the original score, these include changes he made in the form, tonality accidentals and Time signature and then the essay will go on to discuss the parameters that made Segovia’s interpretation individual and different from historic traditions in playing of Italian Baroque mu-sic such as playing chords, trills choosing the tempi and etc.
(i)
For reasons of clarity, I have divided the differences between Segovia’s edition and the original score into two parts.

1. Tonality and Form:

I. Tonality: 

The tonality of the original manuscript is in D minor. Although it is completely possible to be faithful to the original score and arrange this piece in its original tonality, Segovia arranged it in E minor. According to Wade:
‘’The reason why he did this is not entirely clear but probably Segovia changed the tonality to give the performer a decent possibility to play in high positions and create a round, deep sound which would be impossible to achieve in the original tonality.’’
Accordance to my experience Wade’s statement is right because in my arrangement of this piece which is in the original tonality(review the attached file)there is no possibility for the per-former to play any notes in high positions actually the last position the performer can achieve is fifth (V)which is in the middle.

II. Form: 

The structure that Frescobaldi chose for this piece is the main theme followed by four differ-ent variations. Two of these variations are non-dance variations and the others are Italian Baroque dances (Galliard and Corrente).

In Segovia’s Score the structure is changed with the omission of the last variation (Corrente) which is replaced by repetition of the main theme (Prima Parte). Segovia also ignored the title ‘Gagliarda’ in the third part and put a tempo sign instead of the dance title (see Table 1)

According to Wade
“It is obvious that Segovia played and arranged everything in a way that left the music stamped with his own individuality and probably He made these changes to form and tonality to suit the music to the romantic attitude of his time.’’ 4
Like many other performers of his time such as Horowitz, Rubenstein & Heifetz, Segovia was influ-enced by Franz Liszt who stated ‘’the music is only a vehicle to express one’s individuality’’
Moreover this statement of Segovia: ‘’if the composer brings his work to this world I want to give the work a new life by my own.’’6 can show us how much he was affected by Liszt’s comment about indi-viduality in some way.

2. Changing the Accidentals and Time Signature:

I. Accidentals:

Stembridge, in his essay ‘Interpreting Frescobaldi, suggests that:
“Accidentals in both the score and Intavolatura (Italian Keyboard tablature) sources applied only in note before which they are placed (Fig 1). If the same note is repeated immediately, the accidental is normally in force, even if a bar-line should separate the two notes. (Fig2)”.7

From this we are given to understand that Segovia changed the accidentals wrongly by following the modern rules in interpreting accidentals. These mistakes are changed all the Aeolian melodic lines to the ascending melodic minor (see example 1, 2 & 3).
Example 1 (Original Keyboard Version Prima Part Bar 1) Segovia changed the natural d to the sharp d in his edition

Example 2 (Original Keyboard Version Quatra part bar 5); In Segovia’s edition both d are natural which is wrong.

Example 3: The d note in the bass line should be natural in Segovia edition

II. Time signature:

In the original Intavolatura the time signature of the fourth part (Quatro parte) is shown by the ^C sign. Frescobaldi, however, put the bar lines between each sixteen quaver which means the music is in 4/2. This differs from the modern tradition which considers the ^C sign as 4/4, in Italian baroque when musicians could use it for any kind of four-beat music.8 To use the modern interpretation of this sign ^C Segovia added bar lines to this part of the piece in or-der to change the music from 4/2 to 4/4. This decision affects the choice of the correct tempi for us-ers of his edition. By comparing his recording of this piece and other Italian Baroque music experts like the harpsichordist Richard Lester who recorded all the Frescobaldi’s keyboard music, it can be understood that Segovia played the fourth part almost twice as slow as the Lester.

(ii)

Segovia gave many insights into how he felt music should be performed, arranged and interpreted. It is clear that he regarded music as being a means of free expression, for instance, he stated that “Mu-sic should be like life, an explosion of freedom.’’10 Also on music interpretation he stated’’ if composer brings his work to this world I want to give the work a new life’’11. These comments enable us to deter-mine how much this belief could differ his music interpretation from the historic tradition of the original music.
The next section of this essay identifies the differences between Segovia’s interpretation and Fresco-baldi’s traditions by reviewing the existing reference from that era and new studies concerning Fres-cobaldi notation traditions.
Frescobaldi’s most important set of instructions are written in the preface attached to all of his books written after 1615. The final version of these instructions also appears in his second book of toccatas written in 1637.12
In the preface, Frescobaldi categorized the instructions in nine different sections which give advice on a range of subjects from tempo to technical issues now we are going to review some of this instruc-tion in order to compare it with Segovia’s style.

I. Instructions on Chords and Trills:

Chords:
The preface states:
‘‘The beginning of the pieces should be played slowly and ‘chords’ should be played cleared and arpeggiated in an orderly way, without confusion, playing the separate parts one after the other, but in such a way to preserve the harmonic unity.’’13
This suggests that the chords should be played arpeggiated (broken). However, despite this advice, Segovia played the first chord (E minor) by rolling the strings from the sixth string to the first with his thumb (P finger).14 this makes the notes of the chord unclear. Using a rolling technique has another disadvantage. In the original score this chord consists of five notes. By using this technique, however, the thumb will play all six strings, thereby adding a note (extra e) to the chord. (Fig 3)