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TECLA EDITIONS |
Sor, teaching, and the
Enlightenment
When Fernando Sor wished to know why his fingers
differed in their strength, he examined a skeleton. Having done so and
discovered the cause, he then established principles regarding the use
of the fingers.
That is the process which he continually uses in his Method for
the Guitar: first empirical observation, then reasoning and
deduction, and finally the conclusion or establishment of principles.
What is interesting and what makes his book stand out among methods
for all instruments is not only the fact that he uses such a process,
but also that he continually reminds us, again and again, that he is
using the process and why he is doing so. He is a teacher not only of
the guitar but also of the very arts of reasoning and of teaching.
Here, for example, are his words at various parts of the book:
En écrivant une Méthode, je n’entends parler que
de celle que mes réflexions et mon expérience m’ont fait établir
pour régler mon jeu. (In writing a Method, I am speaking only of that
method which my reflections and my experience have made me establish
in order to govern my playing.)
La Musique, le raisonnement, et la préférence que je donne en
général aux résultats sur l’étalage de la difficulté, voilà
tout mon secret. (Music, reasoning, and the preference which I
generally give to results over the appearance of difficulty, that is
all my secret.)
Je le répète encore, je n’entends nullement dire ce qu’il
faut faire, mais ce que j’ai fait, et par quelles raisons. Ce ne sont point des préceptes que je donne, ce sont des
recherches dont je fais part. (I am not giving rules, but am
sharing my investigations.)
(Quotations are from Sor’s Méthode pour la Guitare
(Paris, 1830). The English translation
of it, from 1832, is available in reprint from Tecla.)
Against Reason (he says) stands Authority. “Je n’établis
rien par autorité.” (I do not establish anything according to
authority.) You should not accept something just because your master
did it (“Mio maestro faceva cosi”—which he quotes in Italian);
rather, you should use reason to discover for yourself what the true
principles are which underlie what you are examining. He describes an
apt pupil as one who not only “a dû raisonner” but also “doit
aimer le raisonnement et le préférer à l’autorité” (one who
must have used reasoning ... must love reasoning and prefer it to
authority.) In praising an actual pupil of his, Miss Wainwright, he
says that she had “le raisonnement juste” (correct reasoning).
Those are the words of a child of the Enlightenment. They underlie
scientific method as we still know it today: not to accept blindly
what has been said, but to examine the facts, the data, to apply
reasoning to those data, and then to come to conclusions. They are the
words of a believer in reason, in the power of man to use reason to
discover things and to change them, and in science. Not by coincidence
Sor says that music is a science: “la musique est la science des
sons” (music is the science of sounds) and a musician is “celui
dont le solfège serait l’art de classer” (he for whom solfeggio
can be the art of classifying). The musician must have knowledge, must
observe, must use reasoning—and of course must have feeling. “J’aime
la musique, je la sens” (I love music, I feel it) says Sor.
Looking more closely at the Method, we see the application of those
principles. On the one hand we find lucid and easily flowing passages
of writing such as the Introduction, and on the other we find whole
sections, some of them very long, which are written as scientific
demonstrations and which most people today will find hard to read. Sor
explains why they are necessary. For example, at the beginning of the
book he says that his experience with actual guitars made by Panormo
in London and Schroeder in St Petersburg has shown him that a bridge
of a certain shape gives the result that he wants, but that his
experience nevertheless cannot dispense him from giving a
demonstration. He then launches into a complex demonstration set out
in terms derived from geometry. In other words, not only is Authority
without validity, but also even experience cannot have full validity
on its own but must be accompanied and supported by the reasoning
which will show precisely why it is that experience in a particular
matter gives the results that it does.
It is possible to give a date to this way of thought, because Sor
tells us a story about it from his youth, specifically saying that he
was sixteen at the time, that is to say that it was about the year
1794. He says that he had examined the position of the left hand on
the guitar, and, applying reason, he could see that there were great
advantages in placing the thumb fully behind the neck where it could
give support to the fingers which pressed perpendicularly on their
side. He also saw that to use the left hand thumb to finger notes on
the sixth string would deprive the fingers of that support. So he
asked “un guitariste assez renommé” (a well known guitarist)
about this, who instead of applying reason, sought to invoke the
authority of the teacher and of experience. Authority was being
opposed to Reason, as we saw before, and Sor did not accept that: only
Reason could have validity.
That is the idea which underlies the whole of the Method, and
because we can trace it so far back in his life, we must conclude that
he acquired it at that time.
So what was happening when Sor was sixteen? It was just about at
that time that he was coming to the end of his time at, or had just
left, the monastery of Montserrat, where he had gone as a pupil in
about 1789 or 1790. We know from his biography in Ledhuy’s Encyclopédie
(reprinted in full in my book Fernando
Sor, Composer and Guitarist, second edition, Tecla, 1994) that
his education there had a very strong influence on him, so it is fair
to guess that the emphasis on reason is not unconnected with his time
there. Of course those were the very years of the French Revolution,
for the year of the Revolution itself, 1789, was just when his
education began. And he tells us what happened. From France, as
refugees, came many French clergy, and the young Sor came to know them
well. He wrote: “une grande partie du clergé français émigré en
Espagne … furent incorporés à la communauté de Montserrat ”
(many of the French clergy who emigrated to Spain were incorporated
into the community of Montserrat) —not just a few, but “une grande
partie”. And Sor learned French, three times a week, from the exiled
French Archbishop of Auch. Did he acquire his way of thought from
those French exiles?
Now, the cult of Reason in which Sor believed so strongly certainly
played a large part in the thought of those who brought about the
French Revolution. But it can hardly be that French clergy fleeing
from the Revolution could themselves have been ardent supporters of
the principles of that revolution. Yet Montserrat was no ordinary
monastery. In our own century Montserrat has not merely looked
backward, nor indeed blindly forward, but has kept an intelligent and
intellectually clear and humane view of the politics of its times,
through all the difficulties which Spain has faced in our time.
Perhaps we may say the same of two hundred years ago: instead of
merely opposing the new ideas, perhaps even then, at a time of
suffering and exile, it was possible for them to be seen clearly at
Montserrat. And after all, even though scientific method received a
big boost in the French Revolution, the revolutionaries had no
monopoly on it and in any case it was hardly new. One way or another,
whether Sor’s teacher Padre Viola thought along those lines, or
whether it was the French émigrés who taught him, it does seem that
it was at that time that he acquired the way of thought which never
left him.
Moreover, it has been recently discovered that his ancestry was in
fact French: that his ancestors came to Barcelona from a village in
the French Pyrenees. And when he was a young man in Barcelona, a very
fashionable young man-about-town indeed, he took on the French manner,
so that he was described as looking more like a Frenchman than a
Catalan. It has also been recently discovered that when Sor was a
young officer in the Spanish army, he in fact trained as an engineer,
so he did actually have a solid education behind him in these things.
(See Josep Maria Mangado’s book La
Guitarra en Cataluña, 1769-1939, Tecla, 1998, chapter 1. Interestingly, the Method shows not only a scientific way of
thought but also many references to different kinds of science itself.
We find anatomy in discussing the hand, body position, and the vocal
organs; geometry, in drawing and describing lines and angles of
strings and fingers; engineering, in describing stresses and pressures
in instruments; physics, in the oscillations of strings; and medicine,
in comparing scientific medicine with that which is merely
experience-based (to the detriment of the latter).
“La soumission aveugle de la raison dégrade l’esprit humain”
(blind submission on the part of reason degrades the human spirit),
writes Sor in his Method. And related to that idea of the degradation
of the human spirit through blind submission, we find another side to
his thought: liberty and human rights. Those ideas were closely
associated with reason, not only in Sor’s thought but also in the
thought of the French revolutionaries, and after them in the thought
of those who drew up the American Declaration of Independence and then
on to the principles which derive from them today. In some ways Sor’s
thoughts about human rights are familiar to us today, because they
derive from the ideas which were current in those movements at that
time and which still continue in strength today. The one exception is
nationalism, which has its expression in Sor but which is losing
strength today. He sought to teach and to persuade, not only in his
overtly didactic method, but also in songs which he wrote about three
different political situations.
First, when Sor was thirty, he composed several patriotic songs to
do with Spain’s War of Independence against France. “Vivir en
cadenas, que triste vivir” says one of them: to live in chains, how
sad a way to live; let us fight. Another of those songs has words
which are specifically attributed to him; “Paroles et musique
de Mr. Ferd. Sor l’an 1812” (words and music by Fernando Sor,
1812) —so that not only does his music support the ideas, but he
himself wrote the ideas in the first place. It is a reflective poem,
in which the name of Spain recurs again and again. It is a question of
doing what is best for one’s country against the foreign invader.
(Both songs are printed in full in Fernando Sor, Composer and
Guitarist.
Another song by Sor against what he perceived as an unjust
situation is “Le dernier cri des Grecs” composed in about 1828, in
support of the struggle of the Greeks to obtain independence from the
Turks. The words “indignes fers” (shameful bonds) are used,
recalling the word “degrade” above: the chains in which the Greeks
live are indignes, or, one could say, degrading.
Finally, an amazing new work of Sor has just come to light, this
time a hitherto completely unknown song against the slave trade, for
voice and guitar. It is entitled “Appel des Nègres aux Français”,
the appeal of the Negroes to the French, to free them from their
condition of slavery. This song, like the two others, shows him doing
something about a situation which he perceived as wrong. And in its
concern for human rights, it takes its place in a whole complex of
ideas among which was the enthusiasm for reason which drives the Method
for the Guitar. (The “Appel” is available from Tecla. See Appel des nègres aux français.)
When we look at the past, it is a complex question to ask whether
or not people consciously expect that it shall conform to the thought
of today. Its very difference often gives us a rich experience, for
example if we look at ancient Egyptian or Assyrian art. However, Sor’s
thought was closely and wholeheartedly bound up with the complex of
ideas which has survived so strongly to our own day, and for that
reason it speaks directly and strongly to us. Indeed, it speaks the
more strongly to us because it is enriched by another aspect, feeling,
which we still rightly consider important: music is not only a
science, says Sor, but “je la sens”, and others agreed: “Mr. Sor
feels what he has to say, and that feeling is not merely true, it is
deep and intense”, wrote a reviewer in London about a new set of
arietts by him. No doubt he is liked by musicians today especially
because of that feeling, which enriches his music, his teaching, his
Method, his studies and exercises, - and indeed the whole personality
which led him to compose not only those things but also passionate
songs urging people to assist others in their struggles for what we
today call human rights.
Brian Jeffery
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