Sweet Tea, No Lemon

The Fernando Sor piece is less than 2 minutes of music. Just 39 measures and 298 notes.

Putting a lot of effort into such a small thing is something I haven’t done in a long while. I feel something of what it must be like to be a woodcarver, starting with a nondescript block of wood, working and working at it until the art within is revealed. There’s certainly no doubt that my initial read-through of the Sor was the musical equivalent of a block of wood.

Sightreading on the guitar poses an interesting problem. In comparison, consider the piano. Each note is at a single location on the keyboard so sightreading is the process of making sure that your hands are in a position that allows you to find each note as needed. On the guitar, that task is complicated by the fact that each note can be found at several locations on the fretboard. A skilled sightreader on the guitar must be adept at scanning ahead and looking for ways to make the notes physically possible. Years ago while studying with John de Chiaro, I remember being amazed at his ability to see around the roadblocks of a piece so quickly.

When I began with Sor’s study, what I did can’t be described as sightreading. Instead, it was a meticulous working-out of the details, measure by measure. I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to truly sightread a piece that moves around the fretboard so much.

For now, I’m still polishing up a few rough edges, including that darned spot between measures 4 and 5 which still produces a clunker now and again as I play through. The goal is in sight though, and I hope to post a recording soon.

After several years away from it, I’ve picked up the classical guitar again. I have a copy of the Andres Segovia edition of Fernando Sor’s Twenty Studies, so I decided I would begin with the obvious: Estudio 1 in that collection of sheet music.

“Estudio 1” in the Segovia book is actually Sor’s Opus 6 Number 8.

Thanks to the fine folks at Tecla and Hebe Online, and the magic of archive.org, here’s a copy:
Fernando Sor Opus 6 Number 8

The free copy doesn’t come with Segovia’s help in the fingerings, so be prepared to spend some extra time on that.
If you’re a fan of guitar tablature (I’m not), you may want to look here as well:
Tabs for Sor Op6 Num8

There’s also a free online copy of what is supposedly Sor’s original:
The entire list of Sor original scores
The Opus 6 Number 8 original

Note that there is an apparent error in the original (!) in measure 13, where the C should be C#. Most but not all later editions have this corrected. For example, this piece is also in a book edited by Carcassi, and the error remains.

I was unable to find a free MP3 online of anyone performing this piece, but I did find a site with Midi files for all the studies in the Segovia book. It’s here:
MIDI files of Sor Studies
For Study # 1, the MIDI file is not very musical, but it will at least give a sense of the melodic lines. That listing is also a convenient place to cross-reference Segovia’s study numbers with the real Opus and Number for Sor’s works.

I have devoted a few hours to the piece so far, and it’s still a struggle. The first tough bit comes between measures 4 and 5, where it’s tough to make a smooth transition to the first chord in measure 5. It’s a stretch of the 4th finger of the left hand on the 2nd string, and it’s all too easy to muffle string 1 with the side of the finger.

I’ve mostly worked out the problems through the middle of the piece, and now I’m struggling to put together the portions from measure 32 to the end. There are lots of spots in that section where you hold a note (usually with the 2nd finger of the left hand) while repositioning the other fingers around it.

At first glance, this piece seemed more like a technical study, but there is a surprising amount of music hidden inside. Eventually I hope to achieve a presentable performance that I can record and post here.