Narciso Yepes

Narciso Yepes (14 November 1927 – 3 May 1997) was a Spanish guitarist.

Biography

Yepes was born into a family of humble origin in Lorca, Region of Murcia. His father gave him his first guitar when he was four years old, and took the boy five miles on a donkey to and from lessons three days a week. Yepes took his first lessons from Jesus Guevara, in Lorca. Later his family moved to Valencia when the Spanish Civil War started in 1936.

When he was 13, he was accepted to study at the Conservatorio de Valencia with the pianist and composer Vicente Asencio. Here he followed courses in harmony, composition, and performance. Yepes is credited by many with developing the A-M-I technique of playing notes with the ring (Anular), middle (Medio), and index (Indice) fingers of the right hand. Guitar teachers traditionally taught their students to play by alternating the index and middle fingers, or I-M. However, since Yepes studied under teachers who were not guitarists, they pushed him to expand on the traditional technique. According to Yepes, Asencio "was a pianist who loathed the guitar because a guitarist couldn't play scales very fast and very legato, as on a piano or a violin. 'If you can't play like that,' he told me, 'you must take up another instrument.'" Through practice and improvement in his technique, Yepes could match Asencio's piano scales on the guitar. "'So,' he [Asencio] said, 'it's possible on the guitar. Now play that fast in thirds, then in chromatic thirds.'"Allan Kozinn observed that, "Thanks to Mr. Asencio's goading, Mr. Yepes learned "to play music the way I want, not the way the guitar wants." Similarly, the composer, violinist, and pianist George Enescu would also push Yepes to improve his technique, which also allowed him to play with greater speed.

Yepes

Yepes is a villa (town) in the northern region of the province of Toledo, in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha, Spain.

Population

Geography

Situated on the westernmost part of the comarca called La Mesa de Ocaña (the plateau of Ocaña), its limits are:

History

Yepes has the first documented human presence in a Celtiberian village, founded ca. 600 BC.

The former Hippo or Hippona of the Carpetanians, where the Celtiberians defeated the Roman troops of Quintius and Calpurnius, derives its current from the times of the Muslim rule, when it was called Hepes, which in turn would produce Hiepes, Iepes and finally Yepes. It is possible that Hepes be a mozarabic toponym.

Ten-string guitar

There are many varieties of ten-string guitar, including:

Uncoursed ten-stringed guitars

Ten-stringed harp guitars

Harp guitars are guitars to which extra strings have been added which are never fretted but may be plucked or strummed. These strings are therefore played in a manner somewhat similar to those of the harp, while those of the principal neck are played as a guitar, hence the name.

Often but not always, a second neck, parallel to the fretboard, carries these extra strings. There have been many designs of harp guitar, but in the nineteenth century ten-string versions were particularly popular.

Information on nineteenth-century harp guitars comes from three main primary sources:

Concierto de Aranjuez

For the Klaus Dinger compilation album, see Néondian

The Concierto de Aranjuez is a composition for classical guitar and orchestra by the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo. Written in 1939, it is far and away Rodrigo's best-known work, and its success established his reputation as one of the most significant Spanish composers of the twentieth century.

Inspiration

The Concierto de Aranjuez was inspired by the gardens at Palacio Real de Aranjuez, the spring resort palace and gardens built by Philip II in the last half of the 16th century and rebuilt in the middle of the 18th century by Ferdinand VI. The work attempts to transport the listener to another place and time through the evocation of the sounds of nature.

According to the composer, the first movement is "animated by a rhythmic spirit and vigour without either of the two themes... interrupting its relentless pace"; the second movement "represents a dialogue between guitar and solo instruments (cor anglais, bassoon, oboe, horn etc.)"; and the last movement "recalls a courtly dance in which the combination of double and triple time maintains a taut tempo right to the closing bar." He described the concerto itself as capturing "the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains" in the gardens of Aranjuez.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra

Recuerdos de la Alhambra (Memories of the Alhambra) is a classical guitar piece composed in 1896 in Granada by Spanish composer and guitarist Francisco Tárrega. It uses the classical guitar tremolo technique often performed by advanced players.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra shares a title with the Spanish language translation of Washington Irving's 1832 book, Tales of the Alhambra, written during the author's four-year stay in Spain.

Performance notes

The piece showcases the challenging guitar technique known as tremolo, wherein a single melody note is plucked consecutively by the ring, middle and index fingers in such rapid succession that the result is an illusion of one long sustained note. The thumb plays a counter-melody on the bass between melodic attacks. Many who know this piece only as a recording mistake it for a duet rather than a challenging solo effort, but any student of classical or Spanish guitar will immediately realise that it can - and therefore must - be played by one hand.