Antonio Lauro - Natalia
I have lately been transcribing music from audio recordings. I began with my own guitar improvisations, reasoning that a successful improv would be both a piece of music - which tends to be more difficult to create the more time one has to dedicate to it - and also obviously something I can play competently. In some cases, I intend to re-compose it with other parts. For example, there is In The Ground, a piece completed in winter 2008 for my Saw Horse album Raised By Robots.
Being on a serious classical guitar bender recently, and, as was usual in previous such engorgements, being unsatisfied with near-competence in a few dozen pieces, looking for new music to which to offer my utter incompetence, and finding myself in present financial circumstances, while recognizing that competence can come from study, I branched out into transcribing audio of works by other people, such as Paul Galbraith’s guitar version of the Bach Solo Violin Partita II Courante, and two performances of Antonio Lauro’s Natalia, a snappy, concise, runaway waltz written for classical guitar.
have a look at my transcription
What I find amazing in this practice is that music which to listen to seems extraordinary, full of harmonic perplexity, difficult even, is understood to be quite straightforward. A few stunning oddities may be caused by a D-flat or a sharpened sixth, but many of the strangest sounds come from quite normal harmonies. A large musical effect can come from a relatively small action.
Lauro’s Natalia pushes forward with the type of split polyphony most recognized in Bach’s solo string suites, the Cello Suites in particular. He takes this texturalization of harmonic progression to rather wild extremes at times, but never so that, for example, the bass is harmonizing a treble note to come only later, at which time the bass perhaps could harmonize something different. This is music which can easily be reduced to a chord progression, and that progression is largely confined to the space between the “five of five” and the subdominant - roughly the same harmonic territory as a pre-Revolver Beatles song.
From the perspective of a creator, this is actually kind of a revelation.
What does this mean about learning music from a score?
1 year ago
