A Swiss Homage to Andrés Segovia
While My Guitar Was Gently Weeping
Music From The Royal Courts Of Germany
Minsk Music - Chamber Music from Belarus

While my Guitar was Gently Weeping

Although the guitar played a rather minor role in central-European musical culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - the "great" composers of the Classic and Romantic eras contributed little to the development of the guitar repertoire - it is looked upon as the most important instrument in the folk music of Spain and the Americas. The composers who were inspired by Spanish and Latin American folk music wrote the music that many consider to be typical of the classical guitar.

The guitar music influenced by North American folk music, on the other hand, has attracted little attention up to now, even though the guitar there too holds a position similar to the one it occupies in the folk music of Spain and South America. A reason for this might be found in the fact that North American folk music is made up of jazz, blues, and country music, genres that don't belong to the area of "classical" music. A further reason might well be that it was, for the most part, the steel-stringed guitar, and later also the electric guitar, rather than the usual gut- or nylon-stringed instrument, that predominated in North American folk music.

The works recorded on this CD date from the sixties and early seventies, a time in which the USA experienced, politically and artistically, its most creative period of the postwar era. With one exception, all the pieces on this CD are by European composers who let themselves be directly or indirectly influenced by the glance of this culture. Even groups such as the Beatles and Pink Floyd were influenced by American music. In this way, Afro-American and European music had a mutual affect upon each other, with the guitar as the binding link in this multicultural environment!

I was driving across the burning desert

When I spotted six jet planes

Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain

It was the hexagram of the heavens

It was the strings of my guitar ...

Joni Mitchell, 1976

The USA, the other homeland of the guitar

All the various types of steel-stringed guitar are of American origin, and were developed towards the end of the nineteenth century. The great demand for guitars led many European guitar makers, above all from Germany, to emigrate to America. The gut-stringed guitar had already achieved popularity much earlier; even Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) numbered among its aficionados. One of the oldest guitar methods printed in the USA was ”The Complete Instructor for the Spanish and English Guitar, Lute and Lyre” by J. Siegling, Charleston, South Carolina (1820). While the gut-stringed guitar remained popular among the ladies of urban high society, the settlers who tamed the West played the more robust sounding steel-stringed guitar. It was to become the instrument of America, its music emerging from the prairies and plantations. Although little is known about the actual development of the steel-stringed guitar, we do have some information relating to its usage. The earliest references allude to the use of the guitar by slaves. Indeed, those slaves who came from the west coast of Africa had a long tradition of playing stringed instruments. The rabouquin , a gut-stringed instrument similar to the guitar was to be found in the coastal regions of Africa already at the end of the eighteenth century. The playing of drums or horns was forbidden to the slaves because the white slave holders feared that these could be misused for the transmission of secret messages. String instruments, on the other hand, did not awaken such fears.

Steel-stringed guitars were made by guitar builders in small series for the first time at the end of the 1880's. Easy to transport and inexpensive, the guitar was promoted as an appropriate instrument for song accompaniment. It was used in every type of music, in remote parts of the south, even for accompanying spirituals. The increasing popularity of the guitar coincided with the development, in New Orleans, of jazz as an independent musical style. However, the guitar first came into its own in the blues, which developed during the first years of the twentieth century, above all in Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and North and South Carolina. The blues singers, seeking the most appropriate instrument to accompany their songs, unconsciously made the same choice as the Spanish gypsies. By pulling on the strings, the flexibility of the human voice can be imitated, an effect that plays an important role in the blues as well as in flamenco music.

Country music too did much to popularize the guitar. The British colonists accompanied themselves on guitar, in ballades and folksongs from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

While black singers developed their own tradition of ballade singing, which was influenced by the whites, whites adopted the so-called "nigger picken." The guitar thus became the instrument for the autonomous individual. Through the close relationship between the blues and the fast-growing Methodist and Baptist religious communities, and the simultaneous use of the guitar in country music, the instrument grew to be the symbol of moral America. During the 1950's, the adherents of the folk music movement saw their heros as advocates of civil rights (Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, etc.) The guitar's connection to the protest movement continued and culminated in the sixties with the discovery of a new hero: Bob Dylan. Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" became the song with which radicals throughout America identified themselves. Dylan's songs also coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement, and it was through his songs that the acoustic guitar became the most important instrument of a whole generation. The rediscovery of an older generation of blues musicians also made it possible, at the end of the sixties, to speak of a "classical tradition" of American steel-stringed guitar. Bob Dylan's songs were also influential far beyond the borders of the USA, even serving as a source of inspiration to the Beatles. As the Black Power movement gradually began to exclude white activists, the latter increasingly concentrated their interest on the war in Vietnam. In the same year, 1968, in which the Beatles wrote their song "Revolution" and the Rolling Stones, whose musical style was greatly influenced by "rhythm and blues," put out the call, in "Streetfighting Men", for the youth to join in the battle on the streets - "'cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street" - the "Festival of Life" took place in Chicago. Thousands of young men burned their call-up orders for the Vietnam War, and were chased through the streets and beat up by the police, the National Guard, and army troops. From Chicago to Berlin, from Rome to Paris, revolts broke out and anarchistic movements were founded. 1968 was a depressing year for the USA with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Then in 1969 came Woodstock. It was to be "three days of music, peace and love." The neck of a guitar with a white dove perched on it was chosen as the logo.

The Woodstock Festival is considered to have been the high point of the "flower power" movement. The performance by guitarist Jimi Hendrix was undoubtedly one of the most important events of the festival. Jimi played the American national hymn, The Star-Spangled Banner, on his guitar, refashioning it into a protest song through his sarcastic interpretation. Disseminated throught the Woodstock film, his cacophonic and tumultuous version, which transformed the title into a repudiation of the "American way of life," became a sort of hymn of the Woodstock generation. Woodstock was the moment of utopia. Those who were there speak of the wonderful feeling of being able to experience oneself as belonging to a specific generation. Or as song writer-guitarist Joni Mitchell sings in her song "Woodstock": "We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." Woodstock was a shimmer of freedom, yet narcissism was the other side of the coin that survived the sixties ... And Jimi Hendrix was dead. What remained was the music!

My guitar gently weeps

because I remember guitarist-song writer

Pete Townshend saying:

"I hope I die before I get old"

(he is still living, by the way)

and I think about all those

talented American guitarist

who died so young:

Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929), blues guitarist (found frozen to death)

James Charles ("Jimmy") Rodgers (1897-1933), country guitarist (died of tuberculosis)

Robert Hicks (around 1900-around 1929), ragtime-blues guitarist (died of tuberculosis)

Scrapper Blackwell (1904-1962), blues guitarist (murdered)

Robert Johnson (around 1914-August 16, 1938), Mississippi-blues guitarist (murdered)

Charlie Christian (1919-March 2, 1942), one of the first electric guitarists (died of tuberculosis)

James Marshall (Jimi) Hendrix (November 27, 1942-September 18, 1970) (died of an overdose of sleeping pills)

Michael (Mike) Bloomfield (1943-1981) (died of an overdose)

Duane Allman (November 20, 1946-October 29, 1971), guitarist in The Allman Brothers Band (died in a motorcycle accident)

Paul Kossof (September 14, 1950-March 19, 1976) (died of an overdose)

Stanley Myers: Cavatina (Theme music from ”The Deerhunter”)

Before the English composer Stanley Myers turned to music as a profession, he taught history at Oxford University. During the sixties he became interested in theater, and began composing movie scores, soon becoming one of England's most prominent composers of film music. Myers has composed music for television as well as for Hollywood productions. It was the Cavatina, however, that brought him the breakthrough when it achieved popularity as the music to Michael Cimino's film ”The Deerhunter”.

Guitarist John Williams related how Stanley Myers played the beginning of the Cavatina's melody for him in 1969, even before the piece was finished. The melody was used shortly after that in the film ”The Walking Stick”. Williams suggested that Myers add a middle section to the piece. He played this work frequently in concert and recorded it on LP long before it hit the screen as the music to”The Deerhunter”, and became one of the most popular guitar pieces of its time.

Harry Sacksioni: Goofy, Scarborough Fair, Meta Sequoia

Harry Sacksioni was born in Amsterdam in 1950. He began playing guitar as a child, and also wrote his first compositions at an early age. By the time he was sixteen, he was already working as a professional studio guitarist. He has written music for various Dutch performers, collaborated with entertainer Herman van Veen, composed film and theater music, in addition to making a name for himself as a solo guitarist.

The three compositions on this CD are from Sacksioni's first LP, recorded in 1975. The title "Goofy" refers to the Walt Disney cartoon figure of the same name. The piece, written in 1973, is based on a blues pattern. The version of "Scarborough Fair" recorded by the American duo Simon & Garfunkel gave Sacksioni the idea for his arrangement of this Irish folksong. "Meta Sequoia," from 1965, was Sacksioni's first composition for guitar and was inspired by the great California sequoias.

Armin Schibler: The Black Guitar & Un Homme Seul

Armin Schibler, born in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland in 1920, studied composition at the Zurich Conservatory with Paul Müller and Willy Burkhard. After initial attempts at linking up to the avant-garde at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, he eventually gave up in 1953. Three fundamental experiences influenced Schibler's development in the fifties and sixties: Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, Gustav Mahler's symphonies, and the jazz and rock music for which his Zurich high school students showed so much enthusiasm. During the sixties, Schibler, who was also politically active, endeavored to integrate jazz and rock music into his own compositional work, in the sense of a "vitality boost." He hoped to write music for, and be understood by the young generation.

Schibler left behind an extensive oeuvre: 12 music-dramatic works, nine works for the dance platform, 15 symphonic works, 21 oratorios, 16 radio plays (with his own spoken texts), concerted works for nearly all instruments, as well as chamber music.

Armin Schibler occupied himself intensively with the guitar, taking lessons with Zurich guitarist René Thoma, for whom he also wrote the cycle ”The Black Guitar” between 1964 and 1967. These arrangements of Negro spirituals are recorded here for the first time. Further compositions for guitar include the instructional works ”My own Blues” (1966) and ”Three Easy Blues” (1967). The concert cycle ”Un Homme Seul”, dedicated to Karl Scheit, was written between 1963 and 1967, but had to wait five years before receiving its premiere performance, by Konrad Ragossnig, on March 14, 1972 in Prague. A projected concerto for guitar and chamber orchestra was never to be realized. In his compositions for guitar, Armin Schibler attempted to build a bridge from jazz and the blues to the classical guitar.

Charlie Byrd: Three Blues for Classic Guitar

Charles L. Byrd was born in Chuckatuck, Virginia in 1925. He studied classical guitar with Sophocles Papas in Washington. During a concert tour through Europe, he met the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who invited him to jam sessions. Impressed by this experience, Charlie decided to become a jazz guitarist. In spite of this decision, he also continued his studies of classical guitar. Studies in Siena, Italy with Andrés Segovia during the fifties led to his dispensing with the plectrum. As a result, Byrd developed his own "finger style Guitar jazz" on the acoustic Spanish guitar. In his concerts at that time he played jazz as well as classical music on the same program.

After the appearance of his first LP, Byrd toured South America in 1961. This marked the start of an intense love affair with the native music of Brazil: the bossa nova. His infatuation with the bossa nova found its first expression in the collaboration with saxophonist Stan Getz, with whom he recorded the famous Jazz/Samba LP. Charlie Byrd also played with guitarists Laurindo Almeida and Barney Kessel.  In 1973, he published ”Charlie Byrd's Melodic Method for Guitar”.

Byrd composed the ”Three Blues for Classic Guitar” in the late fifties, dedicating them to three friends. These three pieces are traditional blues, each with its own distinctive character. The first - "Spanish Guitar Blues" - consists of variations on a simple melody above a 12-bar blues pattern. The second - "Blues for Felix" - is an etude based on quartal harmonies. This piece served as the theme song to disc jockey Felix Ivant's television show. The third - "Swing 59" - is influenced by the music of Django Reinhardt.

I'm sitting in the railway station

Got a ticket for my destination.

On a tour of one-night stands my suitcase

            and  guitar in hand

And ev'ry stop is neatly planned for a poet

            and a one-man band ...

Paul Simon, 1966

Jacques Castérède: Deux Inventions pour Guitare

Jacques Castérède was born in Paris in 1926. At the age of 17, he began his musical training at the Conservatoire National de Paris where he studied composition and analysis with Tony Aubin and Olivier Messiaen. In 1953, he won first prize at a composition competition in Rome, where he subsequently resided for four years. During this period, he wrote his "Envois de Rome": a sonata for violin and piano, symphonic dances for orchestra, and the”Livre de Job” for voice. Various commissions followed, including one from the American Wind Symphony Orchestra, for whom Castérède wrote” ... jusqu'a mon dernier souffle”, a composition in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty (1988). Since 1980, he has dedicated most of his compositions to religious themes. Castérède was never attracted to twelve-tone serialism, his compositional style being marked by melodic lines and expressive rhythms. Besides composing, Castérède taught at the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris.

The ”Deux Inventions pour guitare” were written in 1973. The second Invention - "Hommage aux Pink Floyd" - was the required piece for the competition of the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in that year. Although the "Hommage" is often performed separately, the two pieces complement each other and form a unity.

The "Rhapsodie" is built upon two musical ideas: the first - conceived of as a recitative-like prelude - frenzied and torn apart, the second - more intimate and melancholy - continually undergoes changes and reaches a climax in which the utmost in sound is demanded of the guitar. Immediately afterwards, everything disintegrates into a series of tones that traverses the entire range of the instrument. At the end, the aggressive recitative reappears, modified and pacified. The piece closes tranquilly.

The composition "Hommage aux Pink Floyd" is based on the rhythm of "Saucerful of Secrets" (1968), a piece by the group Pink Floyd. The basic rhythm has been slightly altered. Apart from this rhythm, there is no connection between the composition and the music of Pink Floyd. The structure of the piece displays a traditional tripartite form, with a secondary theme in the middle section. The piece is tonal. The rhythm is asymmetric and undergoes continual change. The main theme appears repeatedly, played louder each time. The whole piece is to be played very fast, and demands great strength and virtuosity from the performer.

Castérède has also written two guitar concertos, a ”Rhapsodie pour un jour de fête” for guitar and orchestra (1989), and ”Trois Pièces for guitar” (1984).

John Lennon  - Paul McCartney: Because

John Lennon was born in Liverpool in 1940. Already in 1955 he founded his first rock 'n roll group, The Quarrymen, together with Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The American singer-guitarists Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Bob Dylan were among their models. After various permutations, the Quarrymen evolved in 1960 into the Beatles.

Paul McCartney was born in Liverpool in 1942. Together with John Lennon, he wrote most of the songs in the Beatles' repertoire. Lennon and McCartney became the most influential and successful song-writing duo in the history of rock music.

The Beatles recorded the song ”Because” in 1969 for the ”Abbey Road” LP. John Lennon claimed that the inspiration for this song came after his wife, Yoko Ono, played, at his request, Beethoven's ”Moonlight Sonata” backwards on the piano.

The Beatles were to a great extent responsible for the popularization of the guitar during the second half of this century. The sales of guitars have skyrocketed since the sixties, and the guitar has largely supplanted the piano as the household instrument.

The arrangement of Beatle songs for guitar, for example, those by Leo Brouwer or Toru Takemitsu has become quite common since the early seventies. The version of Because recorded here is by Stanley Myers and first appeared in 1972 on John Williams´ LP ”Changes”.

Han Jonkers

Translation: Howard Weiner

I look at the world and I notice it´s turning

While my guitar gently weeps

With every mistake we must surely be learning

While my guitar gently weeps

George Harrison, 1968

Han Jonkers

Han Jonkers was born in Eindhoven, Holland in 1958. He received initial guitar instruction from Nelly de Hilster, subsequently studying at the Maastricht College of Music with Hans-Lutz Niessen. After earning a music education and soloist's diploma, Han Jonkers was awarded a scholarship that enabled him to study for several summers with Oscar Ghiglia at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy. Further studies with Konrad Ragossnig and Oscar Ghiglia at the Basel Music Academy followed, where he earned a soloist's diploma.

Han Jonkers was a prize winner at various competitions (Viña del Mar, Chile, and Maria Canals, Barcelona) and has performed as a soloist and in chamber music formations. He has initiated several guitar festivals, published musicological articles, given workshops at colleges of music at home and abroad, and taught summer courses under the auspices of the Arosa (Switzerland) Music Festival. Han Jonkers is instructor of guitar at the Cantonal School in Olten and at the Teachers College of the Canton of Aargau in Zofingen.

In 1991, Han Jonkers published a collection of contemporary guitar music under the title ”CH-Gitarre” (Musikedition Nepomuk 9144). His first CD recording, ”A Swiss Homage to Andrés Segovia” (CADENZA CAD 800905), was issued in 1995 by Cadenza Records. The German magazine”Gitarre & Laute” wrote of this CD: "Han Jonkers plays with cultivated delicacy. He understands how to deal with the dimensions and proportions of the compositions, to correctly fashion the small world between 'loud' and 'soft' on the guitar."

Appendix

The commentary to this CD would have been impossible to write without the invaluable help of the following persons, articles, and books:

- "NZZ Folio," Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich, May and July 1993)

- Tony Palmer, All you need is love (Grossman Publishers, New York 1976)

- Tom and Mary Evans, De gitaar van Renaissance tot Rock (De gooise uitgeverij, Bussum, Holland 1979)

- Percival Kirby, The Musical Instruments of the native Races of South Africa (London 1934)

- Oliver Hüttenbach, Jimi Hendrix & Co. (Verlagsunion Erich Pabel-Arthur Moewig KG, Rastatt 1989)

- Harry Graves & Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, Das neue Rocklexikon (Rowolt 1990)

- Tony Russell, Encyclopedia of Rock (Hennerwood Publications Ltd. 1983)

- Gramophone (review of classical recordings), January 1994

- John Williams, The Film Profile (Sony Classical GmbH 1993)

- Portrait of John Williams, (CBS Records 1982)

- Harry Sacksioni, gitaar, Harlekijn muziekreeks Deel 1 (Harlekijn uitgeverij Westbroek, Holland 1990)

- Conversation with Harry Sacksioni (Lienden, Holland)

- Pierre Wenger, Armin Schibler, Der Mensch und der Komponist, a speech given at a commemorative assembly on the occasion of Schibler's 70th birthday

- Armin Schibler, Das Werk 1986 (Alkun Verlag/Albert J. Kunzelmann, Adliswil, Switzerland 1985)

- Conversation with Konrad Ragossnig (Vienna, Austria)

- Alexander Schmitz, Jazz Gitarristen (Oreon Verlag GmbH, Schaftlach 1992)

- Maurice Summerfield, The Jazz Guitar (Ashley Mark Publishing Corp., England)

- Personal correspondence with Charlie Byrd (Annapolis, MD)

- Personal correspondence with Jacques Castérède (Boulogne, France)

- Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head, The Beatles Records and the Sixties (Pimlico Publishers/Random House, London)

This CD was made possible by the generous support of the Koch Berner Foundation and Mrs Marlise Gygi- Wildegg  (Switzerland).