Inside Perspective

In their project "Chasing the butterfly", Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison have undertaken the endeavor to "recreate" the 1903 recordings of Edward Grieg by rigorously internalising Grieg's playing, by "understanding his performance style from the inside" and therefore "empowering" themselves to "demonstrate what these performances would have sounded like today had they been recorded with modern recording equipment".1

I will try here to get this kind "inside prespective" on an early, heavily arpeggiated guitar recording. It is a transcription of a folk song, which Miguel Llobet "harmonized" in 1900. The recording of Llobet playing himself was done in 1925. A preliminary look at it already shows a huge variety of different arpeggio lengthes. This is particularly noticeable in comparison to a modern performance of the same piece.

I will continue with a series of analytical observations:

The quality of the arpeggi of Llobet very often leave the impression, that they are based on a relaxed, perhaps "careless" (and thus often erraticly accented) right hand that allowes the hand to droop into the strings with a wrist angled to around 90 degrees. The usually uneven internal timing of the fast arpeggi suggests, that Llobet often employs a thumb that in a rapid, "falling" gesture strucks multiple strings in a quick succession.

After around 20 attempts to adapt myself to the mentioned traits of Llobet's playing – expanded and slowly arpeggiated or dislocated first beats, shortened and quickly arpeggiated second beats, a hand relaxedly and rapidly "falling" into the strings – the result sounds like this:

This style of arpeggiation as Llobet employs it, can be characterized as "gesture" that superimposes a layer of non-chalance and improvisation on the actual composition.

Miguel Llobet plays El Testament d'Amelia, 1925. Stems give the length of arpeggio or dislocation, the connected dots give the duration of the quarter-notes.

This video shows the performance of Miguel Llobet. The longer a stem, the more time the arpeggio takes.

There is a clear correlation between duration and arpeggio length: The slower a beat is played, the longer the arpeggio is. The horizontal axis shows tempo, the vertical axis loudness.

2. The first beat of a bar is always played slow (yellow circles), the second beat (blue circles) is always played fast, while the third beats (white circles) can be longer or shorter. Slow arpeggiation occurs on the first beat, fast arpeggiation on the second, the third beat is never arpeggiated. Only in one case, measure 5, a fast (and loud) second beat is also long arpeggiated.

The same bars played by David Russell.

4 A beautiful example of how "violin bloom" and arpeggio can merge (Adrew Manze and Richard Egarr play the opening of Corelli's op. 5, No. 1):

1 Slatterbrekk and Harrison have thoroughly documented this project on the wbsite chasingthebutterfly.no .

A picture of Miguel Llobet clearly showing his right hand position. This position was preferred by Francesco Tarréga, Llobet's teacher. Andrés Segovia also uses it.