Hey!

People have listened to your music so and so many millions of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks. That's right: Spotify Wrapped. It's that time of year when you can read those numbers all over social media.

We've decided not to do any promo for Spotify and instead present a few great guitarrer@s, the way we always do.

In the interview of the week, we embark on a fictitious mental journey through time, while the album of the week sounds very tranquil despite its non-Christmas repertoire.

In the sheet music category this time we have a rather challenging jazz composition by Robert Keßler, arranged for concert guitar.

With this we’re off for the holidays. Our motto for next year: there's so much more to discover!

Speaking of discovering:

And now, enjoy the last issue of 2024. To be continued in January!

YOUTUBE FIND OF THE WEEK
with Marco de Biasi

This piece simply has something sacred about it, which is why it fits so well into the Christmas season. There are repertoire classics that you sometimes prefer not to hear for a while. La Catedral by Barrios is definitely not one of them. In this week’s video, Marco de Biasi plays the piece in a wonderfully calm and graceful manner. We were also very pleased with the great video location. Marco de Biasi is an exciting artist in many ways. With his SIN-E research group, he explores the relationships between color, sound and movement. If you would like to find out more, we recommend reading his artistic manifesto!

http://www.marcodebiasi.info/en/projects/sin-e/

SHEET MUSIC
Robert Kessler - Little People

For today’s miniature, we have ventured in a completely different direction to give you a somewhat more challenging piece of music for the Christmas break. In many respects, it's worth getting to grips with it, both musically and technically. We promise!

We have been celebrating Robert Kessler as an absolutely exceptional guitarist for many years. A crossover artist between jazz, blues, pop, flamenco and klezmer. And: a great admirer of the classical guitar. He is one of the most sought-after and versatile session guitarists in Berlin – whether with big band, orchestra, trio or quartet, in theater or television – and passes on his experience as a professor of jazz and pop guitar at the SRH School of Popular Arts.

He sent us lead sheets of some of his pieces and gave us permission to choose one and arrange it for acoustic guitar.

With “Little People”, Robert has translated the world as seen through the eyes of children to music. Floating, dreamy, profound, light-footed – the beautiful main motif almost plays itself.

Here you can listen to the original version – played live by the Robert Kessler Trio:
https://youtu.be/ksnUrQhG_3M?si=FXxrVTAZqBX_Z61A

Or check out Robert’s current album, Little People:
https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/artist/2YYgntmXUMYTCEnzmQdfE0?si=DZHjx28ARyauu0czu2AfZQ&nd=1&dlsi=3ebb24084a854942

ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Emily Granger & Andrew Blanch

The album’s title says it all about the sound: Suite Magica. We already said elsewhere that the combination of guitar and harp is capable of producing a density of sound that is second to none. We’re enchanted.

Andrew Blanch (guitar) and Emily Granger (harp) got us hooked from the first note of this album.

The suite by Emil Puyol, which gives the album its name, was the most captivating. But listening to the Danzas Españolas with harp is also a pleasure! They will be on rotation here over the next few weeks. The beginning of “Oriental” gets straight to the heart, with the harp acting as a melody instrument. It's amazing!

Check it out. It's balm for the ears!

KNOW-HOW
with Jasper Bärtling-Lippina

Jasper Bärtling-Lippina once began his musical journey with the concert guitar, but has long been at home in the world of Early Music. He is not only an incredibly accomplished musician, but also always a highly interesting interlocutor who, despite his young age, has a wealth of musical knowledge that he literally soaks up. If you meet him, try playing him various recordings of an orchestral work. There's a good chance that he'll be able to name the interpreting conductor.

Today, however, we simply want to immerse ourselves in his world – that of Early Music. Thank you Jasper for taking the time to answer our questions.

Hi Jasper, how many string instruments do you own and when and what do you use them for?

In total, there are five historical plucked instruments and a modern guitar or two, which I’ve been playing far too rarely. The historical instruments are a Renaissance lute with 10 choruses, a baroque lute with 13 choruses, a baroque guitar with 5 choruses, an arciliuto with 14 choruses and a theorbo, or chitarrone, with 18 choruses. A chorus is a pair of double strings, sometimes tuned in octaves. Each of these instruments has a different tuning and can be used for a particular kind of music that was played in a particular period, in a particular European region. With these five, I can roughly cover almost any repertoire, but there are still countless instruments that I don't own.

Which year in music history would you like to travel back to?

It depends on whether I would have to stay in that year or whether I could come back. I think if I had to stay, it might be 1960, because life would be too hard during the whole Early Music period. However, if I could come back or even travel back and forth, I would certainly try to rescue one of the lost Monteverdi operas. L'Arianna from 1608 would certainly be a good place to start. For me, Monteverdi stands for perhaps the greatest musical revolution in European history. I would love to see that live. But that depends entirely on whether I could choose a region and social status that would give me access to those performances at all. As I said, a dark era.

Which publication on historical performance practice has opened your eyes the most or helped you the most and why?

I personally have to answer that with Musik als Klangrede (Music as Tonal Language) by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the first book I ever read on the subject. Although the book is a little general overview and doesn't go into every detail that is important in my daily practice today, it is an incredibly good introduction to the world of historical performance practice as a whole. It's very eye-opening, because in a way you learn a new way of thinking about music that is fundamentally different from the traditional Romantic and musicological museum approach. With Harnoncourt, the focus is on the human being – cheesy, I know, but the focus is always on musical expression as a means of communication. That is, music as a tonal language.

What advice can you give to young concert guitarists who have only just opened the door to Early Music?

Perhaps listening to music, and especially music that is not plucked. Wind instruments, strings, operas, motets, madrigals, oratorios, singers. A large part of Early Music is based on lyrics, and it is worthwhile for us pluckers to think carefully about this. Every consonant and every vowel has different characteristics, for example, but in many languages the sequence of syllables and the syntax also have a certain melody. I think we should always ask ourselves about the limits of musical notation, especially in early music and early notation. That music goes even more from sound to paper than from paper to sound, so it is important to be aware of what is not written in the notes.

Imagine you could have one sentence printed on a poster to be put up in huge numbers at all the (classical) music festivals in the world. What sentence would that be?

"Book me! ;)"

More about Jasper:
https://www.jasperbartlinglippina.com/ 
https://www.instagram.com/jasperbartlinglippina/

More about Jasper’s Ensemble:
https://www.ilsegretodellemuse.com
https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/artist/5uRDUH7aXwUYrBGDYlsaf8?si=QhswLvdPRXquwLdtQEDxLA
https://www.instagram.com/ilsegretodellemuse

GUITAR AND…Newsletter

Thanks for being on board for a year!

We are Stefan and Willi and besides the newsletter we are also the guitar duo TMBM, playing exclusively our own pieces and arrangements. And because it fits the mood of the season, here is our piece “Boxi”. A square in Berlin that never sleeps, except between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. The track begins and ends at this time of day and follows the daily life at Boxi.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and see you in January!

OUTRO

We look forward to next year!

Warm wishes,
Stefan & Willi

New Classical Guitar is a newsletter by Willi Leinen and Stefan Degel from TMBM. You can find our music and more information about our journey at http://t-m-b-m.com/.

On Spotify, we curate a playlist with our favorite pieces. Feel free to follow our New Classical Guitar Playlist at https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZwxJRAsW9Zs2JiS2eLy6a?si=9b2a737f01c043a4 and recommend new additions.