Matanya Ophee's Journal

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The Aguado Saga continues....
Just when I thought I was done with this project, it occurred to me that I was going about it in the wrong way. You see, I took the original FrameMaker file for the entire Escuela translation, and deleted from it most of the text that deals with music theory. That still left me with a FrameMaker file containing the music, and some of the original text. Doing that, required a complex repagination process to make for a page turn arrangement that is different than the one used for the full book. In this process, each music example was a separate Score file, converted into a Window Metafile format and imported into FM.

It then occurred to me that Angelo's suggestion of doing simply a compendium of Aguado studies is really the most logical at this point, and eliminating all the text, leaving just the music, would be the way to go. If there is anything that needs to be said verbally, it can be done in a preface. So that is what I am doing now. I am repaginating the music into Score page files, combining several musical examples per page as necessary, to be later converted into PDFs files and imported into QuarkExpress, the way I always did with my music editions.

One added, and unforeseen, advantage of this process is that I am catching quite a few misprints I have not seen before. I just might take the bull by the horns and publish this without the assistance of outside proof-readers...

Look what the cat dragged in from the cold...

I published this Rhapsody in 1981. There was quite a story back then about it. It was premiered by David Leisner in new Hampshire, at about the time I was planning the establishment of Editions Orphée. I was at that concert and I was impressed by the piece. So I asked Marilyn to let me publish it and she agreed. David wanted me to publish his edited and fingered version of it, but I decided that since this was not a piece for beginners, I should leave it in an urtext condition, unedited and unfingered. The composer agreed with me. In retrospect, David was right and I was wrong. Since then, I must have sold a grand total of about 20 copies of it, and besides a home recording of it by the late Peter Segal, and of course David's premier, I never heard this performed. Then this... Thank you Marc Teicholz for reminding me that this piece is still in print...

Goodby Eudora....
It's been my main mail client (what a silly descriptor for a computer program!) since about before the deluge... I liked it, even paid for it and it served me well. Then came G-Mail. I liked this one because of its superb spam filters and its humongous storage facility. I still used Eudora for actual mailing, except when I was on the road and communicated with people directly from G-Mail. Right at beginning of G-Mail, Eva Jaksch told me about how to set it up as a POP3 provider, so I can download my messages to Eudora, and it worked well for quite a long time. And then I signed up for Google's Adwords, hoping to use it to attract more customers to my shopping cart. And then, the SHTF.

Not sure how Adwords is actually working. I pay Google by the number of clicks people click on my ads, and so far, three days later, there has been exactly one click. It may have resulted in an order... however, from that moment on, g-Mail refused to allow Eudora to communicate with it. I tried to find tech-support for Eudora, a program I paid for, and Alas, they no longer provide it. So I tried Thunderbird. That too flunked the g-mail communication test. As a last resort, I went to a program that came with my computer, Microsoft Outlook. And it worked like a charm. The only problem was that in order to download the messages from the last few days, Outlook decided it needs first to download all the 13,000 messages stored in my g-mail All-Mail folder, beginning with 2005. Took three days to download. Thanks Windows for multi-tasking...

It Worked! (I think...)
Got back today from Bloomington, Indiana, where I had my first post proton treatment check up. I started out with PSA 7.1, and it is now 5.8. Everything else, the Doctor said, looks good, and barring any unforeseen changes in the future, the present trend of the PSA going down, promises eventually a cancer free prostate. I will now do this test every three months for the next two years, and if the trend continues in the same direction, it will eventually reach the bottom plateau of about PSA .5 to PSA 2, which means cancer free.

Typesetting music is bloody tedious!
So now I got to the Etudes section of the Escuela. Many years ago, in 1992 to be exact, I contracted with an engraver to prepare an engraving of this material. (That will tell you how long I have been sitting on this project....). At the time, the engraver sent me single line files, i.e., each line of music in its own file. This is the normal way we work in Score. The idea was that all the engraver did was provide me with raw input, and I was to do the pagination, editing, fingering etc. For 17 long years, I have not even looked into these files, but they always lived on my hard disk, and got transferred every time I got a new computer.
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How not to waste precious time invested...
I just about finished the translation of the Aguado/de Fossa 1826 Escuela, when I decided that the amount of text about early 19th century French music theory, is simply too much out of touch with today's guitar pedagogy and would serve no useful purpose. In my judgment, no guitar teacher today would ever use this book, and the only possible buyers would be scholars who might be interested in the historical significance of the text, and do not possess the basic language skills necessary to ready the original, easily available from Minkoff Reprints. All three of them.

Obviously, not a good project to invest thousands of dollars in printing. So I decided to extract the music from this book, and publish, as my friend Angelo Gilardino suggested, as a compendium of Aguado studies, and to hell with the months of work I invested in the translation of the text. So yesterday I went to a Columbus Guitar Society concert. A young man from Florida named Michael Isla.( Read more... )

My place?
Finally, I got this thing up and running. It is my own private website, under my own private domain name. It took me a while to accomplish this. Getting the domain name registered was easy. Getting it hosted on Editions Orphée's site was also not a problem. I have a reseller account with my ISP, which means that I can host other web sites at will. I can even host other people's web sites as a business, but so far, I really have better things to do with my time than to deal with this. In the process of establishing the web site, they asked me to establish a user name and a password. No big deal. And that is when the SHTF.( Read more... )

I have had enough!
Just about reaching the end of my translation of the Aguado-de Fossa 1826 Escuela. But I am not sure I would publish this. After really delving into this in a depth that was required to understand what these guys were talking about, I finally got to the point where I think I know, why, when he published his last method, the Nuevo Método of 1843, Aguado had eliminated just about the entire text that deals with music theory. My assumption all along, based on information provided by José Romanillos in an article about Aguado's last testament that Aguado was selling the new method together with the old, was that the 1843 was not meant as a replacement of the 1826, but as a continuation of it. Now I am not so sure. There is just so much pedantic manipulation of basic music theory, written by Aguado at a time when he himself may not have been up to speed on the material and required, already in 1823-25, the intervention of de Fossa in "correcting" some theories, and compounded thrice over, again by de Fossa, when he was given the task of translating the book into French. The result, once I understood the complex terminology invented by these guys, is a discombobulation of basic information that required some 60 pages of text and umpteenth musical examples. By comparison, the very same material, was published by Richard Pick in his Fundamental Fingerboard Harmony in about 4 pages.

What to do now?

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WIP-de Fossa lives!
I have been slacking off, purposely, on publishing. Since going to Bloomington at the end of May, my main concern was on the translation of the Sor 1830 method, and on the Aguado-de Fossa 1826 Escuela. The Sor is almost done. I am only waiting for a couple more sets of comments from some people, and then it will go out. The Aguado-de Fossa is about half way through. The main issue I have is updating the notation and the fingering to correspond to Aguado's own change of heart in his 1843 Nuevo Método. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Luis Briso de Montiano has been working on preparing editions of the de Fossa material he discovered. Last year, we published the Troisième Fantaisie op. 10 on a theme by Beethoven. Now, we just finished the next one in the series, Les Adieux a l'Espagne, quatrième Fantaisie Op. 11. Looking for a cover, I thought nothing better than to use the same one I used for op. 10. With one difference: the original water-color by the composer's grandson is in landscape format and I could only use the left side of the painting. Now I used the right side of the same painting. Here it is:

And this is not just ridiclous, it is down right amazing!
I reported here before on some clever spider software that, after scouring the articles in GALI, particularly the one by Alejandro Madrid on Adame, decided that some personages mentioned in that article, Carlos Chávez, Rodolfo Téllez Oropeza and others, are actually currently employed by Editions Orphée. I am getting junk mail addressed to these individuals, and to some other individuals whose names I never heard before, at the rate of 2-3 a week. Today, this amusing situation went a step further. I got a phone call and an obviously young woman asking me in Spanish:

¿Puedo hablar con el Sr. Carlos Chávez, por favor?

I answered:

Lo siento mucho, pero esto no es posible. El señor Chávez, murió hace 45 años.

A moment of silence, then the woman, without understanding the joke, says to me:

Mis más sinceras condolencias a su familia y de negocios.

Wonders will never cease...

This is ridiculous!
Either I am experiencing the onset of Alzheimer, or there is a domovoi* living in my house.

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and the yoke ain't there....
Looks like that having shut down the shopping cart for a couple of months was a good way of sending my customers elsewhere. Since I came back from Bloomington, the traffic here , business wise that is, was quiet. A few orders, but not enough to keep me busy. Actually, it was a good thing, because it gave me a head start on the Aguado-de Fossa translation, a job I could easily continue when I go to Israel in a few days.

Now that USAIRWAYS have a direct flight from Philadelphia to Tel-Aviv, the trip should be a lot easier. That flight is 11 hours long, but at least two of these hours can be used working, until the lap-top battery gives out.... and of course, there will be enough time to keep up the work during other parts of the trip. The occasion is a wedding of a daughter of my cousin Daphna. I have met Daphna last year, but have never met her daughter. Would be a good occasion to see all my cousins on my father's side, people I have not seen in over 50 years. Once I am there, I will try and meet my friends Ronny Rogoff who I have not seen since leaving Israel in 1965, and Daniel Doron who I have not seen since about 1972. I should be back here at the end of August, and then it will be time to put the final touches of Luis' edition of de Fossa's Op. 11.

Back under the yoke...
Never mind the marketing phone calls and the junk mail, I can handle those in a jiffy. But now that I am no longer tied down in the proton beam schedule, when I had the rest of the day and weekends all at my disposal, I am back to running a business. So, Je suis terriblement désolé mes chers amis François et Denis, me siento mucho mis queridos amigos Paco (de Fossa) et Dionisio (Aguado), but I got to take care of business. That means bringing my accounting system up to date, processing a few orders that have accumulated here while I was gone. After that was done, perhaps, in a moment of great weakness, I'll clean the place up so I can have room to spread my Aguado materials around and get back to what's really important. Or I might take a few days off and pick up my six-stringer and plow through my pile of old tangos, to find the one that "inspired" Agustin Barrios to write that Beo Ficho.... I can smell it already. something by Castriota or Villoldo....

42 down, 2 to go! — Aguado-de Fossa.
I can see the light at the end of the friggin' tunnel.... I tried to get the doctors to schedule one more treatment this week, so I could go home tomorrow, but for various reasons they could not, or would not do it. So I am to spend one more week-end in bloomin' Bloomington. My treatment for Monday is scheduled for 9:30 AM, so I probably could get on the road by noon time and be home in time for dinner.

In the meantime, the work on the Aguado-de Fossa continues. As I said, the minuteness of the description of the preliminary steps is so annoyingly rudimentary, I mean, these guys spend a huge amount of words on describing to the potential rank beginner, what would seem to someone like myself as utterly superfluous, but then, I am not a rank beginner.... the interesting approach to beginner's instruction, so totally different than all the other methods, old and new, is that the very first excercise, even before the student was presented with musical notation, is the C Major scale along one string (string 2) from fret I to fret XIII. And the fingering of the scale along the string is clearly pivotal, not using guide fingers, exactly the same as the one used by Sor!

I must resist the temptation to discard all of this verbiage and distill this method to its nitty-gritty musical stuff, but I will leave it alone. Aguado himself, in his Preface, describes this First Part as Theoretical-Practical. It would be actually the prerogative of the individual teacher who, I am sure, would be using this method, to let the studet read this material at his/her own pace, and start right away with the Second Part which deals with practical matters.

Aguado-de Fossa
By the way, it is now 38 down, 6 to go. Last one will be on Monday the 27th, which means I am in Bloomington for yet another week-end... And while I am waiting for my readers to come back with their comments about the Sor translation (no rush guys, take your time and prepare your petards properly...), I started to work on the Aguado-de Fossa Méthode Complète. The language is still imbued with the double negative and the long sentences, but the style is much more down to earth, without fancy hoity-toity verbiage. What is so fascinating here, is to find concepts that Aguado expressed clearly in 1826, repeated, if not verbatim, but with the same basic sense, by Sor 4 years later. He read this book. Very carefully...

34 down, 10 to go!
I can see the end of all of this. Two more weeks, and I am back home. In the meantime, I finished the translation of the Sor method, managed to put in all the fingerings and corrections for Luis Briso de Montiano's edition of de Fossa Quatrième Fantaisie, Les Adieux A L'Espagne, Op. 11,* and even began transcribing a piece suggested to me by an old friend named Fernando Sor. Not sure I will finish it, but it's been a long time, years as a matter of fact, since I last did any serious transcribing for six-string guitar. A challenge of sorts.

Oh yes, tomorrow we are invited to celebrate le Quatorze Juillet with Patrick and Marina, the owners of le Petit Café in Bloomington. She hinted that besides cooking, she might also demonstrate a few can-can steps... And singing of La Marseilleuse is not required. (I don't know the lyrics beyond Allons Enfants de la patrie anyway...)

* It is fascinating what this Catalan composer could do with the C major scale, and its three (I, IV, V) chords...

WIP-The Sor translation.
All good things happen on July 7th, the day Margarita and I got married 26 years ago. We will be celebrating this tonight at Le petit Café in Bloomington, a really nice French restaurant run by a mom & pop (she cooks, he serves) team. Simple provençal cooking. What else to celebrate? OH yes, the translation of the Sor method is out the door. Not published yet, but first complete draft sent out to my two trusted readers, Carlos Barrientos and Jan de Kloe. It would have been nice to have a couple of more set of eyes (and the expertise and knowledge that goes with it), but frankly, I really do not know how to approach prospective readers and ask them to spend a great deal of time on examining my work, without compensation, and with what amounts to a non-disclosure (verbal) contract. You see, there have been several translations of this book in recent years, some good, some bad, and some so-so. I believe some of the ideas I express in this translation, and in the extended Annotations chapter, are actually quite revolutionary, and place the teaching of Fernando Sor in a completely different light to that that has been common in guitar circles. I am of course, fully prepared to defend my position, but I would rather do so only after the book had been published. At this time, my interest is to find out where exactly I distorted Sor's words beyond the limits I set for myself in this project, and how. I also would not want any part of this book to circulate without my control before the translation is actually published.

So if any one thinks s/he would like to tackle this examination, under the restrictions I delineated above, please let me know.

This is important.
I first met Stepan Rak at the 1987 Esztergom Festival. We got along famously well, spoke many times and at one point he asked me to publish an English language biography of his. He then told me a long story on how he was born in the Ukraine on the same day the US bombed Hiroshima, and how Soviet tank troops saved him from the ruins of a village that was bombed by the Germans and took him to Prague. I published that biography in the February, 1998 issue of Classical Guitar magazine. Sometimes later, Colin Cooper pointed out, I don't recall if this was in a private communication or in the magazine, that by the time the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the war in Europe was over for three months. Be that as it may, that biography has been quoted several times as a source on Rak. Now it appears it was all hogwash.

community.livejournal.com/guitarclassical/115293.html

This clip is a Russian television program called Жди Меня (Wait for Me) which specializes in re-uniting long lost siblings. It's in Russian and Ukrainian, but the gist of it is that Stepan was actually born in Prague to a Ukrainian army nurse. She left him in the care of someone, and then went back to the Ukraine where she had another child. At the end of the clip, the two brothers meet for the first time after a concert by Stepan in Kiev. Fascinating stuff. Thank you Dima for posting this.

I hate to say this, but mission is (almost) accomplished!
I have finished the translation of the Sor method. What remains now is to do a thorough spell checking, careful proof reading of both the main text and the 32 pages of additional Annotations, spell-check and carefully proof-read the original French, do whatever formatting adjustments need to be made, et Voilá!

But not quite, of course. I will need to have the book thoroughly gone over by experts in the field, before I take a deep breath and print it. In my estimation, to do a good job, my experts will need at least 3 months. So practically speaking, this should be ready in time for Christmas.

22 down, 22 to go!
I am now at the half way mark. It is down hill from now on, I am told by my fellow balloon brothers. And as obvious from the previous post, I am almost at the end of the Sor translation. Should be done with it before the end of June!