A consideration of guitar fingering : implications for the preparation of a musical interpretation for performance and the process of writing music for the guitar

Abstract

Most guitarists would agree that fingering lies at the heart of classical guitar performance. It is a process that eventually becomes intuitive in experienced performers, but one which requires years of playing, analysis and practice to develop. Despite its being a fundamental aspect of guitar playing, and an often critical inclusion in notated scores, guitar fingering nevertheless remains significantly under-represented in literature on guitar technique. Didactic methods for example, where notated fingering instructions are often abundant, mostly tend to reinforce the all-too-common conception that fingering denotes a rudimentary series of numbers and letters on a score that direct a player to employ a particular finger in the realisation of a given note. This observation is all the more startling when one considers how important fingering in guitar music can be; on an instrument where nearly any given pitch can be played in multiple positions and on different strings, fingering is surely an influential and significant factor of guitar technique that warrants research and discussion. This thesis considers aspects of guitar fingering that bear a decisive influence on the end musical product (i.e. the music that is heard). This study suggests that guitar fingering is a procedural activity that connects the act of interpreting music for performance with the process of writing the music itself. In doing so, this thesis provides a contextual framework to allow the performer to add breadth to his or her interpretive outcomes. This study also provides practical advice to non-guitarist-composers who wish to explore the highly interactive nature of guitar fingering on substantive musical attributes such as articulation, accentuation, phrasing and sonority. These considerations of guitar fingering are the products of practice-led research. Findings and conclusions arise from the author's experiential research as a performer and composer/arranger. Case studies of selected works from the guitar repertoire provide deep analysis of issues arising from guitar fingering as it relates to performance interpretation. A further case study of an original arrangement facilitates the exploration of fingering in the process of writing guitar music. This thesis is accompanied by a full-length CD recital that provides a broad contextual demonstration of the research findings. Additionally, short audio samples accompany the dissertation text to illuminate issues arising from guitar fingering that are illustrated through notated score excerpts. In addition to providing a substantial contribution to guitar literature on the subject of fingering, this study also makes a significant contribution to the relatively new area of practice-led research, where in the present thesis the empirical observation of creative practices generates new insights into the procedural activity of guitar fingering. Show more