Prospectus

Julian Bream, the great dissident of Segovia’s era

ROUSELL: Segovia, Op. 29

FALLA: Homenaje
BENNETT: Impromptus
SOR: Variations Op. 9
HENZE: Royal Winter Music (I)

Joseaugusto Mejía
4-27-2016
 Julian Bream, the great dissident of Segovia’s era1
by Joseaugusto Mejía

D
issidents are the propellers of History. Any historical account that attempts a serious

study –not dogmatic nor exclusively revisionist– will hint at this conclusion. The

idea of dissidence tacitly implies hegemony and a dialectic dynamic of evolutionary

motion2. Dissidence in aesthetics is a more subtle notion but it still operates within the same grand

scheme, one that has created an illustrious and divergent path walked by the essential figures of

Aristoteles, Copernicus, Descartes, Luther, Einstein, Debussy, Schoenberg, Henze, etc. In the

subaltern world of the guitar, the most prominent figure was, and still is, Andrés Segovia who,

through his enormous and admirable work during the twentieth century gave the guitar a place in

the world of classical music. His unavoidable name quickly became hegemonic within the re-

emerging guitar world and for the most part of the twentieth century the immensity of his shadow

threatened to invade everything. But there was another figure that steadily and silently emanated

from obscurity and created a luminescent territory that, in my view, will eventually transcend the

embryonic totality from which it emerged. His name is Julian Bream.

In his excellent book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry3 Harold Bloom proposes the idea that

the aegon of identity is achieved through an internalized dynamic of “revisionary” ratios that starts as

a “poetic misreading” in which the new artist swerves away from his precursors due to a recognition

of the preceding historical and practical limitations. In the case of Bream, his dissidence implied,

paradoxically, a filiation that, while following in the tracks of the great tradition resuscitated by

1 The title is derived from Leo Brouwer’s lecture “Bream: disidente de la era Segovia” held in Córdoba, Spain, at the
Cordoba Guitar Festival on July 9th, 2008; and from Brouwer, Leo, “Bream y Yepes: disidentes de la era Segovia”
Revista Clave (La Habana), año 4, No.1 (2002): 25-29
2
In Hegelian terms.
3 Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence; a Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

1
Segovia, at the same time challenged it. That is precisely what Bloom implies when theorizing on a

canonical tradition that only remains authoritative through its ability to admit and eventually

reabsorb the individuations that challenge it by re-defining its poetics. This recital explores essential

aspects of Bream’s re-definition that, in my opinion, is not only operative in the exploration and

creation of a non-Segovian repertoire, but that reaches greater and deeper territories by re-

appropriating, re-defining and subverting many of the instrumental, technical and stylistic resources

territorialized by Segovia. I claim that this was only possible through Bream’s antithetical attitude

towards the –then and in many ways still– prevalent hegemonic boundaries, an attitude that sprang

from Bream’s forced autodidactism4 in instrumental terms and from the greater musical context to

which he adhered his aesthetic allegiance.

Lightness and humor pervade the tender wit of Segovia Op. 29 (1925), the only guitar piece by

Albert Roussel (1869-1937). This satirical portrait of Andrés Segovia, the dedicatee, probably was

Roussel’s spontaneous response to Segovia’s Paris debut in 19245. Its musical identity breathes the

same whimsical irony found in Karl Krauss or Touluse Lautrec 6. Modernism and neoclassicism

organically converge in an apparently conservative waltz, filled with imagination and rhythmic

vitality and furbished with piquant harmonies, bizarre cadences and remote harmonic relations. The

strange boldness of Roussel’s harmonies –once egregiously described as “harmonic strabismus”7–

imbue the dégagé, gentle trace of intense chromaticism that colors this cartoonish depiction. The

4
In “Notes of an Apprenticeship”, Pierre Boulez talks about “the autodidactic who is formidable because in him and
through him an uncertain will to power is working on the basis of lacunae and ignorance”. Boulez, Pierre. “Corruption
in the Censers” in Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1968, 29
5 April 7th, 1924. Besides Roussel, Dukas, Falla, Madame Debussy, Joaquin Nin, Miguel de Unamuno were present.

Wade, Graham, and Gerard Garno. A New Look at Segovia: His Life, His Music. Vol. 1, Biography of the Years 1893-1957,
Vol. 1. Pacific, MO: Mel Bay Pub, 1997, 51
6 Particularly the Lautrec of “La Goulue”, “Reine de Joie” or “Marcell Lender doing the Bolero in Chiperic”
7
(…) “some people have spoken of Roussel’s Falso bordone (false basses) and his harmonic strabismus” Landormy, Paul.
“Albert Roussel”, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 24. No. 4 (Oct. 1938),517

2
rhythmic transposition of the middle section, modeled after the rhythm of Seguidilla, is a hint

towards the maestro’s origins. The piece ends with the sardonic surety of a perfect cadence.

Not sardonic surety but intense melancholy permeates the Homenaje (1920)8 by Manuel de Falla

(1876-1946). Subtitled pour le Tombeau de Claude Debussy, this laconic landmark of Spanish modernism

on the guitar was Falla’s emotive response to the French publication Revue Musical 9
that had

requested famous composers to commemorate Debussy. The 3 guitar editions present minimal

differences but John Duarte’s edition is the most neutral in relation to Falla’s musical conception.

This is evident when comparing the manuscript version and Falla’s later revisions –both in his piano

and orchestral versions (where no structural changes were made). Falla’s internalized Andalucismo –

characteristic of his essential language– traverses this music in which the motivic integration is so

organically intimate that the density of expressive substance verges on the miraculous. Its economy,

intense motivic coherence, synthetic evocation, meticulous syntax and precise integration let us

speak about it in terms of an ultrathematization, evident in the will to unify all the elements of the

work in relation to its thematic material. Thus a discreet, barely perceptible impressionism taints an

ebbing atmosphere of multiple, reverberating evocations: the habanera rhythm –most probably an

obscure reference to Debussy’s La puerta del vino–, the quintessential Andalusian seminal motive –a

minor second, also found in Debussy’s La sérénade interrompue–, the underlying profile, decidedly

guitaristic, of modal harmonies and melodies, and the literal quotation of Debussy’s La Soirée dans

8 Written between July 27th and August 8th probably with the instrumental guidance of guitarist Miguel Llobet. 5 Versions
of the piece have surfaced: 3 for guitar: Durand (Ed. Revue Musical 1920), Chester (Ed. Llobet 1926) and Chester (Ed.
Duarte 1984). A Manuscript version also exists. (LVI A2, in the possession of the Archivo Manuel de Falla, in Granada).
There are two other versions by Falla: a piano transcription (Chester 1921) and an orchestral version (E GRmf 1938)
included in the Suite Homenajes as “No. 2, A Cl. Debussy (Elegía de la Guitarra)”
9 The issue of December, 1920 was devoted to Debussy, who died in 1918. The piece appeared on pages 30-31 under

the title “Homenaja (sic) pur Guitare”. Besides the piece, Falla’s article “Claude Debussy et l’ Espagne” was published
alongside musical homages by Dukas, Roussel, Bartok, Stravinsky, Ravel and Satie, among others.

3
Grenade10 converge to form the intense unity of signifiers that inform this marvelous musical

eulogy11.

Marvelously, the abstract serialism of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Impromptus (1968) has not been

an impediment to its permanence. Serialism is conspicuously absent in the first tier of the solo guitar

repertoire; therefore the favorable popular reception of this set of miniatures is refreshing. With this

work, originally conceived as “little exercises towards writing a Concerto,”12 in which Bennett

explored the possible intersections between the instrumental resources of the guitar and his own

language, we arrive at Julian Bream’s territory. Written for Bream, this set of 5 miniatures explore a

subtle expression that gravitates around two or three moods that are compositionally derived from

the tone row stated at the beginning of the piece. Beyond the strict twelve tone serialism displayed in

the technical disposition of pitches according to the parameters of the system, Bennett’s particular

technique can be appreciated in the serial elisions of the co-joined phrases in Mov. 1, the

combinatorial sets of Mov. III or, in a more abstract plane, the transformations and permutations of

the row in its several unfoldings. The palatability of this “music that people needed13” comes largely

from remote hints at tonality. This is due to the intrinsic characteristics of the chosen row that surely

was singled out because it accommodates so well to the tuning of the guitar. The series prominently

contains 5, 3, 1 interval classes that delineate a nostalgic tonality operative in the inner play of their

relations: 0-5 implying Fourths (also suggesting quartal or quintal harmonies in its inversion,

advantageous to the open strings of the guitar E, A, D); 0-3 implies minor thirds or major sixths; 1-2

10 Falla said about this piece that it “contains, in marvelously distilled way, the most concentrated atmosphere of
Andalucía”. Schmitz, Robert. The piano Works of Claude Debussy. Dover Publications, 1950, 85
11 Julian Bream recounts Benjamin Britten’s enthusiastic appreciation of this piece and how the project of a new work by

Britten was resuscitated after he first listened to Bream’s performance of the Homenaje. The outcome was Benjamin
Britten’s Nocturnal, which is in many ways “the cornerstone of the classical guitar repertoire”. Julian Bream, Paul Balmer,
Judy Cain and Richard Rodney Bennett. Julian Bream my life in music, (England); Avie, 2006
12 The outcome was the Guitar Concerto (1970). Tosone, Jim. Classical Guitarists: Conversations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,

2000, 67
13 Julian Bream, Paul Balmer, Judy Cain and Richard Rodney Bennett. Julian Bream my life in music. (England); Avie,

2006

4
chromatic appoggiaturas; 0-7 Perfect Fifths and Tonic-Dominant relations. Several other elements

are reminiscent of the old language: the ternary form used in movements II and IV that retroactively

contrast with the freer, preluding form of movements I and III, the implied polyphony of several

phrases of movements I and IV, the hints at Major chords (F# and E), and towards the end of the

piece, the actual utterance of tonal chords, Emaj, Gmaj7 and Fm11, in Mov. V14. Adding to this the

quasi-symmetric display of many of the phrases that articulate the musical discourse, we have in the

Impromptus another example of the aesthetic appeal of serial music that, as in the case of Alban

Berg’s Violin Concerto, uses tonality as a ghostly residue water-marked on the background.

Tonality is vividly present and functional in Fernando Sor’s Variations on a Theme by Mozart

Op. 9 (1821). The theme is “Das klinget so herrlich” from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, and is heard in

the First Act, Finale No. 8, Scene XVII. Sor’s version of the theme maintains the melodic and

harmonic contour but it is rhythmically modified, probably for instrumental purposes15. Evidence16

suggest that those adjustments are most likely related to a French singspiel version of Mozart’s

Zauberflöte called Les Mystéres d’Isis that contained the melody “Soyez sensibles”. This melody was

later inserted in other Italian operas and became popularized by a famous singer of the Ottocento,

Angelica Catalani. “O Dolce Contento” was then arranged and published by Giacomo Goffredo

Ferrari.17 Sor added an introduction –in E minor– in the grave style of the French overture, which

connects organically with the modified dotted theme, and supplemented the variations with an

original coda. The 5 variations are not harmonically adventurous, predictably dwelling upon the

14 Perhaps a wink to Bennett’s intense activity as a Jazz pianist.

15 Sor’s textural reduction technique of “semi- and quasi-contrapuntal treatment” was conceptualized by Arnold
Schoenberg in his Fundamentals of Musical Composition. London: Faber and Faber, 1970, 85; and as recognized by William
Sasser (1960. P.134) it is a fundamental technique in Sor’s textural-guitaristic concept.
16 See Buch, David. “Two likely sources for Sor’s variations on a theme of Mozart” in Estudios sobre Fernando Sor. Gasser,

Luis. Ediciones del ICCMU, Madrid 2003.

17 Mozart, “O dolce contento”, a Favorite song, sung by Madame Catalani in the opera la Frascatana, composed by

W.A.Mozart, The variations by Madame Catalani: Arranged by G.G. Ferrari (edizione [?]: Corri 180-?) oppure O dolce
contento | Air by Mozart | Arranged with | variations | For | Madame Catalani | by | G. Ferrari (Dubois & Stodard,
New York 1827 – 34). Buch, David. Op. Cit.

5
implied harmonies of the theme: E Major: I, V, IV –the only structural dissonance is the variation

on the minor mode– Even though the tonal modulation is predictable, a discreet tension is displayed

between the elegant, subtle “Mozartian” chromaticism (chiefly prominent in the minor sections) and

the ruling diatonicism prevalent in the rest of the variations. The theme is varied, stressing distinct

aspects of its identity: Variation 1 stresses appoggiaturas now presented as passing tones; Variation 2

is the richest chromatically and displays chordal appoggiaturas; Variation 3 is constructed using

repeated notes; Variation 4 is based on harmonic arpeggios contrasted in two registers; Variation 5

transforms the accompaniment of the theme, as conceived in Ferrari’s version, to triplets and

displays virtuosic brio in abundance. An original coda, where the discreet chromaticism is

diatonically overcome, concludes this work, which is historically linked with Segovia, who made it

popular again during the first half of the twentieth century and kept it in his repertoire until his last

days. Within the dramaturgy of this recital, its occurrence is intended to enclose the Segovian

paradigm previously explored tangentially. This move, Tessera, according to Bloom’s anxiety of

influence, accounts “for the artist elaborating upon the precursor’s work, maintaining the precursor’s

terms and ideas but constituting them in another sense” 18. “Completion and antithesis”19 give rise to

the new conquered paradigm.

***

Bream’s emancipated paradigm protrudes, at its center, a bunch of imposing masterpieces 20. Among

them, Hans Werner Henze’s (1926-2012) Royal Winter Music (1976-1979) is in many ways the

most impressive in terms of scope, diversity, ambition and difficulty 21. It is certainly the longest, as it

18 Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence; a Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 14
19
Idem.
20 Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal, Michael Tippett’s The Blue Guitar, Richard R. Bennett’s Sonata among the solo repertoire.
21 Bream asked Henze for an “important piece, something of the profound quality of Beethoven’s Hammer-Klavier

Sonata” Bream cit. Palmer, Tony. Julian Bream: A Life on the Road. New York: Franklin Watts, 1983. 83

6
comprises 9 movements on Shakespearean characters (6 and 3 in Sonatas 1 and 2). In the case of

Sonata 1, Henze uses 9 characters from 6 different plays and makes musical psychological portraits

based on his personal interpretation of Shakespeare. The meta-textual polarity must be taken into

account in order to understand the broader scope of its aesthetical wager. This is evident in Henze’s

musical language and oeuvre which has constantly aimed at creating works with extra-musical

significations. Basically, a politicized humanism informs his aesthetics and is consubstantial to his

creations. Within this framework, The Royal Winter Music appropriates the cosmic Shakespearean

canvas and, with a selective vision constructs a meta-narrative of political undertones in search for a

totalizing artistic manifestation, capable of simultaneously embracing apparently diverse disciplines

and formats such as theatre, narrative, poetry, philosophy and politics. All this is phenomenalized

through the musical material by using and consuming all possible resources. The pretension is to

abolish the aesthetical order, parceled in generic or stylistic frontiers and liquidate it by incorporating

it into a superior order that is (we suppose) universal, sublime, ontic. This old aspiration, which

makes Henze a post-modern romantic, has an enormously distinguished predecessor in the German

Romantic tradition: Richard Wagner’s Gesmmkunstwerk.

Musically, this complex hybridation, needed to use a flexible language that would reflect the enormous

diversity of its roots, a language that accepts the notion that “it is the idea which should determine

the form, not the form determine the idea”22 as Kierkegaard claims. This is precisely how Henze

assumes the formation of this music. Music that is extremely malleable, heterogeneous, volatile,

multilingual, in which each character consumes its own territory in distinct ways of expression. We

can talk of this music as being “enacted” inside a scenography of inter-textual significations, thus

Kierkegaard, Søren. Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers. Edited by Howard Vincent. Hong, Edna Hong, and Gregor
22

Malantschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976, 53.

7
needing musical ideograms23 that, in order to transmute language into music,24 will be musically and

theatrically played and will find an inner logic within the enclaves of the particular movement/play.

Therefore Henze is not only expressing the message of the play from the perspective of the

characters, or depicting the characters salient features, but he is trying to express the theatricality of

the characters and the way it is presented both in literature (words) and the acted rhetorical

communication on stage (theater). Consequently we listen to Gloucester’s monologuing while

affirming his enormous ego in the explosive recurrences of its central chord, and we feel him

psychologically dispersed in the violent dissonances of his pitch material or “unfinished” in the

deformed angularity of his rhythms. We sense the conflict between the collective power, as

represented by the state, and the individual egotism of Gloucester. In fact, this is the conflict that

problematizes the play and the music in its thematic teleology, as should be the case within the

context of a Sonata. From the strictly musical point of view, the discourse is constructed mainly by

two elements: a basic pitch material (introduced in the first five measures) and the use of hinge-

intervals of diverse functionality (Thirds and Fourths) that construct chords vertically or

“declaimed” melodies horizontally. The multifaceted expressions of the material gets fragmented at

the end in a violent section of percussive effects that evokes Richard III’s fatal conclusion.

Fatal also is the conclusion of Romeo and Juliet, who are victims both of fate and the feudal

disputes of their families. Henze focuses on their inner world as reflected in the exalted declarations

of their dialogues. Thus Henze employs two distinct lines that extensively use thirds and fourths in

dialogue, imitating each other, speaking intervallic commentaries, questioning and answering, playing

23 “Scrittura per ideogrammi”. See “La Royal Winter Music di Hans Werner Henze” Lo Presti, Carlo in Il Fronimo, rivista
trimestrale di chitarra e liuto. Vol 17, Issue 67, 1989. 9.
24 “Vorrei ottenere che la music diventi linguaggio, che cessi di esistere questo spazio nooro in cui il sentiment si pu’o

rispecciare in modo incontrollato e vouto; la musica dovrebbe essere intes come linguaggio.” (“I want to transform
music into language. I wish that music would stop existing in that sonic space in which feeling can be perceived as out of
control and empty; music should be intense, like language” [my translation]). Henze in Schreiber, Wolfgang, Approccio alla
lingua. Henze e i suoi poeti. Autori vari, Torino (E.D.T.) 1986, 112.

8
specular games. The conspicuous absence of chordal textures formed by both lines (except in very

few places) depicts the impossibility of their union, as does the disjunct disposition of the dialogue.

Although the form is used rhetorically, its circularity (ABA¹) becomes evident when in the last

section the direction of the voices of the first part is inverted, while the dialogue continues to evolve

at a more relaxed pace, elongated, yet increasingly dramatic. We are left, as in the play, with the

strange lyricism of an absurd pathos.

A magical, lyrical pathos is what imbues Ariel, the spirit of water and air. The elliptical quality of

Ariel’s services to Prospero’s hermetic magic is enacted in the alternations of Ariel’s swift leitmotif (a

new incarnation of the basic material of the sonata superimposed with minor third intervals) and

episodes of action. The construction is firmly rooted in textural expression portrayed with quasi

pictorial effects, such as the immaterial agility of the chromatic melismata (flight), the three sections

of harping sounds (gusts of wind), or the evanescent disintegration of Ariel when he goes “back to

the elements” punctuated in harmonics. Besides this texture full of effects, there are more cantabile

passages and even monophonic singing. The magical, arcane climate is immediately present in the

joining of all these elements –mostly contextualized in minor mode harmonies and oscillating

between major and minor triads– which are united in a movement of exceptional subtlety.

The subtle madness of Ophelia’s suicide is portrayed in a fragmented melody. In this case, the

melody is harmonized using the Viennese trichord25 as the miasmatic image of death. The seven

utterances of the melody, in their different guises, form a chain of fantasmatic 26 significations that

help to express and establish the distance –both psychological and metaphysical– from which we are

to perceive her: suspended in time, floating in the gloomy and cold despair of her lamentations. This

chain of successively distant reverberations starts with the strange half sentence that opens the piece

25 [0,1,6] in its prime form; 3-5 in Allen Forte’s list; a tritone and a minor second in traditional spelling.
26 As used by Jacques Lacan, the fantasmatic underside makes possible, as a negative (or impossible) presence, the real.

9
(perhaps a wink to the unconscious world of dreams that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake inhabits or to

the movement’s helix-circularity); the obscure pulse-less complete presentation of the fragmented

melody; the eerie a cappella singing of the concrete melody and its subsequent derivation in a dyad

lament, and the fact that Henze was inspired to write his melody on a traditional Irish Air27. The

most penetrating expression and its reposed pathos comes from the apparent simplicity of this song

with accompaniment, but just as in the Shakespearean text, we are bound to imagine the actual scene

through the suggestions inscribed within the music: the watery arpeggios, the iridescent ripples in

the river reflected by harmonics, the slow tempo and quiet dynamics of passing and the gentle

sinking of her corpse as the music moves towards the low register. The unescapable fate of Ophelia,

victim of her own cowardly acceptance and manipulated by the corrupt foundations of power, is

also expressed inwardly in the elliptical quality of her melody as well as outwardly in the elliptical

shape (ABA¹) of the movements form.

Extroverted outwardness permeates Touchstone, Audrey and William, a movement full of energy

and ironic wit. Portraying three characters of As you like it inspired Henze to organize the movement

on the abstract principle of 3: using tonal triads, triple meter, phrases articulated on patterns of 3,

prominent use of 3 part chords and 3 part textures, Tritonic harmonization, and a large construction

in 3 main sections. The presence of this movement into the large structure of the Sonata is very

important as it introduces the clownish, “lower” characters to counterbalance the somewhat

“elevated” atmosphere of the rest of the movements. Thus the music is willingly impure, mixed,

playful and ironic. The interplays of positive enjoyment reminds us of the image of the Homo Ludens,

“The Groves of Blarney” by the 19th Century Irish writer and musician Thomas Moore, whose song, also verses on
27

Ophelia’s death. Cited in Harding, Michael. A Performer’s analysis of Hans Werner Henze’s Royal Winter Music Sonata 1.
University of Arizona, 1997. 58.

10
playing blessedly in the “forest of Arden that dissolves hierarchies” 28, expressing in her intellectual

foolishness the highest state of the spirit.

Thus the bridge is built towards the reversal of the mirror. The highest poetry comes from the

highest lucidity. That is how Oberon, in his epilogue, “pacified and reconciled, as though Nature

had been subjected to Man”29 speaks in a voice of great grandiloquence, imbued with cathartic

reflexivity, searching for a grand synthesis in which all previous elements –power, tenderness,

tragedy, comedy, the supernatural– are integrated and transcended. Thus the movement is the most

tightly constructed in grammatical terms, merging tonality (triadic chords and hybrid chords),

“consonant” intervals (minor thirds and perfect fourths, and their inversions), with a free atonality

to create large expansive gestures. The material used throughout the piece, and introduced in

Gloucester, reaches in Oberon a completely new weight and signification, as if a new kind of spiritual

harmony has been reached. Within the grand structure of the piece, Oberon retroactively “orders”

the folly of men, and the order of his reality is only visible after the long strain of human passions

have been consummated. With him we are in the presence of a preternatural utopia, where the

fundamental reality that is beyond the scope of our senses becomes possible through the

emancipation of art30. This is the Hegelian Religion of Art that redefines and liberates the idea of

Man and his nature that is not essentially received but is conquered, by gnosis through science,

through art. The secular transcendence has in Henze a political expression on the existential vision

of the Left. The free Man finally penetrates into the fundamental orders of knowledge and, by

opening Maya’s veil, finds a reality more real than what was previously accepted, capable of

28 Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. 203
29 Henze prologue to the Royal Winter Music..
30 See Henze, Hans Werner, and Peter Labanyi. Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953-81. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1982.

11
providing a better structure for his praxeological31 referents. In the mind of this author, The Royal

Winter Music is transcendental music of cognition that resolves into quietism abiding the silence at

the end but only after everything has been consumed and consummated, transforming the un-

renounceable struggle into an inward, expressive and above all meaningful silence. After the piece is

ended, we are left with the sensation that, as in Shakespeare, everything has been said and a limit of

what can be expressed (certainly in the territory of the guitar) has been reached.

In the same way that the unity of Henze’s sonata has a lot to do with meta-textual correlations (even

though the piece is filled with purely musical “communicating vessels”) the selection of this program

has to do with the celebration of Bream’s progressive dissidence. His emancipated individuality was

the precondition for the existence of the “Bream repertoire”. This music could only exist if a

different approach towards the guitar and its relation to music existed. This new approach implied

many oppositions to Segovia’s doctrine, but essentially it implied one which is capital: the

preeminence of the music over the instrument. Understanding that what is expressed should create

the technique for its expression and not vice versa was a big step forward, and has meant a re-

evaluation of the terrain that the guitar inhabits: its perceived limits, strengths, language, technique,

potentialities, etc. This is something we guitarists still have to come to terms with, although a greater

consciousness has started to slowly pervade the new generations of instrumentalist who are also

putting forward their novel discoveries into the great collective work of our discipline, helping us to

erode our epistemic closure.

31 From the Greek “praxis”, meaning “action”. It is a term largely used in political theory and particularly linked to
Marxist theory, although it was much more used by Marx’s exegetes. In this case it is used to refer to that artistic ethic
that aimed at inducing, in the receiving public, an ethical conflict that would compel the transformation of their
inwardness. This edifying erosion could conduct, from the inside, into a better (progressively liberated) judgment that
would lead to a rejection of the current conformism and to a practical action in order to transform reality (Marx’s Thesis
11 on Feuerbach channelized through Art) This, for instance, is what Jean Paul Sartre tried to do in his trilogy “The
Roads to Freedom” and this is what was theorized by the Frankfurt School, particularly by Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer as critical theory in their “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1944). It is the same artistic ethics found in the
littérature engage, or other artistic expressions ranging from Bertolt Brecht’s Theatre, to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema, to the
art songs of Silvio Rodríguez. This is, in my opinion, the context from which Henze’s musical thought and creativity
emerges.

12
The last revisionary ration in Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence is Apophrades, which is the return of the

dead as the successor overpowers the predecessor and his work is read in terms of the successor: a

new hegemony is reached and now occupies the center of the chessboard. As in Jorge Luis Borges

wonderful story Kafka y sus precursores32, we can now see the Segovian paradigm as a necessary

condition in order to create the magnificent opulence of Julian Bream.

32
“Kafka and His Precursors”. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Kafka y sus precursores”, Otras inquisiciones. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sur, 1952.

13
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