The Classical guitar: presence, intimacy and resonance
Reflections on the act of playing the Classical guitar
Kevin Dawe attempts to understand the popularity of the guitar in his book The New Guitarscape (2010), and in doing so lists some of the reasons he feels the instrument has become ubiquitous. These include practicalities such as its portability, versatility and affordability (2010, pp. 21-22), but one of his more thought provoking points is the guitar’s ‘feel, touch,’ closeness to and contact with the human body (p. 22). The following text will examine my own relationship with the Classical guitar.
I am sitting on a piano stool, which I have adjusted to the correct height to ensure my lap is perfectly level to avoid the guitar sliding away from me. I am unable to stand and move around because the lower side of my instrument, with the top and strings facing away from me, rests against the inner part of my right thigh. The leg rest that I use to position the neck at a 45-degree angle presses down onto the top of my seated left thigh. The back of the instrument angles towards my body and comes to rest against my sternum.
These three points of contact – the inside of my right thigh, the top of my left thigh and top of my sternum – form a resonating extension of my own body. An already intimate environment becomes more so as I prepare to play:
My right forearm reaches over the top of the bowl at the bottom of the guitar, until the inside of my elbow rests upon it. My right hand hovers above the sound hole, while my left is raised to the neck, ready to depress the first notes that will be played on the fretboard.
My feet are flat on the floor. I feel secure, rooted. By now, I know well the sensation of playing; the angles that the fingers of my right hand need to attack the strings from, the places I should be aiming for if I want a sweet or harsh sound. I know how much pressure I need to apply with my left hand to make sure that notes sound clearly and squeaks are minimised as I move across the fretboard.
The playing position demands that my gaze is mostly directed down to the object I am cradling, resulting in a particularly insular performance practice. Maybe the origins of shoegaze stretch back to the times of Dowland, taverns and lutes?
To observe someone playing the Classical guitar is to see an instrument drawn close, almost enveloped by its player. The design of a handful of other instruments demand this, such as the cello, harp and, to a degree, the hang drum, where every gesture and mechanical operation sits within the performer’s arm span.
So, how do the Classical guitar and the body of the performer work together? How does all of this feel?
I notice that I can sense the discharge of energy inside the guitar each time a string is struck. It feels exciting, as the potential energy stored in my planted fingers activates the strings and transfers to the soundboard via the bridge. The sensation is that of a small explosion detonating inside the guitar’s resonating chamber each time a note sounds. This discharge is over in under a second, but provides immediate physical feedback: a confirmation of my influence over the instrument that only I can perceive.
There is a concurrent sensation: the fizzing resonance and vibrations of the sounding notes themselves, which reach my body predominantly through the leg rest. These die away as the notes decay and add to the sense of grounding, as though the instrument’s resonance transfers into my own body, down to my feet and into the floor before dissipating. These vibrations cause an equal sensation, perhaps slightly less pronounced, at the sternum. I can feel this across all of the strings except the very highest, although the explosion of the initial energy release remains consistent.
Although the left hand does not typically produce sound in standard repertoire, it too perceives the guitar’s resonance. I notice the strings begin to vibrate as the width of my fingers lose contact with them. The same vibrations that I can feel from the guitar’s body emit from both sides of its neck, travelling down my thumb and forefinger and collecting in the pit of my raised left hand’s palm.
My body and the guitar are physically connected, and each exerts an influence over the other. The extent of the interactions between these entities goes much deeper, however. Cognitive science shows that we actually ‘incorporate’ ourselves into so-called ‘proximal tools’ through first-order mediated actions (Riva and Mantovani, 2012, p. 206). These actions extend our peripersonal space (that which immediately surrounds the body) into the tool (in my case, the Classical guitar), so that it is ‘incorporated into our body schema, prolonging it till the end point of the tool’ (2012, p. 207). I therefore become one with the Classical guitar (Nijs, Lesaffre and Leman, 2013). Writing about the accordion, De Souza describes the performer’s actions of working the bellows with their arms as ‘breathing into’ the instrument (2017, p. 40), and this feeling translates to the Classical guitar: my fingers start the reaction that excites the air within the guitar’s body, which I now perceive as a second respiratory system functioning alongside my own.
Playing the electric guitar is a different experience: one where much of the effort, energy and resonance of the sound is displaced from the instrument and mediated through devices situated outside the performer’s peripersonal space. This shares some similarities with what Butler would call ‘playing with something that runs’ (2014). De Souza (2017, p. 44) describes the interaction of human and technical energy sources in the context of the electric guitar:
I directly activate the vibrating string – but the unplugged guitar responds in a whisper. When I connect it to an amplifier and hit the on switch, it feels like a different instrument. Simply tapping the string now produces a bold tone…the force with which I pluck the string is still reflected in the guitar’s volume, but magnified, supercharged.
The electric guitarist may be standing, their instrument strapped around them. This affords them greater mobility on stage, and the ability to get closer to the audience, all while their sound is unchanged and tethered to an amplifier. This is an example of a second-order mediated action, which creates an additional peripersonal space centred on a distal tool (in this case, the amplifier), within which the performer can also become present (Riva and Mantovani, 2012, p. 206).
The benefit of a single peripersonal space - and the self-contained performance environment created by the Classical guitar - is that the sound itself remains directly connected to the performer. As Merleau-Ponty explains, humans interact with instruments through proprioception, where information from a range of sensory receptors (in the muscles, joints and inner ear) integrates to provide the body with the knowledge required to perform a gesture (Schmidt and Lee, 1988, pp. 153–158). The electric guitar, mediated through the amplifier, locates this knowledge in a separate space which is not immediately accessible to the guitarist. The two peripersonal spaces compete until one becomes prevalent, and the electric guitarist becomes present in both spaces. To the audience, however, the two are still separate entities, creating ‘a confusion (even a contradiction)’ and removing ‘a possible tool for perspective and engagement between the forces at work and the audience’ (Emmerson, 2007, p. 91).
References
Dawe, Kevin. (2010). The New Guitarscape in Critical Theory, Critical Practice and Musical Performance. London: Routledge.
Butler, M.J. (2014) Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition In DJ and Laptop Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Souza, J. (2017) Music At Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Emmerson, S. (2007) Living Electronic Music. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Nijs, L., Lesaffre, M. and Leman, M. (2013) ‘The Musical Instrument as a Natural Extension of the Musician’, in M. Castellengo and H. Genevois (eds) Music and its instruments. Sampzon: Delatour France.
Riva, G. and Mantovani, F. (2012) ‘From the body to the tools and back: A general framework for presence in mediated interactions’, Interacting with Computers, 24, pp. 203–210. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.intcom.2012.04.007.
Schmidt, R.A. and Lee, T.D. (1988) Motor Control and Learning. 5th Edition. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers.