The Guitar Whisperer Blog

The Guitar Whisperer Blog

Sign in Subscribe

classical guitar Featured

New OrpheusOnFire Editions

OrpheusOnFire Editions presents editions of concert works from the guitar repertoire and seeks to bridge the conflicting worlds of performance and scholarship.

Zen in the Act of Pernicious Pedagogy

Philip Toshio Sudo’s Zen Guitar[1] uses the word “training” thirty-seven times, but almost all occurrences of the word refer to one’s training in “The Way of Zen Guitar” and not to the development of the foundation of prior knowledge that should be seen as prerequisite to mastery.

musical expression Featured

The Re-Imagination of Performance

Note: This article was published in the Winter 2009 issue of the Guitar Foundation of America’s Soundboard. My original intention was to write a four-part series of articles that explored aspects of performance—portamento, rubato, tempo modification, accent and articulation—that are often neglected in the training of guitar

guitar technique

John Locke's Idiots and Madmen

I don’t usually toss around invectives about others as a matter of routine, but in this blog post I’ll need to use the word “idiot,” and the discussion will make more sense if I define it. It’s derived from the Greek word meaning a “person lacking professional

virtuosity Featured

Practicing Music by Design: Historic Virtuosi on Peak Performance

Christopher Berg's new book explores pedagogical practices for achieving expert skill in performance. It is an account of the relationship between historic practices and modern research.

Virtuosity Unveiled: Transcending Latency

Introduction I haven’t written anything on The Guitar Whisperer Blog in about two years. I hope this post will make the wait worthwhile. In this post, I take a look at one of the things that happens beneath the surface in high-level playing and probably can’t be inferred

Busoni Featured

Bach, Busoni, Segovia, and the Chaconne

Note I’m interrupting my “Thinking About Practice” series to update a post [http://www.pristinemadness.com/files/chaconne.html] I rattled off in August 2009 on my Pristine Madness [http://www.pristinemadness.com] blog about the relationship between Andrés Segovia’s guitar “transcription” of J. S. Bach’s famous

Thinking About Practice: Part Five

Reducing Music to Technique: Intelligent Bunglers and Brainless Acrobats First, some disclaimers: 1. The words in the title after the colon are not mine, they’re Carl Flesch’s and are from an age when musical invective was more a feature of pedagogy than it is today (so I assume—

Thinking About Practice, Part Four

Practice By Design Or Waste Your Time Although I can’t possibly have read everything written about practice, I’ve read, heard, taught, and done enough of my own to know that many guitarists and students are overly focused on what specific things to do. And this “what” is usually

Thinking About Practice, Part Three

Dagobah and East Coker When I first saw Scott Tennant’s Pumping Nylon[1] years ago, I was surprised to see a page that contained nothing but a quotation from Yoda:[2] > Do or do not; there is no try. This struck me as odd. I’ll admit that

Thinking About Practice, Part Two

Principles or Directives? A principle is a truth or proposition that shapes our reasoning and behavior. We want to have good reasons for what we do and sound principles can be those reasons. Directives, however, are instructions, and are stated in the imperative, a grammatical mood in which commands or

Thinking About Practice, Part One

Thinking About Practice; Practice Is About Thinking Today I inaugurate a multi-part exploration of something musicians do every day, but may take for granted: practice. Much of what is written about practice is either anecdotal, overly prescriptive, or does not take advantage of research in neurology, physiology, or psychology. An

Adolphe Christiani

Adolphe Christiani's 1885 Table

Among the things that grew tiresome and predictable to me while a conservatory student were the inevitable conversations about a performer having “fingers, but no musicality,” or “musicality, but no technique” after attending a performance. I certainly participated in these discussion as a young student, but after a while I

Giuliani Revisited: Part Two

Let the left hand know what the right hand is doing (Part One of this post is here [https://blog.christopherberg.com/2015/01/21/guiliani-revisited-part-one/].) Guitarists sometimes complain about the chords in Giuliani’s 120 right-hand exercises from his Op. 1. The complaints usually revolve around the movement from

arpeggio practice

Giuliani Revisited: Part One

Gedankenexperiment I wrote on the research page [https://www.christopherberg.com/research] of my recently redesigned website about how my Giuliani Revisited [https://www.christopherberg.com/store/books] began as a Gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment: how might Giuliani’s famous 120 right-hand exercises from Part One of his Studio per

A new year, a new website, and a new blog

First, a few words about the blog… My first blog, Pristine Madness [http://pristinemadness.com], started in 2009, and I intended it to be a place for me to write about whatever struck my fancy. It will continue to serve that purpose, but as you can see from the last