Classical guitar

Ang Tigbuhat brought his family to the classical guitar concert at the Marcelo B. Fernan Press Center. The concert featured Tomonori Arai and Gen Matsuda, The Cebu Classical Guitar Ensemble, Franco Maigue and Monching Carpio. Not his whole family was there. His eldest son should have been there if only because he plays the guitar. But the word “classical” turned him off. His artistic life is for now faithfully dedicated to metal-core music. “Classical is for old people” or so he thinks. But Tigbuhat’s daughter and youngest son was there as well as Mrs. Tigbuhat. And he was thankful for that. It was a beautiful concert, with “beautiful” deserving to be mentioned twice.

But still he could not help missing his son as he watched and listened to the music. Few other instruments display the dexterity of a musician as much as the guitar. You do not  see the piano keyboard in a piano concert. But with a guitar, you see all 10 fingers, six strings, the instrument body and the whole fretboard. A guitar concert is not just music, it is  also visual performance. And all the players were more than up to par as performers go. By the end of the show, Tigbuhat could not help thinking he had gotten to know the performers better just by watching them play. He was midway into being entranced with it when his partner popped a most disentrancing question as she is wont to do with perfect timing. “What makes it classical?”

And so as the evening transpired, Tigbuhat’s right brain fell into groove while his left brain figured out that question long after he had replied: “Because it is more structured, completely annotated or transcribed and goes by the formalisms required of classical music.” A fine answer if he were trying to pass a standard college humanities course. But his brain was way less than satisfied with that easy answer. What indeed makes it classical and why should it be different from his eldest son’s metal rock? His son, by the way, does not find the term “rock” acceptable. The complete name of his music is “metal core.” Any other name refers to something entirely different. Or so be believes as he asserts the right to do.

Tigbuhat knows that names are always meaningful. They require an exactness of meaning described by very specific constructs. The world grows more complex, and this growing complexity requires  the construction of new words each with its own new meanings. And Tigbuhat pictured in his head a universal set called guitar music. Inside this universal set, many subsets of possible music could be played with a guitar: jazz, flamenco, Latin, reggae, pop, Bisrock, rock and roll, acid and, eventually, the subsets, metal core and classical. All the subsets share something in common, of course, but he was more interested with their exclusive constructs. The things that make them different.

The apparent constructs of difference are easy. We expect each of them performed inside different environments. The concert hall is not the same as a cafe or nightclub where we expect metal-core music to be played. The constructs of value and the appropriate expressions of appreciation are entirely different. Consequently, the performers dress differently and the audience as well. In a nightclub, we express our appreciation by staying longer and buying more to eat and drink. We can even scream if we want. We enter into the groove and the required trance of each construct of music differently, but we desire to go into it in both cases. The trance-like experience, the whole aesthetics of it, is its value.

But what is music for one may be noise to the other. And there are core differences between classical and metal-core music, which need to be understood, and they have something to do with technology. You do not do metal-core music with a classical guitar. This is a formal requirement, which is true to the same extent that you cannot put a gadget to a classical guitar and then put it on distort and then expect that the  result can still be called classical music. A classical guitar is essentially “unplugged.” There is no way around it. And then we might be tempted to say this difference is not at all essential but only superficial, boxed-in as it is inside such an ephemeral, ever-changing thing as technology. Will there ever come a time when the borders between the classical and other forms of guitar music blur and disappear entirely?

Tigbuhat does not think so. There is nothing to keep us from inventing as many new names as there are new music. But the “classical” will always remain a useful term. And when the concept of the classical evolves with time, we can always put an adjective to go with the name. Consider “contemporary classical.” Sounds contradictory? Not really. Viking Logarta may have been right when he postulated at the concert that classical guitar musicians are just as endangered as whales in our day and age. But judging by the number of young people at the concert, they are certainly far from dead. Classical guitar will always be there, but the players deserve better.