Few guitarists are able to successfully fuse the worlds of classical and flamenco guitar: Adam del Monte is one of the rarities. He is not just an artist, but a highly articulate teacher, and I was fortunate to attend a recent masterclass he gave students at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. He played a newly-designed Altamira N700 flamenco guitar (the company sponsored his tour) rather than his usual Erez Perelman guitar with D’Addario classical guitar strings.
It was brilliant insight for any guitarist and, while much advice was specific to the three students who played pieces, I’ve summed up some of his universal observations below.
Classical music versus flamenco and jazz
“The approach to rhythm is very different. Flamenco and jazz are much more ‘on the grid’ than classical music. In classical music, the first thing that we listen for is tone quality and melody. In flamenco, the first thing we listen for is rhythm (in the rhythmic forms).”
This reminds me of something one of my teachers once said: the flamenco guitar is fundamentally an instrument of rhythm, not melody. Just watch the way flamenco guitarists often set the groove with a series of rasgueado using nothing but muted strings.
On rhythm
“Rhythm is the one thing that gives a sense of security to the audience and to yourself. And thinking rhythmically and thinking groove-wise is what actually gives you the joy in playing.”
“You have to have a sense of where the pulse is but at the same time, inside that, you want to be able to push and then retrieve in a way that doesn’t destroy the sense of security of where the pulse is… but at the same time isn’t flat.”
“Anything that’s rhythmic, you need to subdivide. The more you subdivide the units in your mind, the more control of the groove and driving the rhythm [you’ll have]… rather than seeing it in big terms.”
Crescendo
“Crescendos aren’t just like a knob where you make the radio louder… they’re degrees of intensity as well. So you want to feel that crunch harmonically, the tension – you want to bring that out.”
Don’t practice, program
“I would replace the word practice with the word program… I believe when we’re so-called practising we’re really programing bits of information into our muscles.”
We can all play and hope for the best – practice as repetition – or we can slow things right down and mindfully program our bodies to play consistently well. Adam’s advice to one student whose legato section wasn’t as smooth as it could be:
“Be mindful of two things. One, what is the sound you want to create? What has to happen on a muscle response level to create that? There’s the poetry of music and there’s the physiology of music.”
Break it down
“When you practice/program, be very patient with the process and take little bits at a time. The smaller the chunk that you bite off of something, the better you can chew it all the way. And then what happens is that it becomes really good… You play as badly as you tolerate. Once you create one phrase that really sits very nicely in your hand… that sets the standard for the rest of the piece – you wont accept anything less than that.”
Always return to the basics
Adam’s advice to two students centered on the fundamentals of technique, including right hand position and the way the fingers pluck the strings. Everything rests on the quality of the basics.
“So much of preparing yourself as a guitarist really has a lot to do with being very patient with process. You know you’re going to go through hell with it and you have to embrace it. It never ends.”
He mentioned Carcassi Etude No. 1, Op.60 and No. 7 as core pieces. “Those are for life because they will set you.”
Musicians need to train like athletes
“There’s 15 or 20 different things not obviously related to the discipline that a professional athlete does: conditioning of all kinds, stretching, strengthening and speed, long running, short running, burst running… So I take a lesson from that philosophy.”
Take lifelong responsibility for learning
“It’s a process – you and yourself, it takes a little time. In the end, you have to be your own teacher. Teachers and people tell you things but in the end, we’re all different, we understand things differently, our body works differently than each other and any bit of information that’s out there, the way we process it, the way we apply it, the way we program it into our bodies, is going to vary. So you really have to re-teach yourself everything. And there’s this moment where the student has to cut the umbilical chord from their teacher and it’s the decisive action that has to happen in your mind and heart – taking responsibility for your own continued learning.”
