Ernesto García de León - 20 Estudios (20 Studies), Op. 50 - Collected Works, Volume 2 (kotta)

Solo Guitar
Composed by Ernesto Garcia de Leon (1952-). 20th Century, Contemporary. Individual part. 36 pages. Michael Lorimer Editions #6510659. Published by Michael Lorimer Editions (A0.918540).

Item Number: A0.918540

Ernesto García de León's 20 Studies, Op. 50 is an ingenious collection that addresses fundamental questions about how to develop and maintain guitar technique. It is designed to serve guitar teachers and students as well as performers and concert audiences. Since it explores not just the technique of our instrument, but its musical and expressive aspects as well, it makes daily technical work enjoyable, not tedious-even for someone only beginning to study the guitar.

For guitar teachers and students, 20 Studies can serve as a basic curriculum or it can complement other methods or other sets of studies. For performers, it provides a complete overview and tune-up of the guitar technique in one graded set of daily studies that can be played in less than half an hour. This warm-up then provides the player delicious concert repertoire-as the complete set, or in smaller groups, or in combinations with other music by Ernesto García de León.

These musical exercises are also useful to rectify, reform or rehabilitate the guitar technique.

The materials out of which the twenty studies are developed are first idiomatic patterns of the guitar and then the variety of musical styles so appealing to and characteristic of Ernesto García de León. For example, classic examples of the music of the Caribbean coastal basin in general and the composer's native state Veracruz in particular appear unvarnished in #12 (a rumba veracruzana) and #20 (a son). The other studies blend elements of Mexican music in general-songs of the revolution, native dances, boleros, children's songs, and so forth-with elements of European classical music, Beatles, New Age music, jazz and other musical styles, in a way intended to appeal to the player and to the listener.

As the summary on pages 34 and 35 illustrates, the first sixteen studies explore basic formulas for the right hand. At the same time, they also address the full range of left hand techniques-including balance and positioning, independence of the fingers, longitudinal and transversal movements, shifts by substitution, by displacement, by jump, and by positions, barring, stretches and contractions, damping, pivoting, crossed movements, and movements with fixed fingers. The last four studies concern the slur.

Though each of the basic right- and left-hand formulas explored in the twenty studies is relatively simple in itself, each is a building block of a solid technique. Mastery of the complete set of twenty studies-less than half an hour of music-integrates all the formulas and develops the technique to a level at which an enormous range of the guitar repertoire becomes available.