Why I Teach: David Tanenbaum

A new-music champion teaches classical guitar as a living art.

By Mark Small

Photo Credit: Rory McNamara David Tanenbaum is one of Americas top classical guitar performers and educators. In addition to concertizing throughout the world, Tanenbaum has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for 25 years and is the schools guitar department chair. Widely recognized as a champion of new guitar repertoire, he has commissioned and premiered works by contemporary composers Aaron Jay Kernis, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Hans Werner Henze, and others. In recent recitals, Tanenbaum has been featuring new pieces composed for the National steel guitar fretted in just intonation and in D A D G A D tuning. During a recent conversation, Tanenbaum shared some thoughts about how he encourages students to explore the changing world of classical guitar. Whats your approach during your first meeting with new students? TANENBAUM I spend time interviewing them. If you listen carefully to students, theyll tell you how to teach them. Everyone learns in a different way. I ask them what their dreams are and what they want to do with the guitar. I get a list of their repertoire and ask them what they are good at and what they need to work on. I assess their technical strengths and weaknesses from hearing them play. From there, I develop a plan for them. How do you work with a student who comes from a nonclassical background? TANENBAUM Thats actually pretty common. If you scratch the skin of a lot of classical guitar players, there is a rock history under there somewhere. I find that theres a separation between what the students study at the conservatory and what they listen to when they go home at night. I want to know what they are

listening to so I can help them bring the fun that they have with other styles into their classical experience. Its really important for students not to think of classical music as a museum piece. They need to know that it is alive and well and full of experimentation. I work with living composers a lot and have been involved in the creation of some of the repertoire that I play. I get my students playing new music and encourage them to work with young composers at the school so that theyll be actively involved in the process of creating the repertoire they play. We also offer a transcription class where students make their own arrangements. Through these activities, they experience classical guitar music as a living art. Are you noticing any trends among young players that you feel bode well for the next generation of classical guitarists? TANENBAUM Yes. Most students want to compose, and I find guitarists today are more open to ensemble playing. In the Segovia era, classical guitar was a solo-recital art. Solo recitals are not as big a part of the work for any instrument these daysincluding violin and piano. I think thats a healthy trend. I dont think you are going to become a rounded musician by sitting in a practice room playing by yourself all the time. Guitarists are coming to me with better ensemble skills. They recognize that its fun and you become a better musician by collaborating with others. Playing in an ensemble also helps to develop sight-reading skills. When players are reading by themselves and get stuck on a passage, they stop to fix it. That interrupts the flow. When sight-reading to get the sense of a piece the first time through, you have to keep moving. When reading with an ensemble you have to keep moving too. Students learn to reduce the music a bit if they cant keep a third line going or get every note of the chord the first time through. This improves sight-reading. Whats the most satisfying aspect of teaching? TANENBAUM Seeing students perform is instructive and sometimes very exciting. I think I learn more about them by watching them onstage than any other place. Teaching is full of surprises. Sometimes you have lower expectations for a certain student and then they really get it and take off. Back when I was studying with Aaron Shearer, Manuel Barrueco and Ricardo Cobo were studying with him too. In a repertoire class one day, Shearer looked around and said, There are some people in this room who will change the guitar world. There was this quiet guy who was just an average studentit was Michael Hedges. No one had any expectation that he would do what he eventually did for the guitar. Students sometimes go in directions that you dont expect. How I Teach: Playing from Memory Tanenbaum feels strongly that to become a serious professional classical guitarist, a student must learn to perform confidently from memory. One of the teachers at the conservatory was advocating that we just let the students read if they want, but I dont feel this will prepare them for the real world, Tanenbaum says. Theyll need to play from memory for competitions, recitals, and concertos with orchestra. Some students can play pretty solidly, but if they get nervous, their memory goes. To help build his students memorizing skills, Tanenbaum uses a visualization technique he learned in part from his teacher Aaron Shearer. Tanenbaum maintains that most people play from muscle memory alone, relying on the physical movements of the hands to lead them through the music, and that visualization provides an effective backup system of memorization. I teach my students to visualize playing through a piece in their minds away from the instrument, Tanenbaum says. To do that, they need to be able to visualize and hear every note. The first step is to study the scores without the instrument, hearing the score in their head while looking at it. Next, I teach them to play through the piece mentally under tempo without looking at the music. If they get stuck on a passage, they should open up the score and study that passage, thinking about how they play it on the instrument. The

third stage is to play through it mentally away from the score. I see a real difference between those players who visualize and those who dont in terms of the solidity of their memory. MARK SMALL is a classical guitarist who has released seven guitar duo CDs. He wrote an arrangement for the LAGQs Grammy-winning recording, Guitar Heroes. Visit Marks website at www.smallclementeduo.com.