by Keith Calmes, D.M.A.

Q: How do you get a guitar player to be quiet?
A: You put a piece of sheet music in front of them!

As a life-long guitarist and guitar teacher, I love this joke and have told it for decades. If you also find the humor in it, then you probably agree that guitarists generally lack proficient reading ability. It is said that every joke contains an ounce of truth-even if that truth be a misconception. So, what is behind this one? Why are we considered bad readers? Is it the fault of the guitarist, the guitar teacher, the instrument, or the notational system?

After pondering these questions, I conclude that reading guitar music in one clef is difficult due to the instrument's wide range and polyphonic capabilities. Also, the guitar's diverse capabilities and notation systems (staff notation, chord symbols, tablature) require us to be multilingual.

Exploring the challenges of reading via monophony, homophony, polyphony, and tablature illuminates the multilingual challenges encountered by all guitarists; thereby facilitating more effective instruction and performance.

MONOPHONY: This is the musical texture shared with most other instrumentalists, and our critics' most resonant fodder. Notating guitar music in the treble clef began when the lowest note was just a D below the staff. The contemporary guitar normally has ten pitches below that. With more than one-third of the open-position notes now below the staff, reading on the guitar is burdensome. Ironically, the easiest notes to play are the most difficult to read.

Fernando Sor provides us with a viable alternative with his Fantasia, Op. 7, which was published in Grand Staff. When contemporary guitar composer Andrew York began working with Guitar Solo Publications, he was told to stop notating his works in Grand Staff, correctly assuming that classical guitarists would resist breaking with tradition. Notating two strings in the bass clef and four strings in the treble clef would be clearer than our present system. Would our young, less tradition-bound students excel when reading in Grand Staff?

Most beginning guitar methods teach students to read in open position without teaching them to play a scale. I remedy this by teaching students to play the E Phrygian Mode (the "Open Scale") before introducing reading. Guitar students should be able to play, name, and improvise with the Open Scale. Getting students to sing the scale will also benefit their ear training. Keep in mind that Suzuki veterans may prefer to begin and end the scale on the tonic, and that young students may not be ready to play scales yet.

The ability to play identical notes on different strings is a confusing aspect of learning to play guitar. By playing scales and reading in different positions, guitarists learn that choosing the appropriate string primarily depends on the outer ranges of the phrase.

Another challenge that guitarists encounter is that notes sound an octave lower than written. Simply being aware of this transposition will help remedy "octave confusion". But what would happen if we started reading guitar music at sounding pitch in bass clef? Since octave confusion plagues so many guitarists, it is ripe for ridicule: Q: Did you hear about the guitarist who knew what octave he was actually playing in? A: Neither did I (ba-dum crash)!

HOMOPHONY: Most guitar students begin by reading chord symbols, and harmony remains a real musical strength. Kinesthetic learners and the pop-music minded thrive in this area. Since Renaissance and Baroque guitarists used a similar system, chord symbols provide an excellent connection to guitar history.

Many guitar methods introduce reading 5 or 6 note chords in staff notation before establishing a chord vocabulary. Students should have a firm grasp of strumming chords by the time they read triads. I consider The Hal Leonard Guitar Method by Will Schmid the best in this regard.

POLYPHONY: When Andrés Segovia taught composers how to write for the guitar, he told them to think of the right-hand thumb of the guitarist as the entire left hand of the pianist! Guitarists and pianists both play polyphony at an early stage of their development.

Reading polyphony on the guitar is confusing because there is too much musical information for one clef, and the traditional rules of stem direction do not apply.

Playing polyphony on the guitar requires a great deal of independence, between both hands and fingers. Practicing independence exercises like rubbing your stomach and patting your head or making opposing circles with your hands assist in independence between hands. Independence among fingers of the right hand is best established by studying Mauro Giuliani's 120 arpeggio studies (try altering the volume of different fingers). Independence between left-hand fingers is best established by careful study of Segovia's Chromatic Octaves and Abel Carlevaro's "Fixed-Finger" exercises. Most of these are available in Scott Tennant's Pumping Nylon.

TABLATURE: It is fascinating that tablature is the most common form of guitar notation during the Renaissance, Baroque, and Contemporary periods. Al Gore couldn't have known that he would permanently alter the history of the guitar when he invented the internet! Many beginning students are now technically competent and literate in reading tab, yet resistant to learning staff notation. Though staff notation offers the most precise system, I remain convinced that we should be able to read all forms of notation. If independent exploration of the internet is so powerful, just imagine the possibilities of teacher-driven web assignments.

Notational challenges largely stem from the diversity of the guitar. This diversity also ensures the future of our instrument, since we are flexible enough to meet the demands of inevitable musical change. And that's no joke.

Keith Calmes, D.M.A.
Wall High School
Wall, N.J.

Keith Calmes' fifth book for Mel Bay Publications, Gospel Favorites for Classical Guitar , will be published this February.