Mastering The Sounds of Silence

By Michael Walsh

They laughed when Andres Segovia sat down to play the guitar. The nerve of the ( man, bringing a flamenco instrument into the hallowed precincts of the concert hall. "That stupid young fellow is making useless efforts to change the guitar -- with its mysterious, Dionysiac nature -- into an Apollonian instrument," wrote one skeptic after Segovia's 1910 debut in Madrid. "The guitar responds to the passionate exaltation of Andalusian folklore, but not to the precision, order and structure of classical music."

That assessment was, to say the least, inopportune. When he died last week at 94 in the Spanish capital, Segovia had put the guitar on a near equal footing with the piano, violin and cello as a solo concert instrument; he had also won for himself a place among the most influential performers of the 20th century.

Sitting quietly, almost motionlessly onstage, protectively cradling his six-string Hauser guitar, his left hand moving swiftly and smoothly across the frets, his right hand flicking the strings gently with its fingernails, Segovia was a picture of concentration. A Segovia recital was as hushed as a whisper, as rapt as a prayer. "If people have even a little understanding," he once said, "it is better to move them than to amaze them."

Born in Linares, a village in southern Spain, young Andres briefly studied the violin. But his teacher was a harsh martinet, and Segovia was unmoved by the sound of the instrument. "The violinists and cellists I heard in the Granada of that time seemed to extract catlike wails from the violin and asthmatic gasps from the cello," he wrote in Segovia, his 1976 memoir. "But even in the hands of common people, the guitar retained that beautiful plaintive and poetic sound."

He came by such feelings practically from the cradle. When Andres was a child, his uncle would strum an imaginary guitar and sing: "To play the guitar/ You need no 'science'/ Only a strong arm/ And perseverance." Segovia took this instruction to heart; aside from a few lessons from a strolling flamenco player, he was self-taught. His tastes, though, were sophisticated: Spanish music by Fernando Sor and Francisco Tarrega, baroque music by Bach and Purcell and works by such contemporaries as Benjamin Britten and Heitor Villa- Lobos, many of which were written especially for him.

Behind the bland, avuncular exterior, Segovia was a man of strong feelings. The electric guitar, of course, was anathema, and he denounced rock music as a "strange, terrible and dangerous disease." He often compared the guitar to a woman and boasted of his fidelity, yet he married three times. Nor was he so self-effacing as his calm demeanor and, late in life, his sometimes indifferent performances suggested. Given the guitar's limited repertoire, Segovia felt no compunction about arranging and reworking music for other instruments. "The composer has to work through me," he said. Indefatigable, he practiced five hours a day and even in his 90s was still playing up to 60 concerts a year around the world. He was also a tireless teacher whose students included Julian Bream. This, in fact, may prove to be his most enduring legacy; once scorned by academia, classical-guitar study is now offered by some 1,600 schools of music in the U.S. "Segovia's guitar does not sound loud," Composer Igor Stravinsky once observed, "but it sounds far."