Daniele Russo interviews Daniele Russo
 

    d.r.      Why have you decided to dedicate yourself to the improvisation?

   D.R.      I have to confess that I began my artistic training when I was 3 or 4 years old,
                but not with music.
                My father was a painter, so it was natural for me to follow his example.
                I spent my childhood strewing my drawings everywhere in my home.
                But music entered in my life very early, too. Before learning to write, I
                was able to sing most of Stravinsky Fire Bird suite.
                I could play by ear any musical instrument and one of my favorite hobbies
                was to invent melodies, simply singing them. I used to spend hours a day in
                doing this.
                Only some years later I began to study seriously an instrument, the guitar,
                in the class of  M° Mauro Storti, former pupil of Andrès Segovia.
                So it is true that I began to improvise before beginning to study music.
 

    d.r.      You are a very eclectic person. Do you think this is an advantage or not?

  D.R.      From a career point of view, surely not. To open one door is easier than to open
                several ones.
                But from an artistic point of view, I think that the more experiences you add
                to your cultural background, the more widened your vision becomes.
                So if  I didn't go throughout painting, photography, advertising or computer music,
                not to mention Physics and Astronomy, I think I could not play the way I do.
                Probably, I could not even have got the idea of giving myself to improvisation.
                The general current bad attitude towards eclecticism, is perhaps the greatest
                damnation of our modern age.
                The general trend is: the lesser you do, the better you do it. But this is not necessarily
                true. It was not true for Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Newton or Einstein.
                And if specialization is admissible in applied sciences, is absolutely absurd in art.
                From nothing you get nothing. If you want to say something new in art, you have
                to look around, to be receptive. An artist absorbs from outside, filters and then
                gets back his personal vision to other people.
 

    d.r.      What can you say about the guitar technique?

   D.R.      The more I play the guitar, and the more I get convinced that instrumental technique
                is a mental matter. You play with your fingers, but it's your brain that guide them.
                This can seems an obvious assertion, but it is not.
                When I was about twenty, I remembered that sometimes I played some passage too
                fast, and I got confused. I analyzed this problem, and I discovered that my fingers had
                no fault for that.
                Simply, beyond a determinate speed,  I was not able anymore to have a mental
                vision of my actions on the fingerboard.
                My mental speed was a little slower than my fingers speed, or my fingers faster than
                my mind.  It's somehow like those young and restless dogs that go further beyond their
                owners, and then stop confused without know where to go.
                So I began concentrate my study on my mind, trying to enhance my brain
                capability of imaging, or more exactly of simulating the act of playing.

                To improvise, this mental vision is absolutely necessary. It is somehow similar to
                converse with someone else.
                When you speak with somebody, you do basically two things.
                One is moving your mouth, obviously. But the other one is thinking about what
                you are going to say next. So when you say "halloo", you have just computed in your
                mind the phrase "how are you, can you tell me where did you put my Bach scores".
                And you imagine not only the words, but  also the very act of spelling
                them, with all the physical sensations involved in the act of speaking.
                And that's not all! While speaking you think about grammar, syntax and even
                the most appropriate tone of voice.
                All this happens in a fraction of time, but requires years and years of apprenticeship
                to become an instinctive process.
                To improvise is a similar process, even though far more complex.

                I also dedicated a lot  of years to the quality of sound on the guitar, experimenting
                different nail shapes ( for a short period I also tried to play without nails at all,
                after having read a book on Llobet).
                The quality of sound is of paramount importance in transmitting emotions with music.
                The first thing in a musical performance to capture your attention is the beauty of the
                sound. Only afterward, you begin to pay attention to the music structure, too.

                My aim was not simply to find something good for me, but to understand the physical
                process involved in the production of the sound, and consequently to find the most
                appropriate shape of nail to produce the most beautiful and powerful tone is possible.
                The best tone on the guitar is produced by the combined action of nail and fingertip
                on the strings. Since you can modify the fingertip, you have to work on the nail shape.
                I studied for years the interaction nail string, and what I understood is that the nail
                physically works as a sort of amplifier of the action of the fingertip on the strings.
                Moreover, the fingertip is responsible of the low frequencies part of the entire tone,
                the nail of the high ones.
                And  the process of the touch can be divided in three phases: attack, friction, and
                release.  The third step is perhaps the most delicate, cause it can destroy all the result.
                I studied the problem in the same way engineers do in aerodynamics with race cars
                or planes design.
                The nail acts like a section wing of an airplane, the so called camber.
                What a good wing has to do, is to exert a precise action on air to get a sustaining effect.
                The point is that what a wing designer looks for, is not the form that generates the lesser
                friction, but the form that exerts the required action on the air fluid.
                For the nail, the required action is to amplify the fingertips, and to add high frequencies.
                So what we have to find is not a nail shape exerting no friction on strings, but a nail
                shape exerting the right friction on strings to get the right action.

    d.r.       And how did you find it.

                Experimentally, as engineers do.

    d.r.       Do you try also new techniques, like little finger's use, or other strange things?

   D.R.      I'm convinced that in the next century guitarists will use all fingers of their right hands.
                It's a goal pianists have already reached. I's the natural and logical consequence
                of a a technical evolution process started with the lute : Francesco da Milano used
                to play with two right hand fingers, Giuliani with three, Segovia with four, and the
                "Virtuosi" of the 21th century will surely use all of them.
                I usually practice with my right hand little finger, and even though I have developed
                a good agility with it, by now I have not yet achieved the same tone I can obtain with
                my other fingers. Anyway it's a recent study for me, so I don't despair.
                Some years ago I also invented a new right hand technique, I'm still perfecting it.
                My goal was to perform very fast series of chord, not played with a rasgueado
                technique, but all in one.  Pianists usually do this, but on the guitar it's rather
                impossible to get it. The simple fact is that you need a little time to get your fingers
                positioned again in the attack position.
                When you play a chord on the guitar, you must get your fingers away from your palm,
                and then strike the strings. It's a two phases process, and only one phase produces
                the sound. In this way you can't play quickly chord series. That's because only one
                phase  of this process is active. And  you can't eliminate the non active phase, like
                you can't sing without inspiring sufficient air before.
                So I thought, if you can't get free of something useless, transform it in something useful.
                Why do not strike the strings also while your fingers are getting away from your  hand
                palm?
                This way you can double the frequency of the stroked chords per movement.
                It took me a lot of time to get acquainted with this strange technique, but now I begin
                to master it. It's like to slap someone's face with both the palm and the back of your hand.
                It can be terribly effective!
 
 

   d.r.        How do you study improvisation?

   D.R.      I study progressions, modulations and all the elements that play a role in a musical
                composition. I compose music in my mind and with the instrument.
                I explore several ways I can develop a theme, a melody, or a part of them.
                I study the styles of the past, and those belonging to nowadays.
                I study how great composers like Mozart or Beethoven worked, directly on the scores.
                I like to improvise in the ancient styles, I mean Renaissance recercare, or a baroque
                toccata. Now for example I'm going through the 19th virtuoso music, the Giuliani
                and Aguado period.
                Anyway the style I like the most is the modern and contemporary style.
                I want to point out that what I want to get by improvisation is not to display
                my ability in recreating ancient forms or to give scholastic demonstrations
                of the musical styles through the centuries.
                My first aim is to communicate emotions to the public. The most important
                thing to me, is to be inspired, not to play a "toccata" instead of  "minuetto".
                Otherwise I should end to give a museum recital.
                I want to be spontaneous when I'm on stage. I don't want to plane my improvisations.
                When you begin to play, people doesn't know where are you going, and you too.
                This uncertainty creates a special feeling in the public, a special attention to what
                you are playing, in a word, the suspense.
                It's like when you are looking at a thriller film: what get you fixed in your chair is
                the fact you don't actually know what's happening next.
                If you already know how a film ends,  your feeling is no more the same.
                You can appreciate it, like it, but it is not the same thing.
 

  d.r.        What does music means for you?

                Music to me is a great continent, a world, an entire universe to explore.
                It's a universe inside our minds, it's a travel in our very human essence.
                An ancient painting portrays trees, mountains, human beings, in a word: nature.
                But an ancient music, say an Handel concerto, or even the most so cold descriptive
                music as Vivaldi  "The four seasons", describes nothing real.
                Chords don't live on trees, and rivers don't produce any sort of harmony.
                Music, since its beginning, has always lived only in the mind of men.
                It is part of the inner psyche of men. It is a language that can communicate definite
                emotions, without communicating definite notions.
                I think it could be very interesting  to investigate scientifically in how music  can
                influence directly the emotions zone of  our brain, bypassing any kind of notions based
                communication. If I tell you a sad story, it's normal you get sad.
                But why do you get sad listening to a simple minor chord. And why listening to Mozart
                Requiem you get sad in a way that is different than listening say, the 2° movement of
                Beethoven 7th Sinphony. I have a theory about it.

    d.r.      Can you tell me something about it?

    D.R.     My idea is that music somehow reflects the very structure of our brain, I mean our
                neural connections. Neurons work with a binary language, as computers do.( I know,
                there's something alarming in this). So, emotions must originate from a mathematical
                language too, even though enormously complex. Our brain analyzes harmony, I mean
                vertical intervals among notes, and melodic lines, that is horizontal intervals among
                notes. The fact is that brain analyzes mathematical ratios of notes, more than the notes
                themselves. And these musical ratios in space and time,  cause emotions in our brain
                because they share the same elements, the same basic words of the true language of our
                mind. It's somewhat like a software works in a computer: on the monitor screen we
                see words, photos, windows, animation, but the hardware is working with a language
                made of numbers, codes and other things for hackers.
                And all these non visible languages are based on a simple binary code.
                We speak with words, but our  brains work with numbers.
                What men really did in developing music from the beginning of our civilization,
                was to build a language, with its grammar, its syntax and so on, based on these
                musical ratios. Music can move us by mathematical ratios.
                That's why music had often been drawn near magic or mathematics.

    d.r.       So according to you, music is only a math matter?

   D.R.
                It's like to ask  a DNA researcher if life is a math matter. The more we go inside
                life processes, and the more we have to deal with numbers.
                But I think that even if life turns out to be only a  terribly complicated math matter,
                all we should not cease to be humans. The entire is more than its parts, and this
                is particularly true in life processes. So even if we are made up of protons and
                electrons, we are not just  wandering masses of subatomic particles.
                We are human beings capable of laughing, crying, loving and so on.

                Awareness of the electrical, say biochemical processes involved in our sensitive
                processes doesn't alter anyway our human pleasure in listening to a Bach concerto,
                or in looking at a Velasquez painting.
                I want only to point out that whereas a classical painting contain ratios taken from
                nature, music contains ratios taken from our neural schemes.
                Reason and instinct must live together. Learning more about  ourselves doesn't
                take away anything from our essence, as a photo can't  steal our soul.
                Being aware of  what is a white dwarf or a chefeid, doesn't reduce anyway my wander
                in contemplating the magic of a starry night.

     d.r.      Do you play the classical repertoire, too?

   D.R.      Surely I do. I keep studying and enlarging  my repertoire.
                I'm a classical guitarist, and  as improviser the classical repertoire is my model.

    d.r.      And what do you think about the contemporary music?

    D.R.    Well, this is a very delicate matter. I have a strong feeling with the music composed
                in the first half of the 20th century, Stravinsky, Bartok, Shomberg, Ravel,  Richard
                Strauss,  and  for guitar M.M. Ponce, Rodrigo, or Castelnuovo Tedesco.
                For the second half, I'm a little more selective. I like music that is intelligible, that
                is composed to transmit emotions, not just to try an experiment.
                I like Britten, Dodgson, Walton, Smith Brindle, I mean all those composers who
                use a contemporary language without denying our tradition.
                I don't those composers whose philosophy can be reassumed by the statement:
                "music is dead, art is dead,  reality has revealed to be governed by casualty laws,
                so also music has to be causal". If the supreme goal of the western thought turns to be
                an artistic suicide, sorry don't count on me.
                It's undeniable that nowadays cultured music is not in good health at all.
                This perhaps is due to an excess of philological or archeological attitude.
                In the past  musicians used to play their own music, not someone else's one. (exactly what
                happens today with pop music). They did not play late music, but they tried to
                incorporate it in their style.
                Music in the past was a very alive thing. In Bach times, a piece was rarely played two
                times. Music was made to be used, not to be conserved.
                Today it is often made to be conserved, not to be played, given today's audience
                couldn't understand it.
                I'm not saying that our modern philosophy is better than the old one.
                It's wonderful to have 59 different CD edition of the same baroque suite, or to have
                a deep awareness of  the past music, as never before.
                I only think that perhaps we have gone too further in that conservative direction.
                It seems to me that tradition inhibits too much contemporary composers from making
                true and genuine music.
                It is like we look at the past and think, what else we could do after
                Bach, Beethoven, or Debussy? We could study them to produce something, but it is
                a too hard job. It's better to deny all the old tradition, and put some old sauce pan inside
                a piano.
                I'm simply saying that we are extremely aware of the past, as never happened before,
                but at the same time extremely unable to use it to do something new, as never before.
                We collect historical data, but we can't connect them.
                This does not happen with pop music. Pop music, even though featuring very simple
                structures, though projected towards the future, is well anchored to the past, and to
                people feelings.
                Stravinsky hold that what next generations would have remembered of the 20th
                century, won't be his or other cultured composer, but Beatles' songs.
                I think he could be right.

   d.r.       What do you think about ancient music performed with ancient instrument.

   D.R.     It's a wonderful achievement of our days. I mean we have reached an awareness,
               a deep knowledge of the past never dreamed before. We play ancient music better than
               ancient people did. Getting serious, I'm very happy to hear Ton Koopman or Gustav
               Leonhardt philological performances.
               But I'm also very happy to hear the same pieces played by Glenn Gould on the piano.
               I mean that I disagree with those musicians who condemn every performance with
               modern instruments of music dating later than fifty years ago.
               It's a strange thing: musicians of the past, especially the baroque ones, were terribly
               projected toward the future. We, men of the future, are terribly projected towards the past.
               I'm sure that Mozart would have played on a Steinway, if he could had one of them.

   d.r.      I see you prefer the ancient approach to music than the modern one.
               Don't you see in this a contradiction with your with your previous so scientific assertions.

   D.R.      May be. Anyway this contradiction is innate in human nature. We are animals and
                scientists at the same time.
                We are finite creature capable of  conceiving infinite things.
                I think that in past century there was a wiser conception of the art. Our time is the time
                of science and technology, not of art and philosophy.
 

     d.r.      What do you feel when you are on the stage and gonna start improvising?
                Are you afraid?
 

   D.R.      I'm very excited, very nervous, but I'm not afraid.
                Whereas while studying I'm very analytical, playing in concert I want to be more
                instinctive. My study aim is to make instinctive something that usually is not.
                I get the inspiration and  music starts  flowing. Anyway I always keep an overall
                lucid control over the matter. It's like to divide myself in two persons.
                A part of me is totally immersed in the music, and  another part is very alert to
                my execution, and to the reaction of the public.
 

    d.r.       You give a lot of importance to the public?

   D.R.      When I play in my home, I play for myself.
                When I play before the public, I give the greatest importance to it.
                Improvising, I have the great advantage of communicating directly with my public,
                with my own ideas. So I always try to find the right language to communicate with
                the persons I have before.
                Further, I listen to people suggestions, and I compose pieces commissioned at
                the moment.
                Music is a joyful thing, and I want my concert is a sort of feast.
                Music is a wonderful intellectual game, an alive thing, and I want people to feel it.
                I want people to understand how music is made, how the composition process works.
                Classical music is usually seen as a museum item, and, that's worst, it is often played
                like that.
                This is one of the reasons of its scarce appeal to most of people.
                I sometimes have this horrible vision: 2200, a concert hall where a quartet of polished
                and aseptic musicians in smoking, are performing some Beatles songs with great
                philological transport to a silenced audience, while a child is sent out of the hall
                because was beating the rhythm with his feet.
 

      d.r.    Which guitar do you play?

                At the moment I'm playing a wonderful guitar made by Tobias Braun.
                It is basically a traditional spruce guitar, very similar to the a 20's Santos Hernandez.
                Its sound is deep, powerful and crystalline at the same time, and I can achieve
                an impressive vibrato in the Segovia style.
                I'm really very fond of it.
                I also own a beautiful old Ramirez concerto with a very warm and noble voice.
 

    d.r.       What do you think about Segovia.
 

   D.R.      Listening to Bream I learnt to love modern music, listening to Williams I learnt
                to love perfection, but listening to Segovia I learnt to love the guitar.
                Now is very "in" to criticize Segovia, but he had the power to move your soul
                with his tones. He possessed a special way of accentuate phrases, giving
                them an hypnotic quality. He made the guitar the noblest of the instrument, without
                losing the intimate and popular side of it.
                He was a wizard, a demiurge of the interpretation.
                Segovia should be studied, analyzed, as pianists do with Rubinstein or Horowitz,
                but he had a personality so strong, that the cultured guitar world has reacted to his
                death trying to remove his imagine from the collective memory of guitarists.
                Something is changing. My regret is I didn't know him personally.
                Anyway I knew him well through his art.

    d.r.       What plans do you have for the future?

   D.R.      At the moment I'm promoting improvisation with all my forces.
                I hope I will be given the possibility of giving more and more improvisation concerts.
                I take the occasion to thank you for posing to me such appropriate questions.
                You demonstrated an extraordinary feeling towards my activity.

    d.r.      Thanks to you, Mr. Russo.