Words of Inspiration

Few people suspect what the study of an instrument demands. The public watch the music-miracle in comfort, never dreaming of the ascesis and sacrifices which the musician must perform in order to make himself capable of accomplishing it…

Don't you agree with me that there is in the world of Art today a great crisis which threatens the love of work, and that we musicians might set an example of morality in this field? It is impossible to feign mastery unless he who undertakes that adventure supplements the generous gift of the gods by the stern disciplines of lifelong practice.

But as for us pianists, violinists, cellists and guitarists – how many hours of pain and self-abnegation, how many weeks, months and years do we spend polishing a single passage, burnishing it and bringing out its sparkle? And when we consider it 'done to a turn', we spend the rest of our lives persevering so that our fingers shall not forget the lesson or get entangled again in a brambly thicket of arpeggios, scales, trills, chords, accents and grace notes! And if we climb from that region of technique to the more spiritual sphere of interpretation, what anguish we experience in trying to find the soul of a composition behind the inert notation, and how many scruples and repentings we have before we dare to discover what does not lie hidden in the paper!

-Andres Segovia



In some sense this is what I intend for this journal to be about. I want to keep things focused very specifically on my guitar life and those other aspects of life which I feel have some influence therein. It is intended to be both self-reflective, and a public record of the work and striving of a guitarist who is doing music solely for the love of music, and for the sublime satisfaction of perfecting an art (and in so doing to imitate some part of the Creator-image, which gives the Creator both pleasure and glory).