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New Interpretations and Perspectives

on Barrios’ Works
FEBRUARY 1, 2018

FROM THE WINTER 2017 ISSUE OF CLASSICAL GUITAR | BY CHRIS DUMIGAN

Given the popularity today of the great Paraguayan guitarist/composer Agustin Barrios (1885–1944), it’s hard to
believe that his name was relatively obscure until the mid- to late 1970s. That’s when John Williams first played
pieces by Barrios on British TV and recorded an entire album devoted to him, John Williams Plays Barrios
(http://amzn.to/2FzGAv7), released in 1977 in Europe and 1979 in the U.S. (To be fair, there were several
recordings of Barrios pieces by popular guitarists pre-Williams, such as Laurindo Almeida and Alirio Díaz.) Less
known even that Barrios’ compositions, however, were the recordings he made during the first decades of the
20th century. Those recordings—many scratchy and barely audible—provide a valuable window into Barrios’
genius as guitarist and composer, and also a reference point to understand his intentions for his work beyond
what any published music, much of it not overseen by him, could provide.

Barrios’ recorded legacy is a subject that has fascinated me for many years and has been a focus of my own
investigations. And now my interest has been piqued again by the recent publication of two huge, indispensable
volumes from Les Productions d’Oz of the complete recordings of Barrios transcribed by Dutch guitarist,
scholar, and collector of early guitars Chris Erwich: The Agustin Barrios Recordings.

First, a bit of personal background. It was through John Williams that I originally entered into the world of
Barrios; it was seeing a TV program that encouraged me—and many others like me—to look for any published
music by Barrios. That led me to Richard “Rico” Stover’s four-volume The Guitar Works of Agustín Barrios
Mangore (the first part of which was published by Belwin Mills in 1976), as well as publications by the Peruvian
guitarist and Barrios expert Jesus Benites, the first of which was published by the Japanese company Zen-On
Music a year after Stover’s first volume. Both researchers’ works were the culmination of much travel around the
Americas, unearthing every manuscript they could find, whether by Barrios himself (rare) or by others
attempting to transcribe the recordings.

It was in Stover’s preface that the magic words, “He left a legacy of recordings” leaped out at me. There were
precious few details provided there—just enough to whet my appetite—so after much searching, I acquired
cassettes from the U.S. of a lot of the recordings. Upon realizing that a large number of the recordings were not
in either Stover’s or Benites’ publications, and that even the ones that were often differed significantly from
those published versions, I decided then and there to set about transcribing all of them. It took me three years,
from 1980 to 1983.

Of course the quality of the recordings, taken directly from 78s, varied from OK to awful, with the majority of
them being the latter. Still, the recordings were made available subsequently on LPs, and then on CD, by which
time new recordings had also been discovered and included in Barrios box sets. By this time, my completed
transcriptions from the recordings had been published as The Recordings of Agustin Barrios (I believe I was the
first to do so), and then a number of other books sprang up in various sizes from a number of sources, but
nobody attempted to do a complete set again. In 2002, Rico Stover revised his volumes into two large Mel Bay
publications, asking permission on the way to include my transcriptions, which by then had fallen out of print.
The only exceptions were Barrios’ recordings of works not written by him, which did not go in the Mel Bay
volumes, but were amalgamated into a Lathkill Music volume, Barrios: The Arrangements, which is still available.

And so everything remained until this year when Chris Erwich’s two books came out. I asked Chris to explain his
motivations and his modus operandi.
“First of all, I felt a need to make transcriptions of Barrios’ work because I found out there were significant
differences between his own playing and the available scores, sketches, and manuscripts. The early records
seemed, in my opinion, better maybe even [than] ‘final’ versions of some works. Besides that, a lot of works did
not even appear to be handed down at all on paper.

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“The point of view behind my publication is that I wanted to have a score which could be interpreted. I did not
want to write down Barrios’ interpretation [precisely], because he would sometime lose the beat and/or generate
strange rhythms.

“When we listen, for instance, to Segovia, Rubinstein, and other romanticists, there is a difference between what
they play and the original score because of their phrasing. With Barrios this is even more the case. Not only does
Barrios play extremely freely, but there are also many examples showing that he had difficulties in keeping long
notes held down. Because of that, I had to go back to basics. Quite a few pieces are based on well-known tunes,
so I did research into this music and started to listen to folkloric music, listening to the beat and how the
measure is built up by those specialists, and then, after doing this, trying to reconstruct the score.

“A second difficulty was how to get the right notes. Pitches change, because of the wear and tear of these old
records, and overtones may even become dominant. Audio editing software—changing the sound waves into
.wav files—makes it possible not only to slow down the file while remaining at the right pitch, but also to change
or take out dominant or weird sounds. Even so, there were problems to overcome writing down the right notes. I
therefore asked Carlos Salcedo Centurion to make new digitizings of several records with special gear supplied
by Michael MacMeeken and Federico Sheppard, which resulted in my hearing more frequencies. This whole
process took me many years.”

Each of the pieces has an appendix afterward explaining details Erwich feels are important, and these in
themselves are often fascinating and enlightening.

Not all the known recordings of Barrios’ have been included, as there are some that appear in catalogues and
lists but which have not been found, such as two pieces from one double-sided Atlanta-label recording—La
Morocha Paraguaya by Raccioppi and Estilo Regional, a Barrios original—and five of the six one-sided discs
recorded in 1921 for Odeon—Madrigal, El Hijo Prodigal, Pagina D’Album, Geromita, and Rapsodia Americana, all
Barrios compositions. Perhaps these will be discovered one day and could be included in an expanded edition.

Of the 68 extant recordings of Barrios playing, just two are not in Erwich’s books. Fernando Sor’s Minuet, Op.11
No. 6, recorded for Odeon in 1928/9, was not included because it already exists in a published version, and
Barrios made no attempt to “arrange” it, (which is not the case with the two versions of Tárrega’s Capricho árabe,
which exhibit a few minor differences and therefore are included). The second is Barrios’ arrangement of Franz
Lehar’s Oro Y Plata Vals, a very free version which bears little resemblance to the original. This is absent because
there were copyright issues and the necessary permission was not granted; a shame.
The story of Barrios and his recordings is an ever-evolving one, and should the seven known other recordings
come to light one day, our knowledge will evolve once again. Until then, however, this latest edition should be in
the hands of any lovers of Barrios.

Agustin Barrios Mangoré plays La Catedral

 2 Comments Sort by Oldest

Add a comment...

Fabio Zanon
Dear Chris, thank you so much for your minute work on Barrios' music and for the detailed and
fascinating article. There is a point, however, I'd like to make about the often-repeated statement that
Barrios was a relatively obscure composer until the 1970's. I am far from being a revisionist and no
one can deny the impact of John Williams' extremely popular 1977 Barrios LP, not to speak of the
ever-evolving editorial work made by Stover, Erwich and yourself, which has widened our perspective
on his production. Nevertheless, to be more precise, Barrios never ceased to be played in Latin
America… See More
Like · Reply · 30w

Acácio Oliveira
According to the great historian and archivist of the guitar Ronoel Simões, Mangoré had an
appreciation of the Brazilian guitarist culture having stayed in Brazil, especially in São Paulo. Ronoel
reported to my person moments of encounter with Mangoré to listen to the psycho "Choro da
Saudade" mirroring in the work the rhythm of the Brazilian syncopated.
Like · Reply · 3w

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