𝟏𝟎-𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫 ♪ 𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐨 𝐘𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐬 on Why the Classical Guitar Needs 𝐂 𝐁♭ 𝐆♯ & 𝐅♯ Strings 

See Yepes's friend and student, Fritz Buss, talk about the 10-string guitar and recount the history and intentions behind Yepes's innovation: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ab2fSbCwEWk.html

Les 10 cordes reste les plus spectaculaires guitare. Narsiso Yepes, un grand artiste

One has to wonder why pure and simple science attracts so much opposition. Add artistry to science, and something very close to perfection arises. If a few rare people can additionally explain and articulate the science and artistry, the subject is perfectly illuminated - to the receptive heart and mind. The senses of hearing and appreciation should do the rest.

Und er war super und humorvoll und liebevoll und ein Gentleman.

I ❤ Narcisio!

A few things should be pointed out. First, where at 02:05 Narciso says “most people who’ve talked about the 10-string guitar have talked about it without seeing or hearing it and they’ve already expressed their opinion against it,” he is referring indirectly to Andrés Segovia-that is, to Segovia and his official propaganda platform, Guitar Review’s hypocritical attacks, which promulgated various falsehoods, e.g., that Fernando Sor never saw any reason to use a guitar with more than six strings (well, in fact, Sor wrote several compositions for a 21-stringed guitar!) or that the ten-string guitar was made by the addition of “four thick tongues.” In fact, Narciso never added four thick strings below the range of the sixth string, only the one (seventh string, “C”) that could be variously tuned up, as much as a major second, or down, as much as a minor third, with the intent of easily fretting on it those other low basses that are to be found in 13-course lute music. [1] How do I know that Narciso is referring to Segovia? Because he explicitly says so in another interview, conducted by Fred Kazandjian, at Narciso’s home in Cabo Roig, in which the latter says: “The first criticism was from Segovia, before he had seen or even heard the instrument, soon after Ramirez made the ten-string guitar.” (1992: 234) And why do I describe Segovia’s attack on the ten-string guitar as “hypocritical”? Well, aside from the obvious, namely, that it is intellectual dishonesty to criticize something you have not even seen or heard, the fact is that Segovia wrote “frequent letters” to José Ramirez, complaining about “muffled” notes (which the latter sometimes wrongly refers to as “wolf” notes), as, e.g., in this exchange preserved in Ramirez’s book, Things about the Guitar (199): “[T]here are two notes on the first string that do not have the same intensity as the others,” said Segovia. “I would like you to repair it…” Well, that’s exactly one of the things that Narciso’s innovation was about, that is, not the addition of “four thick tongues,” as Segovia disinformed people, but a solution to the disparity between certain (in relation to one another) excessively resonant notes and some other “muffled” ones that Segovia himself, to his high degree of artistry, had begun to notice and dislike and that Yepes, to his own high degree of artistry, noticed even more consciously and understood how to address in a way that neither Segovia nor Ramirez were able to figure out. (The latter muddied the waters of understanding by juxtaposing his ridiculous, viola d’amore-like contraption alongside Yepes’s ideas, under the same rubric of “The Ten-string Guitar,” but the acoustic fact is that the only thing accomplished by a guitar with EBGDAE strings on the outside and the same EBGDAE strings inside a hollowed-out neck is to add more strings that over-ring in sympathy with the guitar’s already resonant notes while adding none sympathetic to any of the muffled notes other than an always freely-ringing G. This is the antithesis of Yepes’s ideas, despite the fact that both have something to do with sympathetic strings-a superficial similarity, like that between Yepes’s guitar and any other historical guitar with ten strings. It’s another example of intellectual dishonesty.) Second, if any of my subtitles are not to somebody’s liking, may I remind said “somebody” that I did ask for help from native speakers and that the only person who was kind enough to help me was a German-speaking person, who translated the dialogue from the first of these interviews. (One would think that there are Spanish people who would be more invested in supporting such endeavours, but I had the same experience when I approached the German and Spanish missions to South Africa concerning archival documents for my film, “A Meeting of Minds,” about Narciso and Fritz Buss. Long story short, the German Consulate in South Africa had the documents retrieved for me from Germany; the Spanish embassy never even replied.) As for the rest of the translations, I had to rely to a large extent on what little Spanish I have via my elementary French and, in the case of the Japanese interview, mostly on AI. (Automated translation of Japanese is, of course, notoriously problematic.) But, aside from all of that, yes, I have taken the liberty of adding information in square brackets so as to avoid misinterpretations. And, here and there, I’ve translated not Narciso’s literal words but what I know to be his particular understanding of certain words, e.g., “transcripción.” Besides whatever I might know about Narciso, indirectly, by knowing Fritz Buss very well, Narciso publicly explains his conception of “transcripción” in other interviews. It is with such understanding that I translate “transcripción” as a re-arrangement of the music in such a way that it compromises relations between notes that form melodic or bass lines. An example of this is when a guitarist transposes an individual bass note up/down an octave within the context of early music because (s)he doesn’t have the proper bass available as an open string or for some other ‘reason’ like putting a low note where it doesn’t belong because (s)he needs to find an excuse for having otherwise uselessly low basses. Likewise, without “transcripción” means, for Narciso, not without transcribing tablature to notation and not without ‘transposing’ a merely nominal ‘original’ key into its guitaristic equivalent (e.g., D-minor to E-minor), but, instead, it means without compromising melodic relations between notes, including those that form the bass line. ▀▀▀▀▀ [1] Concerning a related bit of disinformation: I take issue with Rob MacKillop’s intellectual dishonesty,[2] claiming that Narciso never intended to play his resonator strings until, supposedly, Maurice Ohana gave him the idea by writing his “Tiento” for 10-string guitar. In fact (as Banjo Gandalf surely knows), in 1963, Narciso commissioned the Ramirez shop to build a 10-string guitar according to Narciso’s ideas about resonance and awareness of the demands of baroque lute music. He received the resultant instrument in March of 1964, whereas “Tiento” was written for Narciso in 1957, for six-string guitar, and later adapted for 10-string guitar by Narciso, as were Ohana’s “Synchronies” (I won’t speculate by whom), which became the seven pieces collectively known as “Si le jour paraît….” Besides, just the fact that Narciso consciously made the seventh string the lowest and not the tenth-just that fact alone-would indicate to any intelligent person that his idea was always to fret (at least) the seventh string-because there’s a reason for making it accessible-and to play strings 8 to 10 open (at least), because these re-entrant strings correspond (for a reason) to the open basses of both the 11-course baroque lute and Carulli’s decacorde (I mean the decacorde proper and not what some people just call a “decacorde”) instead of being an octave lower, at a pitch so low that they would be useless for playing any lute or so-called “multi-string” guitar music without compromising the relations of the bass line. [2] To qualify, above I say “intellectual dishonesty” because that is what it is when a person propagates misinformation and does nothing to publicly retract, remove, and correct it when that person is provided with facts to the contrary. It was a similar situation when, nearly two decades ago, I accused one Janet Marlow of intellectual dishonesty for claiming that, according to Narciso’s words in a particular interview, he added 4 strings to the guitar because, supposedly, it lacked resonance in “four” (not eight) of the twelve notes of the scale. Well, in fact, Narciso says “eight,” not “four,” in the referenced interview, as he does in two of the above interviews. That, then, together with my justified criticism of John W. Duarte and exposure of intellectual dishonesty in his mutually-contradictory ‘reviews’ or attacks on Narciso, of course, opened the floodgates of hatred that flowed towards me from a certain clique of Anglo-American ten-string guitar dilettantes ever since, instead of adopting the facts and reframing their views accordingly, as any intellectually honest persons or true scholars or true scientists (including true musicologists) do all the time. I will add, there can be no legitimate discourse when one side of a conflict habitually resorts to intellectual dishonesty of this and other kinds-not that discourse between experts and dilettantes is a sine qua non or “God-given right” any more than it is between, say, a virologist and an anti-vaxxer concerning the efficacy of a vaccine or a quantum physicist and a theologian concerning the nature of reality. One speaks from hard-earned facts (s)he is willing to amend, if falsified; the other from received opinion and egoic attachment to it.

People often arent honest. Narcisio was.

00:07 Interview A [𝘈 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘕𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘺] 01:35 Interview B [𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘷. 𝘎𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘴 𝘷. 𝘓𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴 | 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘓𝘦𝘴𝘴 & 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺] 02:23 Interview C [𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 | 𝘓𝘶𝘵𝘦 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤] 04:54 Interview D [𝘜𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘰𝘯-𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘴] 06:58 Interview E [𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳 𝘏𝘢𝘥 𝘔𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 6 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 | 𝘚𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 & 𝘉𝘢𝘤𝘩'𝘴 𝘓𝘶𝘵𝘦 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤] 12:24 Interview F [𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘶𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴] 12:43 Interview G [𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦]

Thank you Viktor for putting together this valuable information. Much appreciated.

A lot of thanks for this videos😊😊😊😊😊

Super Video.DANKIE!(=DANKE)

Ausserdem konnte er Gitarre spielen wie kein anderer

Die Grösse Fehler einzugestehen haben nicht viele Menschen.leider...

Whatever they say- I think its just jealousy