Last one to the barré: a Piazzolla challenge
Having got a couple of my lockdown challenges learnt (and in one case edited) and casting around for the next piece to try, I’ve been inspired by some great video performances of Sergio Assad’s spectacular arrangement of Piazzolla’s invocation of winter, Invierno Porteño (from his Estaciones Porteñas). It’s a challenging but deeply satisfying arrangement which presents substantial challenges for the left hand, particularly in the need for barré positions. How to tackle these?
I’m fortunate to have played extensively and (one-time) professionally over the years, but nowadays am in the category of musician-with-a-day-job, so time for practice is limited. With practice comes strength and stamina, which for me are the first things I notice slipping if, for some reason, I skip a week or two of serious playing. But barrés are not just about strength. A whole bunch of things contribute to being able to — apparently effortlessly — hold a position with a barré over many measures, with (of course) all sorts of other intricate things happening with the remaining LH fingers. Here’s what I have found helped over a few weeks of working on the piece.
A little, often
One thing that’s helped me is to have an instrument on a stand and readily available: breaking up the work day with three or four short sessions on some of these exercises is one of the small silver linings of pandemic-induced working-from-home. It’s good to have an excuse to step away from the screen and keyboard, and the cycle of exertion/relaxation helps develop strength gradually.
Use the force, Luke. No, not brute force…
It’s tempting to regard the barré as a trial of grip strength. Finger strength is important, of course, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Make sure you are aware of the mechanics of the barré as it relates to body, bones and muscle, in particular:
- The human grip evolved for holding branches, clubs and spears: essentially circular objects. So holding a finger straight with a grip from the thumb behind is not optimal, and very quickly leads to fatigue of the whole hand.
- You need the finger straight, then pulled onto the strings and the fingerboard with just enough weight to stop the strings cleanly. To do this, the LH knuckle should be level with or just in front of the fingerboard — if it’s tucked behind, in a ‘normal’ playing position, your first finger cannot help but be curved. LH thumb moves to the bottom edge of the fingerboard, or may even float free — it’s not the thumb that’s balancing the force pulling the finger down on the strings (see below!).
- With a straight finger, you can start to use a combination of gravity and the stronger stable muscles of the arm, shoulder and body core to bring the strings down to the fret. These muscles are much much stronger than those flexing the finger joints. You need to be aware of which muscle groups you are using — for sustained effort you want to be activating posture musculature rather than those responsible for explosive strength and speed.
- To balance the angles and forces, you may need to change your posture for the duration of the barré. Try several alternatives — for example, adopt a slightly more vertical orientation of the instrument, or lean forwards to help the left forearm come round the instrument a little more. As always, be aware of how the parts of your body are working together — what you’re aiming for is a compact sensation of drawing the barré into your body core, not an impression of awkward exertion. More on this below.
- Because the force on the fingerboard is greater, and is being exerted by the arm and the body, you will need to counter this by putting a little more of a squeeze on the lower bout of the guitar with the right arm. You might find that a bit of reverse physiology works — by exerting a little more force with the right arm, you may naturally find yourself pulling the left arm into the body, which will help.
Energy where it’s needed
One of the best barré exercises I heard from (I think) a video of David Russell’s. Rest the straight first finger over all 6 strings at (say) the 7th fret, without pulling the strings down to the fingerboard. Now pick a string, and apply just enough work to make that string sound clearly, without a buzz, when plucked. The neighbouring strings should still be muted, rather than stopped, with the first finger. Relax without removing the barré, then repeat on another string. Continue until you’ve sounded, then relaxed, across all six strings. Try different combinations of strings — 1st and 6th, for example, or 3rd, 4th, 5th.
The principle of energy where needed applies to the whole hand. One of the challenges of barré work is keeping the second, third and fourth fingers mobile and able to access all strings and frets, including extensions. We find this in what to me feels like the most challenging handful of measures in Invierno Porteño, m.81–84:
A shift in time
Being able to quickly convert a four or five string barré to cover all six strings (and vice-versa) is a useful technique in many corners.
The best barré is one you don’t play
Sometimes we’re trapped into playing a barré by a fingering that doesn’t work for us. Experiment and be imaginative in alternatives. Here’s Assad’s fingering for m.10–13, followed by what works better for me:
It’s dangerous to be absolutist about fingering, but I will make a case for the second solution being musically and physically preferable. Musically, the three measures 11,13,14 form a sequence, broken by the melodic variation of m.12. It feels awkward to me to break the pattern with a different fingering for the last of these bars. Physically, the alternate fingering requires a smaller barré, that doesn’t need to extend for the whole of the measure, and the extensions between LH fingers 2 and 1 (in m.11 and 13) and 4 and 3 (m.14) are — at least for me — more secure than the 2–3 extension that Assad requires.
Know how your fingers work
Guitarists’ hands vary hugely in size, flexibility, skin condition and thickness. I have slender fingers with large-ish joints and not a great deal of padding in the skin, so the position of my first finger in the barré is critical. Depending on the access I need, I’ll notate some barrés with the word ‘deep’, to remind me to place the barré a little further into the fingerboard than I might otherwise.
And… relax
When you’re practicing these techniques, in exercises or in passage practice, if at any time you start to experience tension, just stop. Early signs of this include too much tension in the other left hand fingers, inhibiting their movement in stopping and releasing strings. With your hands and body in position, relax and let your muscles find their way back to equilibrium. With practice, you can incorporate this into performance — the ability to quickly return to minimum effort after a complex and perhaps strenuous passage is a good habit to cultivate (this and many other lessons I take from Josh Waitzkin’s book The Art of Learning — there applied to chess and martial arts, but I’d suggest that peak musical performance is just as demanding on physical and mental states)
Exercises
Analysing the respective sections of a piece and building focussed exercises to isolate the technical challenges should be part of every player’s way of working — it is important not to simply pound away at the measures you find challenging. Here are a couple of the patterns I’ve used to work on strength and flexibility:
Envoi
There are of course many other pieces in the repertoire that need this kind of stamina (immediately at mind are Sor — the first movement of the C minor Fantasia, op.7, and the B-flat study, Op 29/1, and the Tarrega/Alard A-major study). Focused work on any of these will help the rest. It’s worth keeping one of these pieces in your warmup repertoire to maintain strength and flexibility. The physical and mental work I’ve done on the Piazzolla has also helped in other repertoire — body awareness, having different physical and musical options at any point in a piece, and maintaining a flexibility of approach, all transfer to fluency on playing in general.
I’d be delighted — and grateful — to hear of any other suggestions, strategies and solutions for developing strength and flexibility in the barré — comments are, as ever, more than welcome!
Postscript
After three or four weeks, here’s the result. Still the odd rough corner, and a with a tiny edit in the video to cover a small memory lapse. But the barré sections are basically sound. https://youtu.be/TZqB8uAhlDA
