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Richard Yates' Classical Guitar Transcriptions

Frederic Chopin - 21 Selected Pieces

Transcribed by Richard Yates for guitar solo
Published by Guitar Solo Publications

Review by Stephen Dick, Acoustic Guitar Magazine, December 2002
Chopin Variations: Guitar transcriptions of the music of Frédéric Chopin

Transcriptions have always been a large part of the classical guitar repertoire. They allow guitarists to expand their range to include works by great composers who didn’t write for the instrument and provide opportunities for new insights into those works by taking them out of their traditional settings.

Piano music is both a temptation and a challenge for guitarists. Many of the greatest classical composers, often virtuoso pianists themselves, wrote some of their finest works for the piano. But there are a number of factors that make transcribing piano music for the guitar a formidable task. First, there’s the difference in range. Low tunings and harmonics aside, the guitar has only a three-and-a-half octave range compared to the piano’s seven-and-a-half octaves. There is also the issue of playable range. Even a beginning pianist can easily play four octaves in any key and still have six fingers left over. For the guitar, what’s possible depends on the key. This restriction to certain ranges within certain keys limits how piano music can be transcribed for the guitar.

One subtle problem associated with transcribing piano music to the guitar is resonance. With the piano’s 88 sets of single, paired, and tripled strings, pianists can shape the resonance that arises from the sympathetic vibrations of all those strings whenever one note is played. That’s the purpose of the pedals. Lacking pedals, or at least the right kind of pedals, there is a limit to the sympathetic vibrations guitarists can use to color a note.

Another subtle problem is interpretative tradition: guitarists have no access to the insights of generations of players of a given piece of music. For pianist/composers such as Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and Bartôk, the interpretative tradition starts with the composers themselves. Artists developing interpretations of these composers works can reach back through generations of performance tradition to find insights into the music they’re playing. A guitarist performing a transcription is essentially playing a new piece and may even have to work against the cultural memory of traditional interpretations of that work.

For all these reasons, the more pianistic a composer’s work, the more resistant it is to transcription. As one whose music helped define piano music during its richest period, Chopin has often been considered untranscribable. In transcribing Chopin to the guitar, the transcriber is forced to confront all of the challenges described above and come up with what is basically new music.

Richard Yates and Stephen Aron have both recently faced these challenges. In Frédéric Chopin: 21 Selected Pieces, Yates has chosen to transcribe a variety of Chopin’s works in both standard notation and tablature. In The Complete Chopin Mazurkas, Aron focuses instead on Chopin’s mazurkas, transcribing and recording all of Chopin’s work in that form. Broadly speaking, Yates’ approach is to make these pieces guitar music, to place them where they lie most comfortably and naturally on the instrument. Aron’s approach is to create transcriptions that are as true to the original scores as possible. Both approaches require making choices, and the transcribers’ art lies in how they handled these choices.

One can make direct comparisons of their choices in the eight instances where Aron and Yates have transcribed the same piece. In some cases, they have chosen to transcribe a given piece into different keys. In other instances, they have made different choices as to what notes to leave out or whether to move a given note up or down an octave. Yates has chosen to omit the phrase marks while Aron includes them.

Aron has also chosen, as much as possible, to be true to the range of the original pieces. In many cases, this means he has had to place much of the upper range of a piece above the l2th fret or in artificial harmonics and extend the lower range by tuning the sixth string as low as B or as high as F. This makes Aron’s transcriptions more challenging to play. Sometimes these challenges overwhelm the music; in having to reach a difficult note, the guitarist will have to abandon the use of resonance that is so much a part of Chopin’s piano music. But when this approach works well, as in Aron’s transcriptions of Mazurkas, Op. 33, No. 1, and Op. 68, No. 3, the result is very exciting.

The pleasure in Yates’ collection comes from his inclusion of some of Chopin’s best-known work, such as the Étude, Op. 10, No. 3 (you’ll know it when you hear it). Both in the range of works included and in the manner in which they have been transcribed, Yates has made the music of this popular composer accessible to guitarists.

Aron’s three-CD recording of the mazurkas is an impressive feat in itself. But it does underscore the difficulty of programming a composer’s entire output in one form. However attractive these pieces might be in their original groupings of three to five pieces, taken as a whole they can melt into a sameness that hides the subtlety of each piece. Also, Aron’s interpretation of these pieces often puts the accent on the first beat rather than on the third, giving these mazurkas more of a waltz feel.

Both guitarists demonstrate their knowledge of Chopin and his music and include a fair amount of information about the composer, his music, and his life, as well as performance notes on the individual pieces. Taken together, these add up to a rich survey of works by a composer whose music is not often heard on the guitar.

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