Romantic Entry

Kevin Sweet
Music History
2-20-08


Listening Journal


For my fourth entry, I chose Suite Espanola, no.1 and no. 2 by Isaac Albeniz. Guillermo Gonzalez is the name of the performer, and while I have never heard the music of Albeniz played on a piano before, I do know of his music. The first time I ever heard the music of Albeniz, it was the fall of 1998 and I was living in Lawrence Kansas. I was walking down Massachusetts street, headed towards a coffee shop to meet with a group of friends. The sun had just set and the weather was getting wet and windy. My casual walk slowly turned into a power walk and, finally, evolved into a marathon run.

I entered the doors of the coffee shop, to escape being hit by thousands of drops of water, only to be bombarded by thousands of musical notes by a live classical guitar player named John Jervis. He had just begun playing Asturias, and I quickly forgot about how drenched I was and I greeted my friends with a winded and dumbfounded hello. Here was this older gentlemen with long, white, Einstein-looking hair, playing some of the most beautiful music I had ever heard on a solo guitar. As a guitar player, all I knew how to play at that time was essentially rock music and just looking at the mechanics of his hands astonished me.

As long as I live, I will not forget that night. Little did I know that close to ten years later, I would be getting a degree in classical guitar performance. The transcriptions of Albeniz’s Suite Espanola are among the most famous and widely played music for the classical guitar. Andres Segovia, Julian Bream, John Williams and Pepe Romero are some of the superstar performers who have helped spread the music of Albeniz to an evolving audience.

Albeniz utilizes great skill when crafting and developing his themes and melodies by shifting into surprising tonalities, creating momentum and tension. I know I would quickly paint myself into a corner if I had the responsibility of composing music that was remotely close to the Suite Espanola. After straying away from main ideas, Albeniz does a remarkable job of using chromatic sequences and slight changes in dynamics to create a bridge, leading back to familiar territory.


Isaac Albeniz is a great example of a Romantic era composer who uses thematic material as the basis of composition. Albeniz is a master of developing ideas and building large amounts of tension, taking a melody through jagged pathways and submerging them into unstable waters. The Suite Espanola no.1 is around forty minutes long and consists of eight movements. A serenata, corranda, sevillanas, saeta, leyenda, fantasia, seguidillas and a capricho. Suite Espanola no. 2 is a little over ten minutes long and consists of a Zaragoza and Sevilla.

It is difficult for me to imagine where the classical guitar would be today, if it were not for the help of someone like Isaac Albeniz. His compositions are rightfully apart of the guitar canon and will forever have its place in history and in the musical landscape.