Andrew Williams interviews Raymond Burley
Raymond (Ray) Burley is mainly known as a performer and recording artist. Over a long and successful international career, he has played as a classical guitarist both solo, in ensembles, and with orchestras; collaborated with many guitarists, both classical and otherwise (for example, Gordon Giltrap, John Etheridge and Clive Caroll); premiered works by prominent composers; and performed with non-guitarist partners such as actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft, singer Jacqueline Fox, harpsichordist Gilbert Rowland and keyboard player Rick Wakeman. He has given masterclasses and directed guitar festivals around the world, and has recorded numerous albums.
If that were not enough, Ray is a much-published arranger, with arrangements and collections published by Schott, the London College of Music, D’Oz, Corda Music, Daminus, PWM and Durand.
The list now includes Bergmann Edition, with whom he has a growing number of published arrangements including those for two, three, four and five guitars, ensemble with soloist, and duo with requinto. Composers include Holst, Turina, Scarlatti, Gounod, Bartok, Haydn, Grieg and Vivaldi. The largest group is a collection of pieces for three guitars from the Iberia suite by Albéniz.
I arranged to meet Ray for an interview, deciding to focus entirely on arranging for guitar (there being plenty of information available about his career, musical approach and guitar history, including extended video interviews on YouTube).
My first question is – have you considered or tried composing for guitar?
I have never tried. Possibly I could, but I have no ideas for things I want to write. I enjoy arranging, and I think I’m good at it; why do something I’m not so sure I’d be good at?
But in your collaborations, you have written your own parts. You did this for the Gordon Giltrap classical guitar arrangements you recorded as duets with him.
Yes, given a harmonic structure I can do it. But I currently have no aspirations to write for solo guitar.
Do you remember how you first got into arranging, and realised it was for you?
It’s so many years ago now that I don’t remember the first actual piece I arranged. But the first book I did was for Schott, who approached me to put together an edition of pieces by Sylvius Leopold Weiss. I worked from the London Manuscript, which is in Weiss’s own baroque lute tablature, for 13-course lute.
In transcribing and arranging music of that sort for the guitar, you have to accept that you can’t play exactly what the composer wrote. You often have to take basses up an octave, shift voices around, edit down for playability, re-order some of the counterpoint. The job of the arranger is to make the finished arrangement as musically convincing as possible on the new instrument.
The book was successful and well received. It’s stayed in print for many years: in fact, it’s still sold now. I still remember the kick I got when I first found a copy in Patelson’s, a famous music shop in New York.
It was followed by more collections for Schott: Sanz, Dowland, Scarlatti. Each was different, each presented its own challenges.
The Sanz for example, which was written in tablature for baroque guitar, had its own quirks. All the early and later editions have errors in them, often simply resulting from a misplaced finger number in the tablature. I made the necessary corrections.
In adapting it to modern guitar, you have to, on occasion, add notes or leave notes out. Sometimes, by virtue of your knowledge of the instrument the piece was written for, you can complete the composer’s intentions.
When doing this work, I was most concerned not to compromise the authority of the original manuscript or second-guess the composer. I concluded that it’s OK to make changes as long as you tell people – so your edition is not purporting to be the definitive one. In the forewords to these editions of historic music, I was at pains to note and explain every change I made and leave it to the player whether to accept my changes.
Is there a different approach when you are arranging music written for other instruments?
Yes – there’s a big difference between what you can call transcription and what I’d think of as arranging. For the historic editions of Weiss and Sanz, it was more transcription. You are taking notation written in one medium and translating it into another form – that is, modern guitar notation. While you are doing this, you are also adapting where necessary but keeping as close as possible to the original.
Then there is creative arranging – taking parts written for one or more instruments and adapting them for the instrument(s) at your disposal. This can call for invention of some original material with the intention of achieving the effect of the original.
How much music theory and academic knowledge do you have to bring to bear when you’re arranging music? I’m thinking from the perspective of having confidence that your own creative contribution sounds authentic.
A lot. I was self-taught as a guitarist. When I could already play, I had some lessons with a Russian guitarist, Chesnakov (who was Julian Bream’s first teacher) and later with Julian Byzantine. The teaching was essentially about playing technique, learning and memorising from scores – in particular, with Chesnakov, it was learning and memorizing all of the Carcassi studies. But at that time there wasn’t a music theory component to the teaching.
I didn’t have a university education in music theory. But I have always had a great interest in those wider aspects of music – the emphasis being on music as a whole, rather than just guitar. I have learned everything I know about theory, music history and cultural context under my own steam, by reading and performing music and by reading musical theory texts and musical history and biography. I have done a great deal of this over many years and with huge interest. And then of course by doing – by making transcriptions and arrangements. By immersing myself in repertoire from every period and working with, and learning from, other musicians. Not just guitarists: I’ve worked with singers, other instrumentalists, orchestras and ensembles. And through teaching.
What’s the main impetus for you in arranging?
I arrange music for many reasons. Number one is that I enjoy it and feel I’m good at it. Then there is the ensemble playing. To play the sort of music I want to play with other musicians – singers, harpsichordists, etc. - mostly means I have to arrange it myself.
I’ve also done a lot of playing in classical guitar duos, trios and quartets, and I’ve found these combinations broaden the scope of what can be played on guitar—hence a lot of my arrangements for two, three and four guitars or combinations of guitar and requinto.
For example, I have arranged a lot of Albéniz’s Iberia suite for three guitars (these arrangements are published by Bergmann Edition).
There’s also a more general reason: to revitalise the classical guitar repertoire. That applies particularly to my arrangements for solo guitar. The classical guitar repertoire is fairly limited and has not changed a great deal over the years, and I want guitarists to be able to access a wider range of music by great composers.
What are your criteria for selecting a piece of music to arrange?
Essentially, it’s a matter of finding something I like, and something I know is going to work and sound convincing. It’s often a question of stumbling across something, rather than ‘selecting’.
I hear a lot of arrangements of music written for other instruments, particularly piano, which don’t work on guitar, to my mind. The music doesn’t suit the nature or the mechanics of the instrument. If the arrangement sticks too closely to the original and tries to include every note, it becomes laboured and comes to sound like a demonstration of technique. And by being arranged for and played on the guitar, the music can become diminished.
I don’t know exactly how I know a piece will work. I don’t have a list in my mind of things I must arrange – I come across them by listening, maybe just something I hear on the radio. Sometimes they are surprising; you’d never think of them as possible guitar/guitar ensemble things, but they have certain characteristics that make them suitable.
For example, I generally think of Beethoven as about as close as you can get to being off-limits for guitar arrangement; but I have recently arranged a single movement - the Allegretto - from his seventh symphony, for eight guitars. Think about it – a relatively small number of instruments, a light texture, a very suitable key and musical range. And it turned out well.
You have mentioned your Albéniz arrangements for three guitars. Talk me through your process for making these arrangements.
I start from the piano score.
The original manuscript?
No, a standard edition from one of the big music publishers.
The first thing is to work out the best key to fit the range of the guitar, so that the lowest bass is going to be a D. Then I’ll transpose the whole thing accordingly. I will happily use technology for this, such as the auto-transpose function in Sibelius.
Working with three guitars, you can get much closer to the piano score than you can with one. You don’t have to edit as much out: by distributing the voices efficiently you can keep pretty much everything from the original.
Identifying the melody is probably the first requirement. I’ve done scores with guitar ensemble and requinto, and in those cases, you have to give the melody to the requinto throughout and the other instruments become accompaniment. That’s not the case with a guitar trio. The melody, bass and supporting voices can be shared around the three players.
When one player hands the melody over to another, this gives the audience a chance to appreciate the musical development and hear clearly the composer’s intentions. And three guitars can articulate the internal harmonies and counter-melodies very fully and precisely.
The way I approach it overall is by asking myself “if Albéniz had been writing this piece for three guitars, what would he have done here?” I always try to find a solution that is musically convincing. I give myself permission to diverge from the original: I’m not trying to squeeze every single piano note from the original score into my arrangement. When I talk about ‘convincing’, I bring to bear my knowledge of the historical context and of the composer’s other work. It has to be appropriate to the era, the style, and the composer’s aesthetic at the relevant period.
Do you play the parts as you are writing?
No. At no point do I write with the guitar in hand, it’s all done ‘on paper’ (or screen). And I don’t add fingering – I leave that to the player.
Really? You don’t try things out on the guitar?
No, I know they are right and I know they are playable, so I don’t need to. When I’m working on an arrangement in Sibelius, I have the sound off. Before I send an arrangement to a publisher I will have heard the synthesised playback on Sibelius, but I don’t try them out by playing the individual parts and making multi-track recordings.
Going back to the album you did with Gordon Giltrap, “Double Vision”. If I understand it, these are new original classical guitar parts played with the original acoustic guitar parts written by Giltrap. Did you compose those parts on guitar?
No, again they were written purely on paper. I have really good relative pitch and massive experience of reading guitar scores, so I can hear it all exactly as it will sound without actually having to try it out.
It’s a major thing of mine with students too – I try to teach them to be musicians, not just guitarists. I do a lot of ear training exercises with them.
And in my own case, when I have a new piece to perform, I don’t immediately get the guitar out and start playing. I learn the whole piece by reading it first, before I ever play a note.
With students, I will give them a piece and tell them to write in their fingering for it, without actually ever playing it on the guitar.
Is this natural to you? Would you say you’re musically gifted?
I don’t know. There was no immediate genetic inheritance – no musicians in the family. But I did learn easily and quickly, and from first learning to read music I have always had an ability to hear it in my head.
You said earlier that Beethoven is the nearest to being off-limits for you as an arranger. Can you elaborate on that?
As I said, there are certain types of music that just don’t adapt well to the guitar. There may be some individual pieces that could work by composers whose music I wouldn’t normally attempt. But a composer like Beethoven normally requires resources well beyond the scope of the guitar. Most of the great piano composers, I wouldn’t touch. I love Schubert’s piano music, for example, but the brilliance of the piano writing, the cascades of arpeggios, the harmonic transitions, can’t be convincingly translated to guitar. Imagine trying to play Lizst on the guitar. And Chopin – for me the music and the instrument are inseparable.
I know there are virtuoso guitarists who have worked up arrangements of such things, but they are, to my mind, technical party pieces. A good guitar arrangement must sound as though it was written for the instrument.
What’s the greatest number of guitars you would arrange for?
The greatest number I’ve done so far was eight. However, that was a Handel concerto grosso which was already written in eight parts, so there was no simplification or modification involved.
Some of my things can be played by guitar orchestra, but in that case, you would be assigning a number of players to each part. That brings its own problems, such as ragged note starts and ends. Three is a great number to arrange for because it allows you to get very close to the composer’s score.
Do you know how many books of arrangements you have published over your career?
Honestly, no; I have lost count. But it is something I will always continue to do. I always have a project, and I often hear something that triggers my ‘that could make a good arrangement’ response.
Thanks, Ray, for an extremely interesting interview.