{"id":5103,"date":"2016-11-30T14:02:25","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T22:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=5103"},"modified":"2016-11-30T14:02:25","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T22:02:25","slug":"manuel-barruecos-school-days-the-long-road-from-difficult-student-to-master-teacher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/manuel-barruecos-school-days-the-long-road-from-difficult-student-to-master-teacher\/","title":{"rendered":"Manuel Barrueco\u2019s School Days: The Long Road from ‘Difficult Student’ to Master Teacher"},"content":{"rendered":"
From the Fall 2016 issue of Classical Guitar<\/em><\/a> |BY TH\u00c9R\u00c9SE WASSILY SABA<\/h6>\n

The American-Cuban guitarist Manuel Barrueco established an international career at a young age, and not only were his abilities admired and coveted by his guitar colleagues, but the general classical music world was taken by his outstanding musical and technical abilities\u2014the beauty of the sound he produces is something that remains with you after every performance. Barrueco was signed to EMI and made a number of landmark recordings, both solo and with such musical luminaries as Pl\u00e1cido Domingo, Barbara Hendricks, Emmanuel Pahud, and Al Di Meola. Over the course of his more than three-decade international performing career, he has played in top concert halls around the globe, alone and with many of the best orchestras. He is, quite simply, one of the most accomplished and respected guitarists of our time.<\/p>\n

Alongside his amazing career as a seemingly tireless traveling musician, he has always taken time to share his knowledge through teaching. He began teaching in 1974 at Manhattan School of Music in New York, and this year he celebrates his 25th anniversary of teaching at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although students travel from all over the world to study with him, he says that he was not the easiest student in his youth. It was this aspect of his life that I focused on in my recent interview with him\u2014his life at Peabody as a student and later as a teacher.<\/p>\n

CLASSICAL GUITAR:<\/strong> The Peabody Conservatory has been a part of your life for decades, but what about your musical studies before you arrived at Peabody?<\/p>\n

MANUEL BARRUECO:<\/strong> Immediately before Peabody, I went to an arts and music high school in Newark, New Jersey. At that time, they didn\u2019t teach the guitar, so the teacher suggested that I play the tuba. When I got hold of the tuba and saw how heavy it was, I changed to the French horn. I played that for a couple of years while I was there\u2014the teacher told me that I had a very good sound. So there I wasn\u2019t doing much with the guitar at all.<\/p>\n

Before I went to Arts High\u2014in late 1968 or early 1969\u2014I had been studying guitar with Rey de la Torre in New York. It wasn\u2019t for long because he soon moved to California. For a Cuban, he was a legend. I had never seen him play and he was making a comeback from a hand injury. When I went to his concert in Town Hall in New York, the Mexican composer Carlos Ch\u00e1vez was there also; I remember meeting him and being very impressed with that.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> Was it exciting being at a specialist high school for talented young musicians?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong>\u00a0No, it was actually a very difficult time. When we first came from Cuba, we stayed in Miami, where many Cubans were settling at that time. I was seeing a lot of my family members there again, so that was a really happy time for me, but after less than a year, my family moved up north and settled in Newark, New Jersey. Newark is a city with problems, and of course we didn\u2019t have a cent\u2014we were refugees.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> And in Miami you had lessons with Cuban guitarist Juan Mercadal.<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Yes, Juan Mercadal was very gifted. He made a recording back in the 1960s and it is really at a high level. If you listen to that recording, you can tell that he was singing. I mean truly singing, because sometimes people talk about singing but it is not really singing, just mannerisms, but he was singing as he played. I remember that he told me\u2014this was back in Miami 1967\u201368\u2014that I should play a melodic instrument, and I remember he mentioned the trumpet, to develop a more melodic, singing style of playing. But it was not because of that that I learned the French horn.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> After the arts and music high school was it a natural step forward to go and study the guitar at Peabody Conservatory?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> That was also a little strange in the sense that I didn\u2019t know anything about the schools to study the guitar. I had only heard of one in New York\u2014the Mannes School of Music, which had a well-known guitar department at a time when there were not many at all. The guitar teacher at Mannes was actually a violinist. The career guidance office came up with three schools with guitar departments in the US: Mannes, Boston Conservatory, and Peabody. So I auditioned to them all. But you know, because we were refugees, we didn\u2019t know how things worked here, so we made a lot of mistakes.<\/p>\n

I had applied to Mannes and to Boston, and Mannes gave me a small scholarship and Boston offered me free tuition. Because of that, I was thinking of not auditioning at Peabody. But I got a phone call from Aaron Shearer at Peabody and he said he wanted to meet me before the audition. Years later I found out it was because my letters of recommendation were good\u2014one of them was from Juan Mercadal and I think the French horn teacher from high school also had written one. I explained to him what had happened in terms of money and scholarship with the other music schools and that I was thinking of not going to do the audition, and he said to me: \u201cCome and audition.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I did the audition and he said he wanted me to come to study there. And he said, \u201cIf the school doesn\u2019t give you a scholarship, I will pay for it myself.\u201d I told him that I hadn\u2019t been practicing the guitar for over a year and that I didn\u2019t know how I was going to feel with the guitar. He said, \u201cWell, it doesn\u2019t matter, I want you to come and study here.\u201d So I went there.<\/p>\n

When I was at Peabody, I had no interest in playing the guitar and I didn\u2019t practice and he kept insulting me and sometimes would tell me that I would never amount to anything. I must have been difficult, but some of the things he taught I believed in and I think helped me become whatever it is that I am today.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> Despite all your difficulties, you did graduate from Peabody, didn\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Yes, I did graduate. There were problems. Shearer told me there was a time when he was called in because they wanted to expel me from the school because I wasn\u2019t doing my work. He told me that he told them, \u201cYou can do that if you want but one day you\u2019re going to be sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n

The school was nice to me. In the last year of my course, Shearer threw me out of the class, so I didn\u2019t have any more lessons with him for one and a half semesters or so. He was fed up with me. He said: \u201cDon\u2019t come to the lessons; I will pass you.\u201d When I went to see the dean, I kept explaining to him, \u201cI can\u2019t take a path that I don\u2019t believe in.\u201d I told him that if I ever became a great player, I wouldn\u2019t mind giving him credit, but I didn\u2019t want to not<\/em> get there, doing something that I didn\u2019t believe in, and having to blame him for it.<\/p>\n

\"barrueco-with-student-oscar-somersalo-classical-guitar-magazine\"<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> After you graduated, you actually went to teach at Manhattan School of Music, which seemed like an unlikely job for you.<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Well, there was a ping-pong table at [Peabody] and I used to play there a lot. One day, [guitarist\/teacher] David Tanenbaum came down and asked me if I wanted to teach in New York\u2014the Manhattan School of Music was opening a guitar department and his father, Elias Tanenbaum, who was a composition teacher there, had been asked who they should hire. David wanted to recommend me as one of the teachers as well as his old teacher, Rolando Blades. They hired me, so that\u2019s how it happened.<\/p>\n

There were a few years where I started to get really busy and I stopped teaching because I thought it might not be good for my image, but at that time, a violinist, Stanley Bednar, who was head of the strings department there, said to me, \u201cAll players should teach.\u201d At that time I didn\u2019t know what he meant, but I came to realize that you learn from doing it\u2014you learn from teaching and from the students and most importantly, from those who view playing music as an art, and not a business or as show business. Then, if you are going to do as you preach, it keeps you more pure.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> So Peabody really has been an important part of your musical life.<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> I was also very grateful to Shearer. I would not have been able to go to Peabody and I would not have become the player that I have become if it had not been for him. Musically, the first thing that I learned from Shearer was to try to look at music in an intelligent way. Up to that time, I had been only working intuitively or by imitating things that I had heard before. So musically and technically, he taught me to begin to think\u2014to use my brains and not just to do things blindly or intuitively.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> Did you argue with him more about the mechanical aspects of playing or was it about the musical interpretation?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Both. The first technical thing was the sound. For example, technically the biggest issue was that I belonged to the school that plays rest stroke wherever possible. I had not developed a really good free stroke, and he believed in free stroke as the stroke of the instrument. I understood the importance of developing my free stroke, but when he showed me the sound he wanted me to get, I said, \u201cI\u2019m not going to play with that sound. That\u2019s not going to happen.\u201d So I went home and I came back basically with the sound and the position that I have now. He was thrilled with that, so that did not become an issue.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> Are you telling me that you went home one day and worked out how to produce that wonderful sound that you have just overnight\u2014just like that?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Well, I don\u2019t know if it was overnight\u2014it could have been. I just remember going home and working on it, trying different positions, and finally thinking, \u201cThis is it! This is the sound I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> Were you looking for a free stroke sound that sounded like you were doing an apoyando<\/em>?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Yes, basically, that was my goal.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/strong> When you are teaching now, what do you do when someone comes in and he or she doesn\u2019t have very good tone?<\/p>\n

BARRUECO:<\/strong> Your sound is important\u2014if you have a beautiful sound, it is priceless and you need to have it. What I do is make them hear it, to see if I can wake up their ears and make them hear the sound. Some people hear, some people don\u2019t and leave with as bad a sound as when they came. But some learn\u2014they hear it and they go home, like I did, and they work on it. That\u2019s very satisfying for me.
\n