{"id":7754,"date":"2017-08-28T16:27:42","date_gmt":"2017-08-28T23:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=7754"},"modified":"2021-07-16T12:20:36","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T19:20:36","slug":"raphaella-smits-on-her-guitar-education-mastering-period-instruments-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/raphaella-smits-on-her-guitar-education-mastering-period-instruments-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Raphaella Smits On Her Guitar Education, Mastering Period Instruments, and More"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
From the Fall 2017 issue<\/a> of Classical Guitar | \u00a0BY TH\u00c9R\u00c9SE WASSILY SABA<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

T<\/span><\/em>his year, the Belgian classical guitarist Raphaella Smits is celebrating her 60th birthday. Her extensive discography not only reveals her broad tastes in repertoire, but even more reflects her deep love for performing on historic instruments\u2014on which she is deeply musically expressive, matching musical content with timbres and tone colors. I spoke to the great maestra about her early years of study in Belgium, summers in Spain with Jos\u00e9 Tom\u00e1s, her contact with Andr\u00e9s Segovia, her favorite instruments, and her 60th birthday recording release.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CLASSICAL GUITAR:<\/b> Raphaella, when you play, your phrasing feels very natural. I know you sang a lot when you were young. Do you think this is part of the secret of your expressiveness\u2014because you started in music in the right way: with musical expression rather than with the instrument?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

RAPHAELLA SMITS:<\/b> <\/i>Oh, yes, it\u2019s true. I still think that the voice is the most important instrument in any music\u2014that if you can sing it, you can play it; also to be able to use words, to use the musical line that on its own makes phrasing already, without even the knowledge of how the music should be interpreted. I was almost 13 years old when I got my first guitar, but I was already singing well before that.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In primary school, I went to a Rudolf Steiner school, which was founded in Belgium by my mother, Caroline Van Giel. In that education system, even in primary school, you get a lot of art, voice, choir, all kinds of flutes, theater. Of course, it is not aimed at a professional level, but it is just included in the education. Therefore, I knew music and I knew about singing. I do have a kind of good voice, so then a few years later, I went to the children\u2019s choir of the Flemish opera in Antwerp where I was living; that was also my first stage experience. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My very first teacher, Ward de Beer, was not a guitar teacher. He gave me a book to learn from with songs written in two clefs: bass and treble; a German guitar method but with piano scoring. So I was playing very simple chords but like a piano player on the guitar, and of course I had to sing the melodies. When I am playing, still now, I hear all the different voices, where they are coming from and where they are going to, and often, it is like an instrumental choir. That is also how I am teaching.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CG:<\/b> Do you think that that is quite unusual for a guitarist? When students come to you, do you notice that they don\u2019t have that facility as a natural quality?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITS: <\/b>Yes, absolutely, but some of them do<\/i> have it and I love them! Most of the young players, or my students, are so focused on the instrument that it becomes an issue rather than a tool. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CG:<\/b> Can you change people?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITS: <\/b>Yes. Sometimes, when the score is complicated for them, I play with them, so that they are playing one voice and I play the other voice, or I let them sing. Some of them don\u2019t dare to sing, but I say, \u201cYou have to sing, because then you will feel how the phrasing is going.\u201d Also it is the physical feeling of even very simple things, when the music is going higher or lower, you feel it physically easier when you sing it, rather playing it on the guitar. So I think I can change them. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also what is very important for me, which is how I was educated and what I try to pass on to my students, is the rhetoric in the music\u2014telling the story with all the emotional possibilities; I think it is very important to be able to put this into your fingertips. <\/i>But most of the time, I just really think about the music, about the phrasing, about where the voice is going. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CG:<\/b> I noticed, for example, that when you play the Bach Chaconne<\/i>, you have the full drama all perfectly planned. It always feels as though it is moving forward and just about to arrive at a climax, but it doesn\u2019t climax, and yet you don\u2019t drop the energy. Playing large-scale pieces is hard but you do it very naturally.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITS:<\/b> I think that\u2019s true, and thank you for saying that. But this is really because when I am playing I am always thinking about the future, and I feel in the present, and my memory is on the past\u2014so I am really in the middle of that past\u2013future and<\/i> I am in the present. I think this is what you feel when I play those large pieces. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n