{"id":9395,"date":"2018-03-19T16:18:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T23:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=9395"},"modified":"2018-03-19T16:18:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T23:18:09","slug":"judicael-perroy-on-teaching-and-his-own-guitar-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/judicael-perroy-on-teaching-and-his-own-guitar-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Judica\u00ebl Perroy on Teaching and his Own Guitar Education"},"content":{"rendered":"
BY JEFF KALISS | FROM THE SPRING 2018 ISSUE OF CLASSICAL GUITAR<\/em><\/a><\/h6>\n

M<\/span>aking his way around the recently trendy Hayes Valley neighborhood, his new place of employment at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) nearby, Judica\u00ebl Perroy seems to have succeeded in transplanting himself and his career from his native Paris. His solid physique and dark, tightly curled hair might place him at younger than his 44 years, and he expresses himself with the vitality that\u2019s been characteristic ever since his start as a child prodigy on guitar, performing Vivaldi concertos with full orchestra in Le Mans, France. On his way back to the Conservatory from our first interview in a caf\u00e9, Perroy stops to chat in French with a visiting fellow expatriate, now a piano teacher in Cleveland, and offers a light to a fellow smoker, commenting that this is what he\u2019s metaphorically hoping to accomplish with his first semester of guitar students at the Conservatory: to light their fires. All the while, he never stops talking, in charming French-accented English, his gusto matching what we hear on his recordings across a broad repertoire, from Bach to Piazzolla to Takemitsu.<\/span><\/p>\n

The son of an amateur musician, Perroy enrolled at age seven in the Paris Academy of Music, and taught himself on his father\u2019s guitar. At ten he entered the National School Academy of Aulnay-sous-Bois, where he attracted the attention of several prominent French guitar teachers. He placed second in the International Competition of the Ile-de-France in 1988, graduated summa cum laude from the Academy, and went on to further private study. Having won top prizes at other competitions and institutions, Perroy was flown to La Jolla, California, in 1997, where he placed first in the Guitar Foundation of America\u2019s (GFA) International Concert Artist Competition (ICAC) and was awarded a 60-city tour of North America, which brought him to San Francisco for the first time and also gained him a post at Stetson University in central Florida. <\/span><\/p>\n

Perroy\u2019s recordings have included<\/span> two duets\u2014with flute and with harp\u2014for Bayard Musique, and transcriptions of Bach for Naxos. In France, before taking the SFCM post, Perroy taught both children and adults at several conservatories, with some of his students going on to win their own competitions. Following their teacher to victories in the ICAC were Thomas Viloteau (2006), Gabriel Bianco (2008), Florian Larousse (2009), Thibaut Garcia (2015), and Xavier Jara (2016)\u2014an impressive roster. Perroy\u2019s latest album, Paris une solitude peupl\u00e9e<\/a><\/strong>, <\/i>(Constrastes Records, 2016), includes five pieces by Villa-Lobos, and he\u2019s planning, with his Belarusian guitarist wife Natalia Lipnitskaya, to record transcriptions of Russian orchestral music. I spoke twice with Perroy, first just after his arrival in San Francisco, and again near the conclusion of his first semester of teaching there. <\/span><\/p>\n

CLASSICAL GUITAR:<\/b> How has guitar teaching changed, within your own experience of it?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JUDICA\u00cbL PERROY<\/strong>:<\/b> <\/span>My father, Thomas, began by teaching himself classical\u00a0guitar after he heard John Williams perform in Paris. He didn\u2019t know what to expect, because he was a security guard and he didn\u2019t come from a family where people listened to classical music. He\u2019d started on guitar with pop songs. And when I started studying, at the beginning of the \u201980s, there were a lot of classical guitar\u00a0teachers who were not themselves <\/span>classical guitarists; they played electric guitar in bals populaires<\/i> [local dances]. Now you have all these good<\/i> players who are my age, teaching in conservatories and in private studios.<\/p>\n

CG:<\/b> How did you manage to find good teachers when you were coming up?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY<\/b>: My father discovered that I needed a teacher who could help me more than the conservatory teacher I had, and that\u2019s why he decided to go to a Roberto Aussel concert. Roberto heard me, and later, with his former wife, Delia Estrada, gave me some classes over three years. I come from a very poor family, so he gave the lessons for free. <\/span><\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Both of them were from Argentina; did they transmit any of that to you? <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY<\/span>: <\/b>At that time, Aussel was just beginning to play a Piazzolla piece for guitar, and I guess he recorded that in \u201983 or \u201984, so I was able to listen to that kind of music. There were a lot of Argentinians in Paris who had left their country for political reasons, so I had many opportunities. Then I had a third teacher, Raymond Gratien, and I would say he was my main teacher.<\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Did you want to expand your classical repertoire? <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY: <\/b>At 14, I started to fall in love with classical music\u2014not just the guitar, but also the piano. Of the piano players, I preferred Sviatoslav Richter, Maurizio Pollini, and Alfred Brendel. <\/span><\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Richter showed maybe some of the same enthusiasm you do. <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY:<\/b> I wish I had one percent of that! I have a lot of that music on my hard disc\u2014or my heart<\/i> disc. <\/span><\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Had you always thought of being a professional musician? <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY<\/span>: <\/b>I didn\u2019t think I would do concerts. I was very interested in being a journalist or a sociologist. I did mathematics and economics, and during two years, from age 17 to 19, I totally stopped playing the guitar. Then I restarted, and won a competition. For the GFA competition, if they hadn\u2019t given me a scholarship, I wouldn\u2019t have gone. French people stay a lot in France; we don\u2019t get noticed enough abroad. I had no idea it was an important competition, but I did it, and it worked fine. <\/span><\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>What do you think about competitions now that you\u2019re a judge yourself? <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY:<\/b><\/span> <\/b>I will say something very <\/span>pretentious<\/span>,\u00a0<\/span>which is that I prefer it\u2019s me who\u2019s judging.<\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>Because you think your view of the guitar is special? <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY<\/span>: <\/b>Yeah! The guitar, as a classical instrument, is very fragile, because its image is very linked with pop music. So what I want to promote as a judge is that people play music that is really part of the classical music world, not the weaker crossover things . . . which are not really good for a jazz player and not really good for a classical player.<\/span><\/p>\n

CG: <\/b>What about older versus newer material? <\/span><\/p>\n

PERROY: <\/b>I like it when there is a mix, with pieces that are not overplayed, like new pieces. For a long time, the guitar repertoire was very limited, but it became much bigger. To me, it\u2019s very important in competitions that I hear the identity of the player, with his or her choice of program.<\/span><\/p>\n

Below, Perroy plays part of Bach’s Keyboard Partita No. 2:<\/em><\/p>\n