Blog curated by Marco Ramelli, TU Dublin Conservatoire
In the article A Lost Culture of Touch and Sound. I also explore how the culture of blind musicians, developed over centuries, influenced the emergence of the Spanish guitar. In particular, I propose that their culture of sound and touch can be directly linked to the practices of some of the most renowned guitarists in history, including Antonio Manjón, Francisco Tárrega, Augustin Barrios, and even Andrés Segovia.
Below, I share the first part of the chapter dedicated to Segovia. To fully understand the foundations of my argument, I strongly recommend reading the complete article.
Chapter 5.3 – Segovia and Yepes: Last Links to the Blind Guitarists’ Legacy
The pedagogical path of Francisco Tárrega, which led him from the world of the blind to that of the sighted, is paralleled, albeit more faintly, in the rise of Andrés Segovia, Tárrega’s junior by forty-one years and no less seminal a figure in the history of the guitar. Segovia possessed a deep, intuitive control over the vibrations of the guitar. The resulting sound—which remains one of the great mysteries of his technique—captivated his listeners and has exerted an enduring fascination over generations of guitarists. Where, then, did he acquire it?
Segovia often claimed to be self-taught, but so little is known about his childhood that it is difficult to verify this assertion independently. What we do know is that after his parents separated, he went to Villacarillo, where he lived with a couple whom he referred to as his uncle and aunt.[79] It was here, according to Poveda, that Segovia began taking lessons with his first guitar teacher, a blind itinerant guitarist named Macareno.[80] This is not our first encounter with Villacarrillo: it is the same village where Manjón grew up and learned the guitar, a place with a strong tradition of guitar playing and a deep-rooted culture of sound within the blind community. Although this culture was in decline by the end of the nineteenth century—for reasons explored in the previous chapters—it can be traced back at least to the sixteenth century and to Úbeda, a few kilometers from Villacarrillo and home of the renowned poet and vihuelist Gaspar de la Cintera (“El Ciego de Úbeda”).
In his autobiography, Segovia makes no mention of Macareno’s name or condition, writing only that his teacher’s knowledge was not extensive: “I had learned everything the poor man knew—that is to say, very little.” But it was not knowledge that he gained, rather a sound: “When he scratched out some of those variations he said were soleares, I felt them inside of me as if they had penetrated through every pore of my body.”[81] Not for the first time, we see a blind musician imparting not so much rational knowledge as a culture of touch, passed orally from teacher to student, who picks it up as one picks up a dialect. Since this kind of material is not processed rationally, it is not always perceived as knowledge by the receiver, a distinction that is echoed in the words of Segovia’s uncle about his early learning process: “The boy has so much ability; he doesn’t seem to learn, but rather to remember what they teach him.”[82] To remember—a phrase that in Spanish culture carried a positive connotation, in contrast to the modern perspective, where rational learning holds a higher status in comparison to intuitive learning. The process of absorbing through repetition and doing, rather than through rational understanding, was central to the teaching methods of blind musicians.
It is easy to understand why some researchers have attached so little significance to Segovia’s study with a blind guitarist, for they were likely ignorant of the relevant traditions but susceptible to twentieth-century associations of blind music with low culture. And yet this aspect of Segovia’s education, brief and early as it was, is highly suggestive: Segovia, like Tárrega before him, had the opportunity to absorb a culture of touch from the very beginning, thus gaining a distinct perspective through which to approach the world of cultivated music later on. In doing so, he gradually distanced himself—and even opposed—the cultural tradition from which he first learned the magical properties of sound.
This is not to suggest that the secret of Segovia’s success or style can be reduced to his early education with a blind musician. Individual achievements are the result of a lifetime of building and accomplishment. And yet one can draw a parallel with poets: while a writer’s success depends on everything they create and develop, their spoken voice will always carry an accent, which they could never choose but only absorb from the community around them. While this accent and sound may not be the central element of a writer’s work, it remains an indelible characteristic of their voice. Similarly, Segovia’s formative experiences with the culture of the blind, even if not the defining factor in his career, inevitably left a mark on his musical identity and sound.
Furthermore, as we have already explored, his famous Manuel Ramírez guitar—which played a key role in shaping his signature sound—was the result of a collaboration between the luthier and the blind guitarist Manjón. This connection to blindness extended beyond his early influences and instruments to his own personal experience with visual impairment. A particularly striking example of this is Estudio sin luz (Study Without Light, published by Schott in 1954), Segovia’s most-performed composition, which he reportedly wrote during a period of temporary blindness following a surgery to repair a detached retina.83
Undoubtedly, blind culture played a role in Segovia’s artistic development, both directly and indirectly. In his autobiography, he shares a humorous story that reveals something about how the guitar was perceived as the instrument of the blind in rural communities even in the twentieth century. While on a trip to a small village near Barcelona, he played a piece for his friend Santiago Rusiñol, and a local villager exclaimed: “My God, how this kid plays! It’s a shame he is not blind. Imagine how much money he could make playing in the streets!”[84]
[79] Andrés Segovia, An Autobiography of the Years 1893–1920 (Marion Boyars, 1976), 2. It is unclear whether Segovia’s “Uncle Eduardo” and “Aunt Maria” were really his relatives. See Julio Gimeno, “Andres Segovia y Villacarrillo,” in Manuel López Fernández, ed., XIII jornadas de estudios histórico-artísticos sobre las Cuatro Villas (Diputación Provincial de Jaén, 2021), 286–89.
[80] Alberto López Poveda, Andrés Segovia: Vida y obra ( Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 2009), 44–47.
Julio Gimeno questions the account given by López Poveda regarding the blindness of Segovia’s guitar teacher, pointing to Segovia’s autobiography, where he wrote: “The keen attention with which I watched his fingers must have led him to hope he could secure his stew pot without having to go back out on the road again.” An important factor to consider is that the episode Segovia describes is a childhood memory—something inherently susceptible
to distortion or alteration over time. Moreover, his omission of his teacher’s blindness may reflect a deliberate effort to distance himself from a cultural world he moved away from over the course of his career. As noted in the case of Tárrega’s teacher (see note 74), itinerant ciegos often included individuals with varying degrees of visual impairment and not only complete blindness. Julio Gimeno, “Andres Segovia y Villacarrillo,” in Manuel López Fernández, ed.,
XIII jornadas de estudios histórico-artísticos sobre las Cuatro Villas (Diputación Provincial de Jaén, 2021), 300.
[81] Andres Segovia, An Autobiography of the Years 1893–1920 (Marion Boyars, 1976), 3.
[82] Segovia, An Autobiography, 3.
[83] For a full account of the injury and operation that led to the composition of Estudio sin luz, see Angelo Gilardino, Andrés Segovia: L’uomo, l’artista (Milan: Curci, 2012), 205. Pedro Rodrigues shows that an important element in the piece evidently derives from a piece that Francisco Lacerda had composed for Segovia around thirty years earlier: “‘For Andrés Segovia’: Francisco de Lacerda’s Suite goivos (1924),” Soundboard Scholar 7 (2021).
[84] Segovia, An Autobiography, 148.
Andrés Segovia (1893–1987)
Andrés Segovia’s guitar, made by Manuel Ramirez and Santos Hernandez
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