Carulli Method

[Lakia Throssell]

Although Carulli received music theory and cello training at a young age, there were no guitar teachers in Naples. As a result, Carulli learned guitar through self-study and the advancement of the guitar as a concert instrument.

People often ask, did Ferdinando Carulli have a guitar method? The answer is yes! Carulli wrote over 400 compositions for the guitar, including his influential Mthode complte pour guitare ou lyre, Op.27. Teachers still reference this book in guitar pedagogy today!

This Ferdinando Carulli guitar method book went through several iterations, including an important one entitled cole de guitare, Op.241 (Guitar School). You can find this collection on the IMSLP website here.

Like many of his contemporaries, Carulli was taught musical theory by a priest, who was also an amateur musician. Carulli's first instrument was the cello, taught to him by the local priest. At the age of twenty, Carulli discovered the guitar and devoted his life to the study and advancement of this instrument. As there were no professional guitar teachers in Naples at the time, Carulli developed his own style of playing.

Carulli was a gifted performer. His concerts in Naples were so popular that he soon began touring Europe. Around 1801 Carulli married a French woman, Marie-Josephine Boyer, and had a son with her. A few years later Carulli started to compose in Milan, where he contributed to local publications. After a highly successful Paris tour, Carulli moved there. At the time the city was known as the 'music-capital' of the world, and he stayed there for the rest of his life.

Carulli became highly successful as a guitar teacher in Paris. It was also here that the majority of his works were published. Later in his life he became a self-publisher. In addition to his own music, he published the works of such other prominent guitarists including Filippo Gragnani, whom he befriended and who later dedicated three guitar duets to Carulli.[2]

Carulli was among the most prolific composers of his time. He wrote more than four hundred works for the guitar, and countless others for various instrumental combinations, always including the guitar. His most influential work, the "Method, op. 27", published in 1810, contains pieces still widely used today in training students of the classical guitar. Along with numerous works for two guitars, works for guitar with violin or flute, and three concertos for guitar with chamber orchestra, Carulli also composed several works for guitar and piano (in collaboration with his son, Gustavo).

Many of the pieces now regarded as Carulli's finest were initially turned down by publishers who considered them too difficult for the average recreational guitarist. It is likely that many of his best works remained unpublished and are now lost. Nevertheless, several of Carulli's published works point at the likely quality and sophistication of his concert music, the Six Andantes Op. 320 (dedicated to the guitarist Matteo Carcassi) being a good example. The great majority of Carulli's surviving works, however, were those considered marketable enough by mainstream Parisian publishers aiming at an amateur recreational market.

In addition to his highly successful Methode Op. 27 (which went through four editions during his lifetime and a major revision, as Op. 241), Carulli also published several supplements to the method, along with a method without explanatory text (L'Anti Methode Op. 272), a method for the decacorde, a harmony treatise, a treatise dealing with guitar accompaniment of the voice, and several collections of vocalises and solfges. The latter studies were intended to exploit the guitar's accompanying capabilities, and to be used by both singer-guitarists amateurs, and voice teachers who were not proficient figured bass readers.[3]

Classical guitarists have recorded many of his works. Arguably his most famous work is a duet for guitar and flute, which was recorded by Alexander Lagoya and Jean-Pierre Rampal, although his Duo in G Op.34 achieved a measure of indirect fame in Britain as the theme tune of cult 1980s science fiction/television game show The Adventure Game. The Duo in G has been recorded several times, most famously by Julian Bream and John Williams.

Carulli was best known during his time in Paris as a teacher. He composed many important pedagogical works for the guitar. His most important work was his Mthode Complte, Op.27, published in 1810. This method for the guitar received 4 further printings and a substantial revision in Op.241. In addition to these there is a supplement (Op.192) that contains additional material to go with the method. He also published a book on harmony, a book on solfge, a book on accompaniment for guitarists, and more.

Dionisio Aguado, Nuevo mtodo para guitarra
Dionisio Aguado, Premire partie de la Mthode complte pour la guitare
Dionisio Aguado, Deuxime partie de la Mthode complte pour la guitare
Dionisio Aguado, 25 pices extraites de la mthode pour guitare

Ferdinando Carulli, Op.71 Seconde Suite la Mthode
Ferdinando Carulli, Op.241 Mthode Complte pour Guitare
Ferdinando Carulli, Op.293 Mthode complte pour le dcacorde
Ferdinando Carulli, Guitar method
Ferdinando Carulli, New Guitar method

presumably a reference to followers and disciples of both Ferdinando Carulli and Francesco Molino. The question that first comes to mind is this: What the Pluck these people were actually talking about, while exhibiting such passion and anger, using their Lacote guitars as conversation tools?

The use of the left-hand thumb on fretted-plucked instruments is an ancient practice, dating back to the dawn of history of these instruments. Here is, for example, a sixteenth century picture by Giulio Campi, presumable depicting Francesco da Milano.

In his first guitar method of 1810, his op. 27, Carulli does not actually advocate the technique, but simply uses it in a few isolated places, usually on the bass F, indicating it verbally in small print with the word pouce (thumb). The same notation was repeated unchanged in the next 3 issues of the method. In the fifth edition of the method, now bearing op, 241 and published circa 1829, Carulli says this:

It should be noted that Carulli was not the only method writer of the time who taught the LH thumb technique. This was quite common. So who was Carulli talking about? I would like to suggest that he was talking about Molino.

Obviously, this was a controversial subject among guitarists in the early nineteenth century in Paris, and the Maresco caricature thus begins to make sense. By the time Molino published this method, the one by Fernando Sor was already in print.

Even though this picture shows the player using the left-hand thumb, the discussion by Sor regarding this picture is not about the thumb, but on the general sitting position used by French and Italian players. Sor finds this position as detrimental to playing, because it places the guitar way too far to the left. In his opinion, a proper position is one which emulates the position of piano players, where both hands have the same distance to travel away from the body. A pianist sits in the middle of the piano, and the guitarist should sit in the middle of the guitar. Like this:

The original fingering in this example, the second chord in bar 1 and the chord in bar 3, are clearly fingered with a barr. At the same time, the bass notes have also an arrow indicating a LH thumb, a symbol that was used by many Russian guitarists since. Von Held explains:

I would like to make one comment on the graphic appearance of this symbol. Obviously it was etched by hand on the original plates, not using a standard engraving stamp. The arrows are of different shapes and different sizes. That means that at the time this book was being prepared for publication, the type of symbology offered was not yet standard practice.

It certainly became standard practice throughout much of the nineteenth century, not only in method books and printed music for the Russian seven-string guitar, but also in Russian method books and printed music for the Spanish guitar. Perhaps the culmination of Russian seven-string pedagogical work in the nineteenth century, was the 1906 publication of the first volume of the guitar method by Valerian Alexeevich Rusanov.

This is a large book, 140 pages, which contains as much theoretical text as musical examples, very much in the format practiced in previous generations by writers such as Sor and Aguado. It should be noted that Rusanov, who was the founder and chief editor of the Russian guitar journal Gitarist under which auspices this method was printed, was very well familiar with the Sor method. He even began publishing a Russian translation of the Sor method in the early issues of the magazine. The subtitle of this page actually states that this work is based on the best Russian and foreign methods. When discussing the LH thumb, Rusanov says:

That task fell to his student and disciple, Vladimir Mashkevich. Rusanov must have left Mashkevich a great deal of material for the second volume, including many ideas that he transmitted to him in private correspondence and in personal talks. Mashkevich was a most meticulous compiler of guitar related material. The large collection of his papers, now at the Glinka Museum in Moscow, was the basis of the Yablokov Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Guitarists.

In other words, the new approach to guitar technique now preached by Mashkevich, avoiding the traditional Russian use of the LH thumb, was based on Western sources for the classical guitar, and influenced in no small part, one suspects, by the performances of Andrs Segovia in the Soviet Union in 1926-27.

Last year, I spoke here about the conflicts between Russian sixers and seveners over the last two and half centuries. I noted then that during the nineteenth century, these two groups co-existed peacefully, and only after the appearance of Segovia in the Soviet Union in 1926, the atmosphere changed into open warfare. As we all sadly know, the sixers won, and the majority of Russian guitarists today, play the six-string guitar, mainly playing the standard Western repertoire and using the standard Western approaches to technique. The few seveners that persisted, had to change, if they expected to be survive. Towards the end of the Soviet era, when economic conditions and employment opportunities became harder to come by, the major teachers of the Russian seven-string guitar employed in the state schools, were required to also teach the six-string guitar. Obviously, they could not possibly employ two different techniques in their teaching. So teachers like Lev Menro and Anatolii Shirialin seem to have abandoned the LH thumb. In their method, published in 1990, they used exclusively the same standard LH technique as that used by the sixers, i.e., no LH thumb anymore.

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