Luse Classic Guitar Method

Several new revisions for the Thumb and Basic Rest Stroke books are now available here.

Several new revisions for the Basic Rest Stroke book are now available here.

Dusan Bogdanovic comments:

You have transplanted the American eclectic approach to an entirely different environment. With a great success.

A review of the 2^nd quartet by Manuel Cabrera II:

I found the 2nd quartet to be a very engaging musical experience. It was indeed an adventure and while listening, I could not help but get absorbed by the ongoing conflict within the theme, where I felt the alto guitars played the role of the antagonists while the bass and the prime guitar especially always seemed to initiate a return to the supposedly innocuous theme.

The instrumentation and use of different effects on the guitars such as harmonics, loud rasgueado chords, tremolo and glissando were very effective in producing different textures. I particularly liked the quiet part right after the loud chords where one of the altos was doing a tremolo on a high note while the other alto guitar started insisting to go to a minor key by playing F minor and Bb minor chords. It was definitely a moment reminiscent of some parts of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

I think what made this piece really exciting was the seemingly unending conflict in the theme. There was much suspense and agitation and I was constantly anxious what would happen next. After a while everything seemed to deteriorate and fall apart, leaving me to wonder if there was ever a way for things to return to how they were. I was silent for about a minute after the piece ended. It was a mixed feeling of shock and yearning, an unsettling feeling that it ended the way it did, and a very strong longing to hear the main theme again.

Congratulations to Rob for writing such a compelling piece, and to the members of the Quartet for a very good performance. It was my privilege to listen to such excellent music played with passion and fervour.

A review by Chan Mun Yew:

Composed like a story, the Luse 2nd Quartet depicts a journey gone awry. The journey starts off light-heartedly and leisurely, a layer of hope that slowly disintegrate when uncertainty creeps in with the discordant plucking. The story is packed with drama, with lightness initially peeking out randomly but the battle slowly spirals towards a tragedy when the darker layers persists. Frustrations and anxiety climbs as the pace builds up, with hope slowly snuffed out. Despair sinks deeper as the sinister layers get a stronger foothold. The final struggle is electrifying with silence, the final relief.”

A review by Roxana Waterson:

The collection ends with the compelling drama of the Luse 2^nd quartet.  The work begins in sunny mood, weaving an innocent melody with lilting rhythms, becoming abruptly shadowed and more complicated as we sense this theme heading off into more uncertain and anxious territory. After an increasingly discordant and disturbing passage, we return to a variation of the original theme but now with a slight sense of things coming undone, spinning off into uncharted realms. Gradually, an increasing sense of entropy prevails, all possible tones of the guitar being brought into play to suggest an unravelling, a tearing apart of the sonorous fabric, some notes pinging off into outer space. Momentarily we seem to hear the heavy tread of a peasant dance, almost immediately disintegrating, soulfully, into a series of melancholy chords and ripples, followed at length by faint tearing sounds becoming more insistently catastrophic and suggestive of a terrible, unstoppable derailing of something that must come apart at last.  Apocalyptic irruptions of sound are followed by irrevocable silence – end of the world; a shocking sensation of loss.  The startling originality of this work leaves a unique impression on the consciousness.

Second Quartet – a few reflections from the composer. . .

Stravinsky was fond of referring to himself as “the vessel through which The Rite of Spring flowed.” Although in a far more humble context, I can understand these sentiments all too well. I too, in my Second Quartet, was “the vessel,” in this case the vessel through which the climactic image from “2001, A Space Odyssey,” flowed.

While in my third year at the Peabody Conservatory in 1968, Kubrick’s epochal film turned up at a theatre a couple of blocks down Charles St. I walked in with no particular expectations; an ideal state of mind, as it turned out that fateful day. And like so many who saw the film both before and after me, I left the theatre a changed man.

Forward to Singapore, 1985. Our newly formed Singapore Guitar Quartet is in need of repertoire. Composition of my Second Quartet commenced under clear creative skies with no portents of dark clouds or subterfuge. It was to be something light and entertaining, a  divertissement, perhaps.

But as the composing proceeded, a shadow fell over the deliberations. I began to feel oddly detached from my own creative process. Increasingly, the work took on a destiny of its own; by the climax, I was reduced to an awe-struck bystander, but a bystander with formidable and seemingly, at times, insurmountable responsibilities. (A brief analysis is detailed in “Addenda to the Second Quartet.”)

What fascinates me in retrospect about the first phase of the quartet’s existence is that at no time – neither while composing nor during the subsequent period of the work’s performances — did I consciously connect “departure time” with “2001.” Such are the creative vagaries, I suppose, like not seeing the nose on one’s face.

With the quartet’s disbanding in 1991, the cassette recordings spent a quarter of a century gathering mould.

By 2011, enhanced editing technology in the capable hands of the in-house recording engineer enabled “hand of God-like” time-travel, back to that stunning final performance. Once there, certain shortcomings, detectable in hindsight, were rectified.

Mainly, I marvel to think that inspiration received in that darkened Baltimore theatre of my student days, has, like a well-skimmed stone, splashed across the decades, ready to complete its long trajectory with one more skip, here and now, into yours, the listener’s ear!

Roxana Waterson, a student of Robert Luse for the past 15 years, plays Canción del Emperador (sobre “Mille Regretz” de Josquin) and Diferencias sobre “Guardame las vacas” by Luys de Narváez (1538).

Passing Clouds consists of guitar characterizations of poems by Miyako Kimura. The work was composed in 1997 and the music revised in 2009 for this presentation.

This work was originally uploaded in two parts in November 2009 due to the then YouTube length limit of 10 minutes. We are now able to present it as it should be experienced, complete and without interruption.

From “Of Colors Most Fleeting” vol. 2, the Singapore Guitar Quartet performs “Riddles”, written for the quartet by Singapore Composer Phoon Yewtien.

From the liner notes, Roxana Waterson comments: “Riddles by Phoon Yewtien is a piece of unusual textures, some scurrying and dense, some lyrical and dreamy, bringing to mind for this listener the colors of the Chinese zither (gu zheng), or Japanese koto. In places, the music seems to evoke images of flowing water, or small boats rowing on a wide river, as it might be in a Chinese painting.”

Intended especially for overseas users of the method, revisions and errata are now available online. Accessed via the ‘method’ tab in the menu, the first batch of corrections are for the basic method as well as for intermediate rest stroke.

Although primarily a violinist and lute player at that time, Ken Lee studied guitar with Rob in Singapore in the 70’s. Now, after a hiatus of more than three decades, Ken’s study of the Luse Method has resumed. Read Ken’s comment here.

From the liner notes to “Of Colors Most Fleeting” Vol 1:

Of particular interest to volume 1 in the series is Robert Luse’s third quartet, his second work composed for the Singapore Guitar Quartet – “Train-time”, where he has attempted to bring some rural American “twangy steel-string vitality” to the more rarefied world of nylon string chamber music.

The work had its impetus in Robert’s life long enthusiasm for trains, both real and imagined. Inspired by a favourite childhood story – “The Little Engine That Could” – the first movement is full of ironic humour ad unexpected twists and turns. The guitaristic equivalent of whistles and clickity-clacks can be heard, as well as passing reflections on train journeys long past.

In two clearly contrasting sections, the opening notes of the second movement paraphrase that greatest of all American railroad songs:

John Henry said to his Captain,
A man ain’t nothin’ but a man,
But before I let that steam drill beat me down,
I’ll die with my hammer in my hand.

John Henry beats the steam drill down (section one) but his triumph is short-lived. Section two takes the form of a plaintive elegy for the fallen hero, whose ‘great heart burst.’

The third movement, being more in keeping with the abstract nature of the first, spring from those darker, more mysterious trains portrayed in the folk song “Casey Jones” and by Django Reinhardt in his fabulous “Mystery Pacific.”