I wonder why some bloggers blog anonymously. Maybe the answer can be found in a novel I just started reading, titled “Forbidden Notebook,”1 that starts with a diary entry of November 26, 1950, the first person narrator, Valeria Cossati, explaining her illegal purchase of a notebook:
“I saw that the tobacconist had assumed a severe expression to tell me: ‘I can’t. It’s forbidden.’ He explained that an officer stood guard at the door, every Sunday, to make sure that he sold tobacco only, nothing else. I was alone now in the shop. ‘I need it,’ I said, ‘I absolutely need it.’ I was speaking in a whisper, agitated, ready to insist, plead. So he looked around, then quickly grabbed a notebook and handed it to me across the counter, saying: ‘Hide it under your coat’” (10).
Having obtained the notebook, Valeria must now find a place to keep it hidden in her apartment, secret from her husband, Michele, and her two children, Mirella and Ricardo. And she conspires with her would-be writing self to find time when the others won’t notice to write in her notebook:
“For more than two weeks I’ve kept the notebook hidden without being able to write in it. Since the first day, I’ve been constantly moving it around – I’ve had a hard time finding a hiding place where it wouldn’t be immediately discovered. If the children found it, Ricardo would have appropriated it for taking notes at the University or Mirella for the diary she keeps locked in her drawer. I could have defended it, but I would have had to explain it” (11).
Her anxiety builds, and she finally starts to write, but says,
“I have to confess – I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I got this notebook” (11).
Yet she looks forward to finding the opportunity to write, writing that no one will read but herself:
“I always used to be a little sad when the children went out, but now I wish they’d go so I’d be left alone to write” (11).
Then of course the metatheme makes itself obvious:
“The strangest thing is that when I can finally take the notebook out of its hiding place, sit down, and begin to write, I find I have nothing to say except to report on the daily struggle I endure to hide it” (12).
She asks for a drawer, one she can lock. “For what?” her husband asks. “I answered, “some notes. Or maybe a diary, like Mirella” (15).
“They all, including Michele, began laughing at the idea that I might keep a diary. ‘What would you write, mamma?’ said Michele.”
They more than laugh; they make fun of her, until, “Suddenly, I burst into tears” (16).
Michele suggests a cognac to settle her down, but she refuses, because,
“Embarrassed, I looked away. In the pantry, next to the cognac bottle, in an old biscuit tin, I had hidden the notebook” (17).
I first started my blog, The Coming of the Toads, back in 2007. I had been reading and following – dare I say, studying – a few blogs, and had even tried my hand at a few comments when I decided to deal myself in (solitaire though the game was). After a few posts, I deleted everything, then almost as soon randomly reinstated it. Of course I had no readers, no “followers,” to begin with, so no worries, but I tried to take the writing seriously nevertheless, which is to say with literary decorum, as oxymoronic as that might sound to some readers, but one is never alone, after all, and must address the possibility against the assumption no one will read it that someone might read it. But either way, so what? Such irony might immediately call for self-deprecation, which might be a way of keeping one’s intentions, one’s writing, hidden, self-prohibited.
“Forbidden Notebook,” by Alba De Cespedes. Originally published in Italian as Quaderno Proibito in 1952 by Mondadori. At first, it seemed hard to find. I tried Alibris and Amazon, and I now somehow have two: a first paperback edition, 2024, Astra House, and a Pushkin Press edition, also 2024, both Translation by Ann Goldstein and Forward by Jhumpa Lahiri. ↩︎
More rain. More “Traveling Sprinkler.” Paul Chowder hasn’t been playing his new guitar much, though. Instead, the former bassoonist has found an interest in electronic music, and he’s bent on creating jingles and jangles and hums and beats and calls it dance music.
“I worked for several hours today on a new song called ‘Honk for Assistance.’ I saw the sign at a convenience store, near the ice machine, and I thought, Now that is a dance song, in the tradition of Midnight Star. I sampled a few honks from my Kia’s horn and set up a beat and fingered up some harmony using an instrument I hadn’t tried before, the Gospel Organ, which has a slightly percussive sound in the attack phase of each note. I added more chords on a Mark II keyboard and some homegrown handclaps and some rhymes made with the Funk Boogie Kit” (190).
Where is music, today? Where was it in Claude Debussy’s day? I’m listening now, suggested by Paul Chowder, our narrator of “Traveling Sprinkler,” to Debussy’s “Preludes,” via YouTube Music on my Chromebook. I don’t have my hearing aids in, and the Chromebook speaker is not exactly a Marshall Super Lead 100 Watt amplifier stacked with two humongous speaker cabinets towering overhead, so maybe I can’t really say I’m listening to Debussy’s “Preludes,” anymore than I can say I’m in the kitchen nook typing while getting wet from the drizzle outside.
Around page 128, Paul spends ample time discussing the benefits of stereo versus mono. What he does not mention is asymmetrical hearing loss, a condition where you hear less volume in one ear than the other. You’re sometimes unsure which direction a sound is coming from, and it can make you a bit paranoid as you navigate your way around town. You have to be extra careful crossing the street, particularly if there are electric vehicles in the neighborhood. And bicyclists and joggers coming up behind you and passing full of assumptions and presuppositions about their position startle the shite out of you.
“I put the headphones on, and I lowered the needle on Zubin Mehta conducting The Rite of Spring, and suddenly I was there, enclosed in the oxygenated spatial spread of stereophonic sound. I was there with the panicked piccolo, and the bass clarinet was a few feet away, and the timpani surged over to the left, mallets going so fast you couldn’t see them. I couldn’t believe how big a world it was – how much bigger and better stereo was than mono….You need two ears” (129).
Or three, or four. One day, back home, I rode my bike down the Strand to Mike Mahon’s place in Hermosa, carrying with me Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music,” on the Impulse label, from 1965, still new and noisy around the early 70s. Mike was a classically trained pianist, although like Paul Chowder, had decided he wasn’t good enough to make a career of it, and went back to school for a PhD in English Literature, specializing in Yeats and Joyce and company, but still Mike was an audiophile, and had the latest equipment. He took my album and ran it through an electronic vinyl record cleaning machine he had, then we listened to some of it on his impressive and expressive and expensive sound system. Then he pulled from his album collection a copy of Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” and we listened to the “Infernal Dance” piece. Talk about “attack phase.”
I played a bit of “The Firebird” just now, switching off the Debussy. I’m immediately reminded of Poe’s “The Bells”:
Hear the loud alarum bells— Brazen bells! What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now—now to sit or never, By the side of the pale-faced moon.
I can only handle a minute or two of “The Firebird” this morning (or Poe) before switching over to Segovia playing Bach on his acoustic guitar, from Andrés Segovia: Bach – Gavotte from 4th Lute Suite for guitar, Allegro Films.
In butterfly mode, Paul Chowder continues, in “Traveling Sprinkler,” from acoustic guitar to electro sounds to his girlfriend Roz and his neighbor Nan, parking his car here and there to get some writing done, in other words, in and out and back in again, listening to every day sounds and how they wrap around the cans and cannots of one’s thoughts. But Chowder keeps mentioning songs and music I’ve never heard of. Where have I been? And I asked myself again when and how and why it was I got Nicholson Baker’s “U & I,” and “Traveling Sprinkler” to begin with. So I looked them up. I thought I had purchased (and said in a previous post) “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris. Not so. I purchased it new from Amazon in June of 2023 (though it was not sold by Amazon – a bit confusing all of that, how Amazon works sometimes). And just now, about two years later, I’m getting around to reading it, “Traveling Sprinkler” (though I had given it a try a couple of times before), while “U & I,” I got used on Alibris in February of 2019, also giving it a couple of tries, but unable to fall into it, yet.
Anyway, it’s all old stuff, the books, the references, the music, not to mention the many political digressions, arguments with backing but often rants of a sort, Paul Chowder takes off on. He’s a pacificist, who, as I mentioned, attends meetings, though he’s not a full member, but which is why I thought the acoustic guitar was a good fit, him being a pacificist. But it depends on how you hear sounds. Last night late (after watching the Dodgers beat the Athletics in a record-breaking score of 19 to 2) before bed I played through a few of the Leo Brouwer “Etudes Simples” pieces, as I do almost every night, on my 1977 acoustic Takamine C132S. Number 1 is not all that pacific sounding, but Number 2 is lovely, particularly setting the tone for sleep.
The political arguments, by the way, though now aged, just over a decade away, are effective today, without stirring up too much dust. I’m increasingly finding I’d rather listen to decade old or older music too. Timeless music. Anyway, thinking back to that business about stereo and mono, I’m reminded of the Jimi Hendrix album “Axis: Bold as Love.” The first piece, titled, “Exp,” is an amazing example of stereo at play. It’s very short: 1:56. You can give it a listen here.
Rain. Inside still reading “Traveling Sprinkler” while outside rain falls, sprinkles, showers. Yesterday briefly it rained hard, but mostly (and the forecast is now calling for ten more days of this) a light, light to moderate rain, periods of partial clouds amid dashes of partial sun. But it’s beautiful, the multi-blue-grey cruisers and destroyers, heavy-hefty frigates idling by, littoral patrol boats, submarines up in the sky. Loose Cs strolling by. Anyway, I reached page 160 in Nicholson Baker’s “Traveling Sprinkler,” beginning the day at page 92, so close to 70 pages for the rainy day. When I left you yesterday, I might have sounded a bit worked up about his getting the Best Buy guitar. And later, I even looked it up, and sure enough, there it was, for $40, at Best Buy, a Gibson acoustic, but out of stock.
Back at the first paragraph of Chapter Four, Paul Chowder, the first person narrator of “Traveling Sprinkler,” opens with:
“I’m out in the garden, Maud, and the very fine clouds have, without my noticing, moved across the moon and collected around it like the soft gray dust in the dryer. I want to scoop the gray clouds away and see the moon naked like a white hole in the sky again, but it isn’t going to happen” (29).
Why does he call it dust, the dryer lint? Because dust sounds better than lint coming just before dryer, and the st gives off the flavor of the stuff.
I took numerous breaks from “Traveling Sprinker” yesterday, one to play The New York Times “Spelling Bee” game with Susan. We’ve been playing it together nearly every day. We sit next to one another on the love seat and prop my tablet against a pillow between us and use our stylus pens to enter words, making mistakes as we go, talking about the words. Coco, for example, which we’ve seen before, not acceptable (“not in word list”), not to be confused with cacao or cocoa, both acceptable. Sometimes the rules seem a bit illogical. Yesterday, the middle letter was O, and the other six letters were G, L, A, I, C, and Z, the other letters arranged in a circle around the O, and I saw emerging like a photograph being developed, zoological, and so we started with the day’s only pangram.
But we ended up getting stuck a few words away from a Queen Bee finish, found a couple more, but then couldn’t find our last word, a 6 letter GO word. We took a break to stretch and cut an apple into slices and came back to the couch lightheartedly determined to reach Queen Bee for the day, only one word away. In 179 Spelling Bee game-puzzles, we’ve reached Queen Bee only 19 times. I decided to ask AI (Artificial Intelligence) for some help, explaining to Susan the difference between cheating and getting some help. I asked Gemini, and this is the answer I got:
“Let’s see… using only the letters G, O, L, Z, A, I, and C, and starting with GO, a six-letter word we can make is GOLGI.”
Do you see the problem with that answer? So much for getting some help.
I was reminded of a recent post over at Ashen’s blog, “Course of Mirrors.” The post is titled …Thoughts on AI and ChatGPT …, and in it, Ashen creatively questions the implications of Artificial Intelligence. She quotes a 70s poem by Wislawa Szymborska – here are a couple of lines: “The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple,/ sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.” And I am reminded of the Richard Brautigan poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Machines, who, like all parents, it would seem to be developing, make mistakes.
I woke up this morning thinking of rain and W. Somerset Maugham’s short story titled “Rain.” The story is about restraint and strain and torrential tropical rain. But what I was thinking about was what we mean when we say, “It’s raining.” What’s the it? I wasn’t fully awake yet when I thought later I’d ask Gemini to explain. I just now asked, and here is Gemini’s answer:
“Ah, that’s a fun little linguistic puzzle! The “it” in the sentence “It is raining” is what we call a dummy pronoun or an expletive pronoun.
Think of it this way: the “it” doesn’t actually refer to any specific thing. It’s a grammatical placeholder that we use because English sentence structure generally requires a subject. In this case, there isn’t a real subject doing the raining. Rain is a weather phenomenon, not an action performed by a particular entity.
So, the “it” is just there to make the sentence grammatically correct. We use similar dummy pronouns in other impersonal constructions, like:
“It is cold outside.”
“It seems like a good idea.”
“It‘s important to be on time.”
In these sentences, the “it” doesn’t point to anything concrete; it simply fills the subject slot.
Isn’t language fascinating? We have these little grammatical tools that help our sentences flow even when there isn’t a literal subject performing an action.”
Not a bad answer. I wasn’t expecting that bit of editorializing at the end. And now I’m thinking back to the short story “Rain”:
“If he remonstrated or sought to put his meaning into an intelligible phrase, Walker would fly into a passion and cry: ‘What the hell do I care about grammar? That’s what I want to say and that’s how I want to say it.’”
But back to yesterday. While I was chatting it up on my phone with Gemini, Susan said, “Look at the [tablet] screen.” And there it was, the page that appears when you’ve reached Queen Bee! Susan had come up with the missing word: Googol.
Over the weekend, I read two articles somewhat related to one another: “How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters” (apparently some subscribers are losing track) in The New York Times, and “Is the Next Great American Novel Being Published on Substack?” (If a tree falls in the forest?) in The New Yorker. Too many subscriptions, paid or free, and the emails begin to pile up like old zines on a rusty rack in an empty barbershop, and come to be treated like spam and deleted, at issue, at bottom, simply this: more than we have resources to profitably or efficiently manage. Millions of miles of Substack track and only one effort is nominated. And part of the success formula is still will you get picked up by a traditional publisher. But there are great novels precursors to Substack serials: Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope. Maybe serializing your novel no one hears on Substack is the theme of the Great American Novel.
Having finished “The Paris Library,” and in long pause from Substack, I perused my small shelf (24 and 1/2 inches, to be exact) usually full of still barely opened or half read or unread books, but also some to-read-again books (as over the last few years I seem more inclined to reread something I particularly liked in a previous reading life rather than risk something new to me that might leave a bad taste or go permanently unfinished, a yucky slice of green pizza). Today, I counted 25 books on the to-read shelf. I feel no urgency about reading from the shelf. Every so often (periodically, but without a period), I wipe it clean and replace the books with a little vase of a freshly cut sprig or two.
About that phrase above, “to be exact.” Am I the type of guy who says things like “to be exact”? I don’t want to be. I knew a guy who habitually talked about other guys, and he frequently introduced his comments or opinions using the phrase, “He’s the type of guy….” He was the type of guy who used the phrase, “He’s the type of guy.” Well, there you have it. And even if he didn’t use the phrase, you felt categorized nonetheless. You got typed, along with the other guy, for you are either the type or not the type, and if you’re not that type, you’re some other type. So, to correct matters, it’s best to avoid any such shorthand phrases, for they are cliched and unnecessary, like most comments or opinions, I hasten to add, this one included. In fact, and in any case, the shorthand ends up making things longer, as I think I’m in the process of showing here. Of course, once you start to strike through stuff, you might end up with nothing. Hang out the shingle, “No Post Today.”
From the shelf of the unread, I picked “Traveling Sprinkler” (Penguin, 2013) by Nicholson Baker. I like Nicholson Baker, though I’ve only read one of his novels, “The Anthologist” (2009), which I enjoyed. But I’ve read most if not all of his New Yorker pieces (but I’ve not seen him there in awhile). I purchased “Traveling Sprinkler” used from Alibris some time ago. It’s a sequel to “The Anthologist.” It must have got wiped from the to-read shelf, not sure when, because it was just a few weeks ago I discovered it on another shelf and moved it back to the unread shelf. It had been sitting next to Baker’s “U and I: A True Story,” which twice I’ve tried to break into, both times unsuccessfully. “U and I” sat on the to-read shelf for weeks before I consigned it to a distant shelf. But I’ll get back to it, sooner or later, maybe.
Anyway, I like Nicholson Baker for several reasons. First, I very much enjoyed “The Anthologist.” I even did a bit of research, the basis for a fun post titled “Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Carr, and Googling Clothespins.” Second, Nicholson seems like a nice guy. For example, he seems to be one of the few fairly well known writers who if you follow them, on Instagram, for example, they’ll follow you back. Not that they actually check you out ever, but still, it’s nice to get followed back once in a while. I’ve not conducted a study on this, but I’m willing to guess that more than, say, 99 followers or following, assuming regular postings from either, and keeping up becomes an impossible challenge.
Baker’s latest appearances on Instagram tracked his efforts to draw, and then he came out with a new book, “Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art” (April, 2024). I’ve not read it, nor am I likely to add it to the to-read shelf anytime soon. Speaking of his wife, who’s an artist, Baker says: “She also draws with colored pencils and weaves fabric. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, she just does it.” I like that, not making “a big deal of it.” I saw it in the “Read sample” of “Finding a Likeness” at Amazon. Anyway, “Finding a Likeness” looks like a cool book, but I’m already out of room on the to-read shelf. Not that I have to self-limit to the 24 and 1/2 inches, but really, enough is enough.
And I’m enjoying “Traveling Sprinkler.” I’m only about a third of the way through it, through page 109, which ends Chapter 12, to be exact, so I probably shouldn’t try saying too much about it, until I finish it. It’s about the type of guy that’s largely unsuccessful in his career, though he doesn’t seem to have put that much into a career. In fact, I’m not exactly sure what his career is. He’s a poet of some sort, but I don’t think being a poet qualifies as a career. One reason you become a poet is to avoid a career, or to hide what you really care about from a career. Although there’s not much need to hide anything in a poem, given the unlikelihood anyone’s going to read it anyway, or if they do, understand it. He, Paul Chowder is his name, the narrator, started off as a musician, playing the bassoon. He gave up on the bassoon because he didn’t think he’d ever be good enough to make a fixed go of it. He sold his bassoon, a gift to him from his grandparents, for $10,000. I didn’t know bassoons cost that much. And that’s old dollars, before a tariff or two. He had a Heckel bassoon. He comes to regret having sold it. A major regret. I looked up bassoons just now. You can get a Moosman bassoon today for around ten grand. And if you don’t have that kind of dough (or a well endowed grandfolk) to blow on a bassoon, you now have two words to juxtapose in a poem. But what Paul wants now, and, in fact, has purchased, at Best Buy, no less, is a cheap acoustic guitar.
I didn’t know Best Buy sold guitars. Best Buy is where I bought the Chromebook I’m now typing on. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see any guitars in the Best Buy where I purchased this laptop. And Paul wants to ditch poems for songs. You might begin to understand why I said I like Nicholson Baker and “Traveling Sprinkler.” You learn a lot of footnote worthy stuff reading Nicholson Baker, that the poet Archibald MacLeish was a founder of the CIA, for example (105-107). And Baker himself played the bassoon. So is Paul a stand-in for Baker? No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t work like that. That’s too easy. All I wanted to suggest is that what Paul says about bassoons is probably reliable. He says Debussy was a fan of the bassoon, but then anyone could look up something like that.
Paul reads a lot, and attends Quaker meetings, though he’s not a full member. When he was younger (he’s on his 55th birthday as the book opens), he wanted to be a composer. He listens carefully to popular music now, but he divulges he’s never really heard or paid attention to lyrics, but he does now. I’ve made a note of a few of the songs he mentions, that I’ve never heard of, thinking I might look for them on YouTube. Kind of funny, looking a song up now, since the book is now 12 years old, and I’ve never heard of the songs he mentions, and most popular songs don’t have a very long shelf life. But then why would I have heard of his songs? And even if I had, I don’t hear lyrics either, unless it’s a Patti Page or Hank Williams song. In most rock songs, the voice is just another instrument, part of the noise. So he goes on about songs and poems, and Paul gives us the good lines from some poems, so we don’t have to waste time reading the whole poem. There’s much so far, in the first 109 pages, that I relate to. Not that you need to relate to everything you read, or anything you read. It might be better if you don’t relate. Develop new tastes. I wish I’d have discovered Penelope Fitzgerald, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and Henry Green earlier, but sometimes you have to wait until you’re ready for something.
Paul clarifies the difference between the oboe and the bassoon, and I was reminded of the jazz appreciation class I took in college, and the instructor told the class the oboe was not played in jazz, no jazz oboe players, and I raised my hand and corrected her, pointing out that Yusef Lateef played jazz oboe. Turned out, she didn’t know that much about jazz, lectured from notes, said I was wrong about Lateef and jazz oboe. Yusef Lateef also played the bassoon. Paul probably knows that, or Nicholson Baker does, but they haven’t mentioned it yet, through page 109 of “Traveling Sprinkler.”
And so Paul buys the cheap guitar, takes a lesson, though it doesn’t sound like the lesson was much help, but he’s enthusiastic about making up some songs:
“Everything’s different when you write a song. The rhymes sound different and they happen naturally, and the chords don’t sound like the same chords played on a piano. Your fingers make choices for you. The guitar is your friend, helping you find chords you’d never have found on your own, and then these chords help you find tunes you’d never have thought to sing. It’s such a simple and glorious collaboration” (104-105).
That’s a perfect rebuttal to the academic’s put down of popular song lyrics when compared to poetry.
One of my sisters recently visiting, one the guitarist and both patient artists on paper and cloth, not in any particular hurry, so riding the Coast Starlight for a bit of adventure and fun you don’t get on an airplane these days, and knowing my affinity for books, upon leaving for the southbound trip, left me a gift of “The Paris Library.”1
As genre, it’s a historical novel, and thematically covers some of the same ground found in “Suite Francaise,” the novel by Irene Nemirovsky,2 the setting of both books the World War II German occupation of France and its effect on the French population. In the preface to the French edition, a quote from Irene in a letter to a friend: “How could you think I could possibly forget my old friends because of a little book [she’s talking here about her first novel, “David Golder”] which people have been talking about for a few weeks and which will be forgotten just as quickly, just as everything is forgotten in Paris?” (421-422).
That everything is forgotten is why we write and read, and why sometimes there are those who would destroy or ban books, or close libraries. At the same time, given the ongoing repetition of predicaments that lead up to those books, one wonders if one really wants to repeat a given experience vicariously yet again, or why.
Irene’s daughter Denise discovers while copying her mother’s notes over 60 years after World War II, “These were not simply notes or a private diary, as she had thought, but a violent masterpiece, a fresco of extraordinary lucidity, a vivid snapshot of France and the French – spineless, defeated and occupied: here was the exodus from Paris; villages invaded by exhausted, hungry women and children battling to find a place to sleep, if only a chair in a country inn; cars piled high with furniture, mattresses and pots and pans, running out of petrol and left abandoned in the roads; the rich trying to save their precious jewels; a German soldier falling in love with a French woman under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law; the simple dignity of a modest couple searching amidst the chaos of the convoys fleeing Paris for a trace of their wounded son” (Preface to the French edition, 430).
But “The Paris Library” remains in wartime Paris, where not everyone is “spineless” or even “defeated,” but half the story includes, almost absurdly, in split-time alternating chapters, a setting some 40 years later in the US state of Montana. Letters play an important role, another way of remembering, should they be stashed away for some future generation to discover – or for the letter-writer to re-discover an old self. And in “The Paris Library” the human frailties uncovered or challenged by universal circumstances of the results of one’s actions prove the human possibilities of self-empowerment and resilience and rehabilitation. Challenging too, the constant reminder that one constant of the human condition seems to be the constant seemingly contradictory struggle for peace.
“The Paris Library,” by Janet Skeslien Charles, first published in Great Britain by Two Roads (John Murray Press, Hachette UK), 2021. ↩︎
I have the First Vintage International Edition, May 2007, translation (2006) by Sandra Smith, originally published in France as Suite Francaise by Editions Denoel, Paris, in 2004, and subsequently in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus and in the US by Knopf, 2006. ↩︎
This is the fourth blog post in a row about playing the guitar, inspired by one of my sisters, who has asked me for some ideas to further her own playing. The guitar is a folk instrument, by which we mean knowledge of the instrument and techniques for playing it are passed along to others usually orally and informally. When the great guitarist Julian Bream attended the Royal College of Music in the late 1940s, the guitar was not admitted, being considered, well, a folk instrument, and not suitable for classical music study. Bream did much throughout his career to change the reputational plight of the guitar in the conservatoire, as did Segovia. Frederick Noad in the 1960s was another guitar teacher who did much to popularize methods for formal study without losing the folk flavors.
By method, we mean an incremental or developmental approach to learning that follows a purposeful outline. But most people pick up a guitar and learn a riff or two, a chord or three, and try to imitate what they’ve heard on some recording. If they chance to perform, in the living room or garage, the problem of sounding like that recording is overwhelming. If someone requests, for example, “Stairway to Heaven,” you might be able to pull off the first part on your used acoustic Silvertone, but you’ll soon realize you need either to make the song your own or invest in a mountain of electronic and drum equipment to attempt a sound like what folks hear on the radio and would have you replicate in your garage or bedroom.
The guitar for some time now has had the reputation of being the easiest of instruments to play poorly and the most difficult of instruments to play well (a perspective attributed to Segovia). Having not attempted the oboe or French horn, bagpipes or pipe organ, kazoo or spoons, we’re not sure, but about the guitar we know enough to say it’s easy to get to a certain point of technical frustration. When that happens, it’s often useful to, as Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” Then again, Thoreau didn’t play the guitar. He played the flute.
One way to simplify guitar is to play a melody. Keeping within the C scale of notes will also keep things simple (no sharps or flats). Take, for example, the opening notes to the song “Over the Rainbow.” Position your hand over frets 5 through 8, and play the melody from C (3rd string, 5th fret) to C an octave up (1st string, 8th fret). The next note you’ll find one fret down, a B (1st string, 7th fret). Then a G (2nd string, 8th fret). Then A (1st string, 5th fret), B (1st string, 7th fret), and C again (1st string, 8th fret). See if you can figure out the rest of the melody. You’ll be learning to play the guitar.
We saw that the C Major Scale of notes is useful because it has no sharps or flats. We’ll find that it’s particularly useful in other ways for the guitarist.
Let’s review the C Major Scale of Notes. C to C gives us an octave. We can number the notes. We’ll use the numbers to build chords:
Numeric Note
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Letter Note
C
D
E
F
G
A
B
C
A major chord is built stacking the 1st, 3rd, and 5th of a scale. We can build a chord that begins with each letter of the C Major Scale. When finished, we’ll have the C Major Harmonized Scale of chords:
Chord #
I
ii
iii
IV
V
vi
vii
Name
CM
dm
em
FM
GM
am
b-dim
Notes
5
G
A
B
C
D
E
F
3
E
F
G
A
B
C
D
1
C
D
E
F
G
A
B
The C Major chord (I, or CM in the table above) contains the notes C, E, and G, the 1st, 3rd, and 5th steps of the C Major scale of notes. The D minor chord (ii, or dm in the table above) contains the notes D, F, and A. Why is it a minor chord? A minor chord is built also using the 1st, 3rd, and 5th steps of a scale, but the 3rd is flatted, moved a half step down, which, on the guitar, is one fret down. I thought you said there were no flats or sharps. Here’s where things get a bit tricky.
Let’s take a look at the C Chromatic scale of notes. This is a scale that shows all the notes, including the flats and sharps. A sharp is indicated with a # sign, and flats are indicated with a b. Note that a C# and a Db is the same note, called a flat when moving down and a sharp when moving up):
1
1#2b
2
2#3b
3
4
4#5b
5
5#6b
6
6#7b
7
8
C
C#Db
D
D#Eb
E
F
F#Gb
G
G#Ab
A
A#Bb
B
C
The C Major scale of notes uses just 7 of the notes of the Chromatic scale above. As we have seen, those notes include: C D E F G A and B. What happened to the sharps and flats? We skipped over them. How do we know where to skip? That’s a given. To build a major scale, we skip over the 1#2b and the 2#3b, but notice there is no 3# or 4b, and there is no 7# or 8b. So we have notes that skip like this:
1 (skip) 2 (skip) 3 4 (skip) 5 (skip) 6 (skip) 7 8 C (skip) D (skip) E F (skip) G (skip) A (skip) B C
In other words, there is no 3# or 4b and there is no 7# or 8b. There is no E sharp or F flat and there is no B# or Cb in the C Major scale. If we want to flat the F, we get E. If we want to flat the C, we get B.
It might be useful now to take a look at the whole guitar fretboard (depending on your device, you should be able to slide right to see all the columns):
Open Strings
1st Fret
2nd Fret
3rd Fret
4th Fret
5th Fret
6th Fret
7th Fret
8th Fret
9th Fret
10th Fret
11th Fret
12th Fret
13th Fret
e
f
g
a
b
c
d
e
f
b
c
d
e
f
g
a
b
c
g
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
d
e
f
g
a
b
c
d
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
a
e
f
g
a
b
c
d
e
f
And here are the same notes using corresponding numbers:
Open Strings
1st Fret
2nd Fret
3rd Fret
4th Fret
5th Fret
6th Fret
7th Fret
8th Fret
9th Fret
10th Fret
11th Fret
12th Fret
13th Fret
3
4
5
6
7
1
2
3
4
7
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
1
5
6
7
1
2
3
4
5
2
3
4
5
6
7
1
2
6
7
1
2
3
4
5
6
3
4
5
6
7
1
2
3
4
Notice the 1 skips a fret to 2, but the 3 does not skip a fret to 4. Same for 7 to 1. The 1 corresponds to C, the 2 to D, etc.
If we start a major scale on D and use the skipping method of counting through the Chromatic scale, we get:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2#3b
3
4
4#5b
5
5#6b
6
6#7b
D
D#Eb
E
F
F#Gb
G
G#Ab
A
A#Bb
If we build the D Major chord using the 1, 3, and 5 of the scale in the table above, we get a chord with the notes D (1), E (3), and F# (5). The D Major chord is built using the notes D, E, and F#. Taking the D Major chord of D, E, and F# but flatting the F#, we get D, E, F. The chord is now a 1, flat 3, 5 chord, or, a minor chord.
Now, back to the C Major Harmonized scale, which is built with the chords C Major, D Minor, E Minor, F Major, G Major, A Minor, and B Diminished. The chords are shown in the table as
I
ii
iii
IV
V
vi
vii
CM
dm
em
F
G
am
b-dim
It’s a bit tricky to say all of the chords contain no sharps or flats, since we saw that the D minor chord has a flatted third. But the flatted third of a D chord, as we’ve seen, gives us an F note, not an F#. You can work it out for the E minor and A minor, as well as the B diminished (which flats both the 3rd and the 5th notes of a scale). What you’ll find is that the chords as expressed in the C Major Harmonized scale appear to have no sharps or flats. They are built with “natural” notes, meaning not sharped or flatted notes.
Chord #
I
ii
iii
IV
V
vi
vii
Name
CM
dm
em
FM
GM
am
b-dim
Notes
5
G
A
B
C
D
E
F
3
E
F
G
A
B
C
D
1
C
D
E
F
G
A
B
Here are some suggestions for practical application:
Play chord progressions using chords from the C Major Harmonized scale. For example, play ii (dm), V (GM), I (CM), or play I (CM), vi (am), ii (dm), V (GM). Play I, IV, V.
Memorize all of the C notes on the guitar fretboard. Be able to jump from one to the other, in any order.
Play the C Major scale of notes on the fretboard beginning (ascending and descending) with each of the C notes you found in 2 above.
Play all of the chords in the C Major Harmonized scale in the first position of the fretboard (frets 1 thru 3). Play them in order, ascending and descending.
A good way to learn the notes on the guitar fretboard is to begin with the notes in the C Major scale, which has no sharps or flats1. The C Major scale, using letters to signify notes, goes like this:
C D E F G A B C.
To begin, play the scale, one note at a time, using the open strings and fingering the notes on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd frets, beginning and ending on the C note, forward (ascending) and backward (descending), memorizing each note in its open or fretted position.
Use your 3rd (ring) finger on the 3rd fret, 2nd finger (middle) on the 2nd fret, and 1st finger (index) on the first fret. If you want to finger-pick, alternate index with middle fingers of your right hand, or use your thumb throughout. The table below shows the 6th (thickest) string at the bottom.
Open String
1st Fret
2nd Fret
3rd Fret
B
C
G
A
D
E
F
C
Now play the C Major scale on the 2nd through the 8th frets. Here you’ll be playing through two octaves2. Again, play forward (ascending) and backward (descending) in alphabetical order, memorizing the notes. When you get to the C on the 3rd string (5th fret), move your hand up so that your index finger plays that note, ring finger the D, index the E, middle the F, pinkie the G, index the A, ring the B, and pinkie the final C (1st string, 8th fret):
1st Fret
2nd Fret
3rd Fret
4th Fret
5th Fret
6th Fret
7th Fret
8th Fret
A
B
C
E
F
G
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
C
D
As you play through the notes, you can sing: Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do. Or, sing the notes: C D E F G A B C. Or sing numbers: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.
Solfa
Do
Re
Mi
Fa
So
La
Ti
Do
Numeric Note
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Letter Note
C
D
E
F
G
A
B
C
Next, we’ll look at the C Chromatic scale and the C Major Harmonized scale to see how chords are built.
On the piano, to play the C Major scale, you press only the white keys, skipping over the black keys, but on the guitar, every fret is what is called a half step, and the sharps and flats can’t be seen. ↩︎
An octave is 8 notes, beginning and ending on the same note. ↩︎
I was given the exercises to practice by my first classical guitar instructor. After many years of carrying them around in my three-ring binder guitar workbook, I’ve taken photos of the two pages, from which I’ve copied below, adding just a few edits and a short glossary of terms. In addition to being useful developmental exercises, the lines can be used for warmup in any setting. While the exercises were written with classical guitar in mind, they work for any guitar genre. The basic idea is that you don’t want your fingers to simply remember riffs, because then they fall into forced habits, often limiting and hard to change, but the exercises encourage a flexible, ambidextrous capability, each finger able to move independent of the others.
EXERCISES (1 thru 24 - see Instructions below Line 24):
1.1234 0234 0134 0124 0123
2.4123 4023 4013 4012 3012
3.3412 3402 3401 2401 2301
4.2341 2340 1340 1240 1230
5.1243 0243 0143 0142 0132
6.4132 4032 4031 4021 3021
7.3421 3420 3410 2410 2310
8.2314 2304 1304 1204 1203
9.1423 0423 0413 0412 0312
10.4312 4302 4301 4201 3201
11.3241 3240 3140 2140 2130
12.2134 2034 1034 1024 1023
13.1432 0432 0431 0421 0321
14.4321 4320 4310 4210 3210
15.3214 3204 3104 2104 2103
16.2143 2043 1043 1042 1032
17.1342 0342 0341 0241 0231
18.4231 4230 4130 4120 3120
19.3124 3024 3014 2014 2013
20.2413 2403 1403 1402 1302
21.1324 0324 0314 0214 0213
22.4213 4203 4103 4102 3102
23.3142 3042 3041 2041 2031
24.2431 2430 1430 1420 1320
Instructions
Numbers refer to left hand fingers (index is 1, middle 2, ring 3, little 4). The exercises can be played on any string in any position (i. e. beginning at any fret). An “0” in lines above, e.g. 1320, means play string open (un-fretted).
Do each individual exercise (four notes) eight times, except as noted below, and proceed to the next without interruption. Fingers “i”, “m”, and “a” use rest strokes1 throughout except when playing chords in 7, 8, 9 below. After first learning all exercises with right hand fingering i m a m, practice daily in the following manner:
Begin on the first string changing every four notes to the second string, and in turn to the third, etc. as far as the sixth string and back again each exercise. Each exercise is then actually repeated 10 times. The “Lines” below refer to the rows or exercises in the section above.
Line 1: i m a m Line 2: m a m i Line 3: a m i m
Thumb (indicated with p) every eight notes. Each day use a different combination of strings, i. e. fingers on 1st string, thumb on 6th, next day fingers 2nd, thumb 6th, next fingers 2nd, thumb 5th, then 3rd and 5th.
Line 4: i&p m a m i m a m Line 5: i m&p a m i m a m Line 6: i m a&p m i m a m
Chord (a&m&i&p) every eight notes. Each day use a different combination of strings, e.g. chord on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, & 5th, other notes on 1st, or chord same, other notes on 2nd, etc.
Line 7: a&m&i&p i m a m i m a Line 8: a&m&i&p m a m i m a m Line 9: a&m&i&p a m i m a m i
Line 10: Shifting position one fret each exercise to the end of the finger-board and return.
Line 11: The same, shifting two frets each exercise.
Line 12: The same, three frets.
Line 13: i m a m – With slurs2. Example: 1~2 3~4 Line 14: i m a m – With slurs. Example: 1~3 2~4 Line 15: i m a m – With slurs. Example: 1~4 2~3
Lines 16, 17, 18: m i m i m a m a i a i a m i m a
Lines 19, 20, 21: Eight notes as legato3 as possible, eight notes as staccato as possible.
Rotate exercises weekly. That is, the second week play lines 4, 5, & 6 changing strings, 7, 8, & 9 with thumb, etc.
The finger of a rest stroke, or apoyando, after plucking a string, comes to rest on the string above it, thus allowing for a more controlled stroke that can produce more volume. While the instructions call for all rest strokes, the player may prefer also practicing with free strokes (where the finger does not come to rest but plays through). ↩︎
There are two kinds of slurs, the hammer-on and the pull-off. In each, the note is sounded with the left hand finger by hitting a higher fret on the same string after a stroke (ascending slur) or pulling quickly off a string to an lower fret of the same string (descending slur). ↩︎
Legato is playing smoothly and continuously from one note to another; staccato is playing each note with a stop between notes. ↩︎
Dolce is soft or hollow; metalico is bright or electric. To play dolce, move the right hand forward of the sound hole; to play metalico, move the right hand back toward the bridge. ↩︎
The Coming of the Toads 