From Legnani to Laufey: the guitar’s classical role

Arranging a pop song might, at first glance, seem to stand outside of the classical tradition. After all, the classical genre has long defined itself through distinction, an ensemble not a band, a piece, not a song, classical, not pop. For the ‘core’ instruments of the classical music tradition, this creates no natural problem, but for an instrument like the guitar which enjoys a rich history as the ‘voice of the people’, this distinction is more complex.

For centuries, plucked strings accompanied song and dance, blurring the line between art and every day life, and the guitar inherited that lineage of accessibility. Even as it moved into the salons and conservatories of the 19th century it carried with it the aura of the personal. Whilst the violin and piano became symbols of bourgeois aspiration, the guitar remained the companion of poets and singers, an instrument to be played anywhere. This cultural position shaped the way the classical establishment received it; a beautiful but modest instrument, a little too close to popular music to be fully ‘serious’. 

Conservative views of the time clashed with more appreciative reception of the guitar as a classical instrument. During his illustrious career, the famous violinist Juan Manén lamented of Francisco Tárrega “Why did his artist’s soul long for such an unworthy instrument? Why were so many patient hours […] misspent on such a poorly-accepted instrument?”. At the same time an article in the Mercantil Valenciano on 21st December, 1888 illustrated an emerging change of attitude towards guitar’s role in the classical world: “Tárrega, without exaggeration is a genius on the guitar, which he has raised from its former humility to the heights”.

At these “heights” the guitar’s most classical moments were transcriptions and fantasies written with pre-existing material, re-imagining the music that already defined classical taste; opera arias, orchestral themes and piano works. Tárrega and his contemporaries were celebrated for their transformation of familiar repertoire into something intimate and new. Through these acts of recreation, the guitar found a legitimate and accepted place within the classical world.

In the early twentieth century, this creative trend continued, composers from Spain and Latin America began to use folk melodies and rhythms in concert works and the line between the popular and the serious dissolved even further. In these pieces, the guitar’s roots were celebrated rather than suppressed. When a choro was committed to page, or a fandango became a sonata movement, it was not a loss of authenticity. The change of setting changed the music’s meaning: folk music became ‘classical’ and its ‘academic’ material became the place, time and culture its roots ‘originally’ came from.

In today’s world, popular music and the classical music that remains popular, may seem awfully disparate. Mozart string quartets do sound very different to the latest Dua Lipa track, but the comparison is misleading. Mozart’s context, a courtly, aristocratic environment with its own aesthetic expectations, is far removed from our contemporary musical world. Modern classical music does share more with the pop idiom than one might initially assume. In the same way that Legnani, Tárrega and Sor took arias and repurposed them through the voice of the guitar, arranging a modern pop or jazz-influenced song for classical guitar follows the impulse to translate the ‘familiar' into a new voice and to allow popular music to speak in a different register. This allows an audience to listen to its new classical transformation and enjoy it as a classical work.

When I first heard Laufey’s music, I immediately thought that a classical guitar arrangement would be possible because her music is so lyrical, the lines are so melodic and are coloured with harmonies that are rich and textured. The closeness to her voice, the interplay between melody and accompaniment and the gorgeous jazzy swoops of the phrases all beg for interpretation on an instrument that has always thrived on intimacy.

Just as Tárrega transformed operatic works into something new, a classical guitar arrangement of Laufey’s music allows the songs to inhabit a new space, something a bit quieter, more tactile and more personal. This arrangement of her song ‘What Love Will Do to You’ was a joy to work on. In the process of translating the essence of the piece for the guitar, the guitar felt like both a vessel and a lens.

Arranging contemporary music in this way is not a departure from the classical tradition, it is a continuation. The guitar has always served as a bridge between worlds, between folk music and the concert hall and between popular music and art music . Bringing a modern song into that lineage reaffirms the classical guitar’s role as an instrument of transformation. In that sense, this arrangement of ‘What Love Will Do to You’ is not just an act of love, it is a project of classical music-making that is deeply true to the nature of our instrument as the ‘voice of the people’ and also in its role as the ‘classical guitar’.