20 Studies (20 Estudios), Op.50
Ernesto García de León
Musical Exercises to Refresh Your Technique
20 Studies, Op. 50 is an ingenious collection that helps to develop and maintain guitar technique. These musical exercises are also useful to rectify, reform, or rehabilitate the guitar technique. García de León composed the twenty studies after suffering an accident in 1991 that made his right hand practically unusable. Fortunately, he regained his potential to play through one long, meticulous and successful microsurgery in 1996 by the excellent Columbian hand specialist Dr. Rafael Reynoso Campo. Doing post–operative exercises, García de León realized he needed to completely re–learn basic finger movements and formulas and he began to practice them. The young Mexican guitarist Noé García Alcaraz—to whom this collection is dedicated—then encouraged García de León to compose a set of studies to explore and perfect fundamental techniques—exercises useful not only to Ernesto, but also to Noé, and to all guitar players. Thus the twenty studies were born.
The composer performs selections from “20 Studies.”
The sequence of the set is graded from easy to difficult, but the exercises may be studied or performed in any order. The materials out of which the twenty studies are developed are first idiomatic patterns of the guitar and then the variety of musical styles so appealing to and characteristic of Ernesto García de León. For example, classic examples of the music of the Caribbean coastal basin in general and the composer’s native state Veracruz in particular appear unvarnished in studies no. 12 (a rumba veracruzana) and no. 20 (a son jarocho). The other studies blend elements of Mexican music in general—songs of the revolution, native dances, boleros, children’s songs, and so forth—with elements of European classical music, Beatles, New Age music, jazz and other musical styles, in a way intended to appeal to the player and to the listener.
The first sixteen studies explore basic formulas for the right hand. At the same time, they also address the full range of the left hand techniques—including balance and positioning, independence of the fingers, longitudinal and transversal movements, shift by substitution, by displacement, by jump, and by positions, barring, stretches and contractions, damping, pivoting, crossed movements, and movements with fixed fingers. The last four movements concern the slur.
Though each of the basic right–and left–hand formulas explored in the twenty studies is relatively simple in itself, each is a building block of a solid technique. Mastery of the complete set of twenty studies—less than half an hour of music—integrates all the formulas and develops the technique to a level at which an enormous range of guitar repertoire becomes available.
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Editor's Note: Notes taken from Ernesto García de León, Collected Works, Volume 2 by Michael Lorimer, ed. Used by permission © 2010 by Adela Publishing (ASCAP).