Transcription and gesture in the portuguese-guitar music of Carlos Paredes

This paper takes the stance that an active and vigilant oral tradition relies on the framework of a continuous creative process, which both better understands the inherited cultural products and lays the principles for its recreation by new practices that might reinterpret and reinvigorate that tradition. This stance is especially urgent in light of the current touristic pressure that creates demand for live performances, and which often lead to an overabundance of poor-level and un-informed practices. This effort proposes to approach Paredes' music in the tradition of the composer/performer as stylistic hybrid of embodied and culturally constructed sound, and centers around two vectors of inquiry: (1) the examination of the creative process of Paredes' performance style within the larger context of the Coimbra-style of playing, (through analysis of video footage and by one of the authors being a carrier for the oral tradition of the Coimbra guitar), including the examination of plucking and figuration based patterns, qualities of vibrato, the relation between the guitar tuning system and ergonomic issues; and (2) the first-hand research on the creation of notated transcription (and analysis of some existing transcriptions) as a place for negotiating performance idiosyncrasies, musical conventions and style, and the gestural and timbral imagination (of composition and reception), including aspects of stylistic-based characterization of the music corpus and range of formal designs