Before I ran off to the US this summer, I shared a YouTube video of me playing Franz Schubert’s “Ständchen”. I’ve loved this troubled love song for years, and when I was first experimenting with self-accompanied art song, this was the first place I looked.
It has a clear guitar-like accompaniment, and in terms of the harmonies, most of the chords are perfectly playable on guitar. Indeed, there are various arrangements floating around, and I wish I’d looked there first; my arrangement has many similarities to the guitar-only arrangement by Mertz (minus the melody in the guitar). Had I just looked there first, I could have saved myself a lot of time.
Of course, part of the time was just learning the technique to play it in the first place. I hope to do many more of these, and with each piece I have to stretch my classical guitar abilities further.
I’ll try and share these more quickly here in the future. Please enjoy.
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