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.
You are a troubadour! Thanks so much for sharing this beautiful performance. I’d be happy to hear you sing or play separately, but together it is a tour de force. I hope you’ll continue to work up more self-accompanied repertoire. The conversational timbre and range of the baritone voice works very well for this as well. Those of us in opera/art song sometimes discount how amazing the rock/pop singers are who play guitar, drums or keyboards while singing. It really takes a lot of practice to get that right, doesn’t it? Keep up the good work!
Kate, Washington, DC
Thank you! That’s very kind. Yes, it’s a lot of practice. I have another one of these in the works, but it takes time and several efforts to get it recording-ready.