the ear
The ear bends to the wood, scrutinizes the silence that it might better understand its grain, translates sounds and noises into knowing action.
The task of listening starts here, with the wood that is still without form and from which you try to intuit its potential, understand its secret. The wood ‘plays’ long before it becomes the sound board or the back or an actual guitar. It is something which lies beyond the theoretical knowledge of the properties of material, of the degree and speed of the transferability of sound; it is the tension towards a vibratory mode, a sonority and it is this characteristic that will become part of the “sound of the guitar”, made of wood and strings and fingers.
It is a listening process that will persist patiently throughout the whole genesis of the guitar. The ear of the guitar maker, alert to sound, perfects the intonation of the sound board with his refined workmanship, always attentive to the slightest change, keeping his sensibilities alive throughout the transformation in progress.
When the process reaches its peak and the instrument is ‘born’, the first sound has the taste of an unviolated place. With one’s attention tuned to its utmost, the sound is left to reverberate at length, to savour it, yes, but also to understand it. You perceive its duration, its quality and clumsily try to contain it within the limits of our verbal universe, but it is futile. The sound of the guitar, in all its integrity is something which defies every attempt at categorisation.
So you discuss it, you listen, you compare, you listen, you remember and you listen, again and again.
