Please forgive the length of this post, but it does take some explaining. I am totally blind and am interested in learning to play classical guitar. The music that interests me for this endeavour is opera, Neapolitan, Italian art song, serenades, parlour songs, Spanish guitar, etc. not folk, popular, rock, country, blues, and so on. I found the following two resources for the blind.
https://afb.org/aw/21/2/16906
https://letsplayguitar.org/
The problem is how they teach. I am not the sort who wants to learn a few chords and begin playing songs after my first or second lesson. I am a firm believer in learning music theory, scales, and exercises, and only after a very long while, playing actual songs. This is similar to proper singing instruction, which can take up to six years. To me, these other methods are the equivalent of Vaccai, or for those unfamiliar with him, learning a few tourist phrases of a language to get by, instead of learning via grammar, dialogues, translation, memorisation, etc. Whether or not I ever perform in public, I don't want to learn half way. I do have Harmony : its theory and practice by Ebenezer Prout for the theory, and I am using Perplexity to clean it of errors and supply the missing notation when possible.
https://archive.org/details/harmonyitsthe00prouuoft
Having said that, I am now researching some nineteenth-century guitar teachers. I've come across names such as Carulli, Aguado, Carcassi, Legnani, Molino, and Sor, all offering something different and for different levels of study. It seems that, for a beginner, Carulli and Carcassi, and possibly Aguado might be good choices. Despite its date of publication, I couldn't find an accessible version of Carulli's Op. 241, though I did find a good lecture about it on Youtube. However, while he plays the notes, I have no idea what fingers he is using for what.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oowE9bD_k44
I also found an English version of the English edition in hard copy on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Ferdinando-Carullis-Guitar-School-Tablature/dp/3950550283
My main problem as a blind student is notation. If he writes strictly on the staff, I won't be able to follow him, unless I could possible run the text, which I will first have to scan with ocr, through Perplexity and see if it can make sense of it. If he uses his own notation 1 through 4 for the left hand, and p for the thumb plus a through d for the right), I can read some of it. But that still leaves me with the issue of where to place my fingers on the strings i.e. first fret, second string, index finger. They offer modern tabliture, but I beleive the same problems will still exist. I don't know, as I know nothing about that system. At the first link for the blind, they mentioned an accessible chords site, but while their main page still works, their accessible one doesn't, and the main one just gives diagrams for the scales and chords with no text to read.
Does anyone know where I can find an accessible course for the guitar that is more traditional, or at least a place where I can learn the scales and some exercises?
#accessibility #blind #Carulli #ClassicalGuitar #guitar #music #MusicTheory #notation
