Etude in E Minor (Op. 35 Nr. 24)
Fernando Sor
Fernando Sor (1778 - 1839) composed a large amount of didactical material -studies and lessons- for the beginner and advanced guitarist.
Besides his guitar method, he composed a number of collections with etudes, in order of increasing difficulty these are Op. 60 (25 etudes), Op. 44 (24 etudes), Op. 35 (24 etudes), Op. 31 (24 etudes), Op. 6 (12 etudes) and Op. 29 (12 etudes).
He succeeded in adding a lot of original and fresh music to the otherwise formal and sometimes dull etude form.
Sor composed his "24 Easy Studies" Op. 35 as a reaction to complaints that players found his other studies quite difficult to play and far too ambitious for the beginner. Nevertheless these "easy" studies have some difficulties too!
This Etude in E Minor is an excercise to "lift out" melody notes from an arpeggio pattern. In the original score, these notes were actually there. As a consequence of the limitations of the sheet music software, however, this was not possible in this score. Therefore I marked the melody notes with accents. The original instruction to this study states that the player should hold the melody notes until the next one must be played.