OK, I can’t just let this one sit there. My apologies to those of you who are thinking “I just got my ass sewn back on from the last time he bored it clean offa me and here he goes again. Whadda ya call a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about AND won’t shaddup?”
So, generalities - when describing the instruments, the Spanish Guitar and the Classical Guitar are usually meant to describe the same object, with the Flamenco Guitar being slightly different. Flamenco Guitars are engineered to be a bit easier to play (closer action for the left hand), have less sustain, have more volume for chords and less volume for individual notes than a Classical/Spanish Guitar, and they often have ‘Golpeadors’, thin plastic plates, glued to the top to help them take the finger tapping that is called for in Flamenco music. They’re very much like the pick guards on a steel string guitar, and for much the same reason, except that the finger tapping in Flamenco involves hitting the top (the soundboard) with the fingernail.
Classical/Spanish instruments are usually engineered to project the sound of an individual note as well as possible while retaining a mellow sound.
Both types of guitar tend to have the widest necks of any of the acoustic guitars. On a steel string, players often mute an open string that they don’t want to, and strum with the pick. The muted string is drowned out by the surrounding strings that are resonating. In music for a classical guitar, the guitarist may well have to play an open string that is between two fingered strings, and all of the strings need to sound clearly and beautifully. Villa-Lobos 4th Prelude immediately comes to mind - on a classical guitar both 'A’s in the 6th bar come through beautifully. On a steel string, the second a, coming between two fingered strings, goes PBTTTH because one of the two fingers is bumping it. Immediate loss of all Elvis points, resulting in one sad guitarist.
Getting back to the question of music for Spanish Guitar versus music for Classical Guitar - oddly enough, I find that for most people, Flamenco sounds more like ‘Spanish Guitar Music’ than Classical.
Spain has a unique position in terms of its musical heritage - it was a place where European, Arabic, North African and Jewish musical ideas got to rub shoulders for a long time. An excellent way to explore this is to look up the album “Musique Arabo-Andalouse” on the Harmonia Mundi label, where they play renaissance Spanish music which has clearly been influenced by non-European sources, in its rhythms, its instrumentation and its scales.
In particular, these rhythms and scales remained embedded in the folk forms of Spain, and, from a guitarist’s standpoint, especially in the music used to accompany the dance form known as Flamenco.
In the late 19th century, these rhythms and scales came to be integrated into the ‘mainstream’ classical tradition by composers including (but by no means limited to) Bizet, Ravel and Debussy, as well as composers from Spain such as Albeniz and Manuel de Falla.
The chief difference between Classical music and Flamenco is that Flamenco is an oral tradition. While certain aspects of its style have been borrowed by mainstream classical composers and written down in various books, its purest version is passed down from master to pupil. Also, although there are specific musical gestures (falsetas), the works are largely improvised within a mutually agreed framework. As a result, there are no fixed ‘Flamenco’ pieces - the same dance a week later may sound quite different because of a change of guitarists, whereas the sequence of the dances has not changed at all. I won’t elaborate as I’m at the absolute limit of what I know of Flamenco, never having studied.
Classical music is, of course, written down and while there may be great differences in interpretation, the form and harmony of the piece remain the same from performer to performer.
Classical guitar is its own special thread of Music History, with its own geniuses, innovators and consolidators. The difficulty of writing well for the instrument, coupled with the development of the piano as a more common instrumnent in the home and in the concert hall, led to the guitar’s presence in what some wags call ‘the trailer park of music history.’ Names like Sor, Aguado, Carcassi, Regondi, Mertz, Coste are obscure to the music lover raised on a diet of symphony and sonata, while guitarists bemoan the fact that Pagannini and Villa-Lobos are probably among the only guitar composers that the general public has heard of.
Now, of the composers listed above, Sor is the only spaniard, and he predates the flourishing of nationalism in Spanish music. Francisco Tarrega is the virtuoso guitarist and composer who a) was hugely influential in the final stages of development of the modern instrument (larger, fan bracing so that the top can take more tension in the strings all leading to a louder instrument for the concert hall.), b) composed music using some of the scales and rhythms we now consider characteristic of a Spanish style of music and c) arranged music for guitar, including a set of piano pieces by Issac Albeniz entitled Suite Espanol, op. 47 which included the Asturias (Leyenda) mentioned upthread. Albeniz himself preferred the Tarrega arrangements for guitar to his own piano version (possibly because the piano versions are really tough to play!)
So here, music for classical guitar starts to branch into two streams - those who embrace the instrument’s connection to folk elements in music, and those who want the instrument to be taken seriously in its own right.
Andres Segovia is a hugely controversial figure in the history of the instrument. If you want to start a flame war, go to the Classical Guitar Mailing list and lob a bomb like “Segovia was the worst thing that ever happened to the classical guitar” or “Segovia was the greatest thing that ever happened to the classical guitar”. Guaranteed to last a week…
Segovia used to carry his guitar in a cello case, so he wouldn’t have to put up with people calling out the Spanish equivalent of “Give us a tune, there.” He wanted to emphasize the instruments classical roots and move it away from folk music forms which he considered inferior. He avoided works that used effects like Golpe (tapping on the body), Rasgueado (a rapid, vigorous strum with a harsh, metallic sound) and Tremolo (rapid, repeated strokes of a single note, giving a mandolin-like effect. The entire basis of the F. Tarrega piece mentioned upthread, ‘Recuerdos de l’Alhambra’) and he encouraged composers to expand the repertoire of the instrument by commissioning music. He was also a monster of a player - he set a standard for concert performance that it is difficult for anyone to match.
The other stream of classical guitar music embraces the influence of folk music on the instrument, not only in terms of Spanish music, but also taking ideas from South and Central America, Africa, Turkey, from blues, jazz, country and rock and roll. Villa-Lobos deserves a mention here as someone who ran across Segovia. They didn’t have much in common, and Segovia was rather surprised when his casual ‘If you write something for me, I will look at it’ produced the 12 Etudes. Despite writing the preface (the etudes were dedicated to him), Segovia never recorded more than the first, and found them quite outside his tastes. Villa-Lobos writes with a primitive energy and glories in the influence of Brazilian street music, particularly the Choros (a now dated popular form.)
Leo Brouwer is a Cuban, another composer who writes primarily for the guitar and who is worth a mention in the context of composers influenced by the guitar in the context of its folk influences. Particularly in ‘El Decameron Negro’ and his arrangements of ‘Drume, Negrita’, ‘Ochos Brujos’ and ‘Quítate de la Acera’ he glories in the guitar as a percussive rather than a melodic instrument.
So, to get back to the original question - there’s lots of overlap between ‘Spanish’, ‘Classical’ and ‘Flamenco’ guitar music. Of the classical stuff that sounds most ‘Spanish’ to my ears, I’d recommend checking out some
Francisco Tarrega - pretty much anything, but particularly ‘Recuerdos de l’Alhambra’.
Manuel de Falla - Homenaje a Claude Debussy is the only thing he actually wrote for guitar, but there is a guitar arrangement of ‘El Sombrero de tres picos’ which is outstanding.
Isaac Albeniz - Suite Espanola, op. 47 which includes Granada, Cataluna, Sevilla, Cadiz, Asturias (Leyenda), Aragon, Castilla and Cuba
Some interesting Wiki links -
Segovia
Classical Guitar
List of Classical Guitarists
Flamenco Guitar
List of Flamenco Guitarists