VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

Two new articles are now live on Medium.

The first is a brand-new investigation into one of the most curious reversals in classical guitar historiography: how Graham Wade went from praising Narciso Yepes and calling the ten-string guitar "vindicated as an ideal medium for Bach" in 1974 to becoming one of its most influential institutional detractors only a few years later. The article traces the documentary evidence and asks what changed.

I've also published a concise summary of my longer four-part study arguing that Andrés Segovia's musical ideology was fundamentally Modernist rather than Romantic, and that the familiar "Spanish Romantic" narrative is a later construction.

If you're interested in the history of the classical guitar beyond received views, both articles are now available on my Medium page [clickable links in the Comments, below]:

“True Love and Understanding”: What Happened to Graham Wade, Author of Traditions of the Classical Guitar (1980)?:
https://medium.com/@10string/graham-wade-narciso-yepes-classical-guitar-beeb617907d6

Classical Guitar’s Founding Myth: Segovia Was a Modernist, Not a Romantic:
https://medium.com/@10string/segovia-modernist-81645dab107b

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 11

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

Yesterday I lost one of my closest friends and most important mentors: Dr. Gerald Florian Messner. He was 89. He passed away on 2 June 2026 and is survived by his wife, Lala.

Some of you have heard me mention Florian's name in the context of this channel. He was not a guitarist. He was something considerably harder to categorise: an Austrian-Australian ethnomusicologist, trained actor, playwright, poet, composer, painter, and radio broadcaster.


His most significant scholarly contribution was documenting the multi-part vocal tradition of Bistritsa, Bulgaria — coining the term "interferential diaphony" for a style of close-interval polyphony that outsiders describe as "maximally rough," whilst the singers themselves experience it as smooth and beautiful. Others described it as sounding either like ringing bells or like howling wolves. The elderly women of Bistritsa were inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2005, partly as a direct result of his research.


His ethnomusicological work extended to Papua New Guinea, where he documented the shark-calling rituals of New Ireland. He composed two pieces for me, for ten-string guitar: "Mnemosyne," and "The Echo of the Shark Caller" — the latter drawn directly from that fieldwork.


When I knew him in Sydney, between 2006 and 2010, Florian was already in his late sixties: tall, broad-shouldered, a person of genuine warmth, endlessly generous with his time, knowledge, conversation, and cooking. He laughed constantly — a quiet, impish "ch-ch-ch" produced especially when he had said something irreverent and slightly outrageous, which was often. No occasion was ceremonial enough to be safe from him. His Friday lunches were among the best afternoons of my life.


Weeks before his death, the University of Vienna wrote to inform him that the Senate had voted to award him the Golden Doctorate — a ceremonial renewal of his 1975 PhD in recognition of fifty years of exceptional scholarship. The ceremony was scheduled for 29 June. He died on 2 June. His wife, Lala, told me that when he received the news, Florian had laughed: before, they had ridiculed him. Now they were "guilding" him.


I can hear that laugh perfectly.


One of his last public statements was this: "My advice [to artists] is follow your intuition and be consistent and don't give up. And if you can't do that, then don't touch the arts at all."


On 2 June, Lala wrote to me from his account:
"Florian passed away today. Please pray for him 🙏 He was ready to go — he told me on Sunday that death was calling him."


He was ready. Knowing Florian, I am fairly certain he was also curious.


I have written a full tribute on Medium for anyone who wants to know more about who he was:
https://medium.com/@10string/gerald-florian-messner-1937-2026-8b767654013b

[Clickable link in the comments, below.]

— Viktor

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1 month ago | [YT] | 13

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 — 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐠

I am now accepting a small number of private students in Johannesburg.

𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐭 & 𝐟𝐞𝐞𝐬
Weekly 30-minute sessions, four lessons per calendar month. One rate: R2,000 per month (2026), payable in advance. More frequent lessons may be considered for advanced students with established repertoires or performance deadlines. Longer lessons are not offered.

𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐈 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡
Committed students of any age and any level — total beginners through to concert artists. The focus of each lesson is adjusted accordingly: from the fundamentals for those starting out, to Yepes's technical innovations for intermediate and advanced players willing to rethink everything they've been taught, to purely interpretive and performance work for young artists preparing to perform. Lessons are not limited to 10-string guitarists — as a specialist in the Yepes system I am fully equipped to teach the 6-string; the reverse is not true.

𝐈𝐧 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲
I don't offer online lessons, and I won't. The most important thing to develop on any instrument is tone production: the ability to listen, genuinely and specifically, and to respond — to this player, this instrument, this room, this moment. That process is destroyed the instant you insert microphones and speakers between teacher and student. Every recording/playback device alters the sound. A teacher working online is therefore not hearing what the student is producing, and vice versa — they are hearing a processed approximation that may sound better or worse, but certainly different than reality. Teachers who offer online lessons either don't understand this, or have decided it doesn't matter. I'm not interested in either position.

𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐟𝐞𝐞. I don't differentiate between beginners, advanced students, or professionals — my time, expertise, and attention are the same in every lesson.

__________

𝐓𝐨 𝐞𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞, 𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥 — on the Home page, tap or click "more" in the header, then scroll down to "More info." Please use the subject line 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫 𝐋𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 — 𝐄𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐲 and include:
• your name,
• a contact number,
• your current level, and
• your reasons for wanting to study.

Messages with attachments, or unsolicited offers, opinions, and commentary, will not be opened.

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 21

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

In my previous Medium essay, "Three Thoughts on Classical Guitar Tone and Resonance," I argued that the classical guitar establishment's tonal ideal and defence of the six-string instrument are rooted in a Modernist aesthetic whose moment has passed.

While the classical guitar world looked the other way, the most significant living composer-performers of our generation have been quietly dismantling the ideology that underpins the establishment's position — not through argument, but through practice. Their own words, in their own published scores, document the shift.

What they have written, and what it means acoustically for the guitar, is the subject of the new essay.

Read it here: https://medium.com/@10string/guitar-modernism-paradigm-shift-d69d7dc91535 [Link in the Comments, below.]

_____
The spectrogram images are from my own composition "Remain" (2026) — the same phrase, the same piano, with and without felt preparation. The difference is visible before you read a word.

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3 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 10

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

What Do Classical Guitarists Actually Mean by "Good Tone"?

The classical guitar world has a tone problem — not in the sense that its players produce bad tone, but in the sense that it has lost the ability to evaluate tone honestly.

Start with the most basic confusion. A large part of the guitar establishment quietly equates brightness with quality. Acoustically, this is backwards. Projection in a hall is not determined by high-frequency content. It is determined by energy in the fundamental (the written note), energy in the first few partials, and temporal stability — sustain. When the fundamental collapses and the spectrum is dominated by upper partials, the sound becomes thin and localised. It may seem clear at close range, but it does not carry. This is why the instruments historically most admired for projection — the cello, the viola, the human voice — are spectrally darker, not brighter. Purer, not more complex. This is why a live harpsichord all but disappears in the midst of even the smallest ensembles. It is also why guitar harmonics — apparently very soft but spectrally pure — actually carry remarkably well in concert halls. The guitar establishment has systematically confused spectral glare with acoustic strength.

How did this confusion become so entrenched? Partly through a recording illusion that almost nobody discusses. Modern tone judgement is shaped overwhelmingly by digital recordings consumed on laptop speakers, phones, and cheap headphones. These systems favour narrow dynamic range, compressed signals, and strong high-frequency content. They make mediocre tone sound better than it does in reality. A purer, darker tone that projects effortlessly in a concert hall can therefore appear dull or recessed on consumer playback equipment, because the spectral balance that makes it powerful in space is precisely what gets flattened — and worse, distorted — by the digital chain and the majority of today's playback devices. Players have been quietly optimising their tone for budget-to-mid-tier recording and playback equipment for decades, not for acoustic reality — not for human ears in real-world spaces. The result is an entire pedagogical culture calibrated to the wrong instruments: the laptop, the cellphone — not the hall, and not direct contact with human audiences.

Underneath this lies a much older sociological mechanism. When most members of a field share a limitation, the group tends to redefine the limitation as a virtue. Mediocre orchestras redefine rhythmic rigidity as precision — or "historically informed performance." The protected denizens of the groves of Academe redefine pretentious jargon as intellectual rigour. Bureaucracies redefine paralysis as prudence. In the guitar world, the thin bright tone that most players produce most easily has quietly become the standard — not because it was ever demonstrated to be acoustically superior, but because it is common. Any middling player can produce it. Anything outside it becomes automatically suspect. The standard is not an achievement. It is a consensus built around the mean.

The psychological mechanism reinforcing this is equally predictable. When a player encounters a tone they cannot easily produce, two explanations are available: either that tone represents a higher degree of control, or it is defective. The second explanation is psychologically far easier to adopt. It requires no re-examination of one's own limitations. It protects the existing hierarchy. So the tone that requires the most control — the most virtuosity, in another, always overlooked sense of the word — darker, more focused, spectrally refined, projecting — gets labelled as "bad," "unpleasant," etc. by the very players least equipped to produce it. This is not analysis. It is ego-protection dressed as criticism and "taste." And you will constantly hear it from the old fogeys on classical guitar forums, more often levelled against Narciso Yepes than anyone else.

What makes this psychological defence so durable is the sunk cost it protects. Producing a darker, purer, projecting tone is not simply a matter of adjusting a habit. It requires relearning from first principles — guitar positioning, nail conditioning, and the fundamental mechanics of right-hand touch. It is incompatible with the standardised orthodox technique that has dominated pedagogy for roughly three to four decades. In other words, acquiring it means discarding years — sometimes decades — of accumulated practice and rebuilding from the ground up. That is a demand most established players will not face. It is far easier, psychologically and practically, to declare the destination unreachable/undesirable than to acknowledge that the road one has spent a lifetime on leads somewhere else. The establishment's attacks on darker, more projecting tone are not aesthetic judgements. They are sunk-cost rationalisations.

The establishment presents this "preference" as "tradition." It is not. Pre-twentieth-century instrumental aesthetics consistently aimed towards vocal models: sustained tone, strong fundamental energy, projection, warmth. The thin, bright, dynamically compressed guitar tone treated today as the "historical sound" or "classical ideal" — because "this is classical guitar!" — is a twentieth-century construction, coinciding precisely with the Modernist aesthetic Richard Taruskin documents in Text and Act (1995) — the same aesthetic that produced the neo-classical Stravinsky's deliberate emotional austerity, Schoenberg's rejection of Romantic warmth, and a broader cultural flight from the sustained, projecting, voice-like tone that Western music had pursued for centuries. The guitar establishment did not discover a timeless acoustic truth. It absorbed a hundred-year-old fashion and forgot it was a fashion.

Which again leaves one question that the establishment cannot answer without exposing itself:

Is the modern classical guitar tone ideal an acoustic achievement — or a rationalisation of technical limits that happened to align with a Modernist aesthetic whose moment has passed?

__________

IMAGE: The final note of the Sarabande from J.S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1008 — played on harpsichord (left) and cello (right) — captured as spectrograms.

The difference is visible at the moment of attack. The harpsichord's energy is scattered across a wide spectral range, distributed thinly across many frequencies. The cello's energy is concentrated — focused on the fundamental and the first few partials.

That concentration is precisely what carries in a hall. Anyone who has heard both instruments live knows the result: the cello projects effortlessly; the harpsichord, despite its apparent brightness and incisiveness at close range, disappears rapidly at distance and is masked almost immediately by one or two other instruments.

Spectral glare is not acoustic strength. The spectrogram makes that visible.

3 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 12

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

The Guitar World Has Been Asking the Wrong Question

Every discussion about guitars with more than six strings starts from a false baseline: that the six-string guitar is the historical norm, and everything else requires justification.

The history says the opposite. Guitars with more than six strings were standard before the Segovia era — to say nothing of lutes. The standardisation of the six-string guitar is a contraction. It is the historical deviation. And that contraction was not acoustically motivated. It was aesthetically motivated — within a historical context that has passed. As Richard Taruskin documents in "Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance" (1995), 20th-century Classical Music systematically moved towards thin, lightweight, dynamically miniaturised sound. In that post-Stravinskian context, the six-string guitar's limitations were not a problem to solve. They were the point.

This is why the instrument's resonance architecture was never fixed — and why that word, "fixed," still makes the establishment uncomfortable.

On a six-string guitar, sympathetic vibration is structurally uneven. (Indeed, this is true for any guitar other than Yepes's — in its standard tuning.) Some notes receive reinforcement. Others receive none. But these gaps and resonances do not map onto musical meaning — they actively invert it.

Consider one of the most fundamental gestures in tonal music: the leading note resolving to the tonic. In A minor, the melody reaches G# — the leading note — sustains it, intensifies it, drives towards its resolution. That G# is one of the most expressive moments in the entire piece — possibly the most. Every note before it has been driving towards it. Anything after it resolves away from it. The entire expressive weight of the work converges on that one sound.

On a six-string guitar, that G# receives no sympathetic reinforcement. None. Meanwhile, in most cases, any already sounding E, B, A, or D continues to assert itself — the notes that frame the resolution, not the tension. The instrument is structurally built to amplify the predictable (A) and discard the expressive (G#) at precisely the moment expression is most required.

And it is worse than silence. When G# lacks its own resonance, the previous harmony does not simply stop. It bleeds forwards. The resonance that should have receded — subducted, overshadowed by a new and stronger G# resonance — fills the space where the leading note should be ringing with maximum clarity, sustain, and tension. (That is "mud.") The most expressive note in the piece is obscured by harmonic residue from what came before it. Then the tonic A arrives, not as resolution, but with insistence — the most predictable, least meaningful moment, emphasised by the instrument as if it were the point.

The instrument has reversed the expressive logic of the music at its most fundamental level.

Narciso Yepes designed his 10-string guitar (which IS his tuning) to eliminate this mechanism. Every pitch class has its sympathetic string. New resonances continuously subduct the old ones. The instrument follows melodic and harmonic movement rather than working against it. And it simultaneously extended the playable bass range. Both. Not one or the other.

Here is the false distinction the "extended-range" or "multi-string" guitar world — a niche within the establishment — has quietly constructed: they imply that Yepes addressed only resonance whilst THEY also address range — as if Yepes never played a low bass note. And as if their instruments or tunings had identical physical properties (the same resonance) as Yepes's innovation. This is dishonest, or displays a total lack of understanding. Yepes's instrument solved BOTH problems simultaneously. Theirs solves one — and exacerbates another. The chromatic resonance gap remains on every guitar that has not addressed it, regardless of string count. The leading note still has no voice — the same goes for many other expressive moments. The bleed is still there. The often invoked "mud" is the evidence.

The establishment's response has been to attribute the acoustic consequence of their own instruments' failure to the concept of sympathetic resonance itself, declare the problem understood, and close the conversation.

The conversation has not even been had — certainly, never at the level of granularity that it demands. The broader question that remains is simple:

If an instrument can be designed so that its resonance architecture supports melodic and harmonic movement across all twelve pitch classes — so that the leading note and other expressive moments may ring as clearly as the tonic — what really is the MUSICAL argument against doing that?

The classical guitar establishment has no answer to that question that does not expose itself as fundamentally Modernist — which is to say, not of today, but of yesteryear.

3 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 30

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

A Meeting of Minds — and what's been happening:

I haven't posted since December. Here's why, and what's coming.


I've been editing the five-part documentary series "A Meeting of Minds" down to a single film suitable for festival submission. The series will be released here on YouTube — free, for critical, educational, and historical purposes — after any festival premiere. More on that timeline as it develops.


The short version of what the film is:


When Fritz Buss arrived in Madrid in 1961 to study with Narciso Yepes, he encountered a musician unlike any other — a guitarist whose technical innovations, philosophical depth, and refusal of orthodoxy placed him permanently outside the grasp of the classical guitar establishment. Over the following decades, Buss transmitted what he learned to generations of students at the bottom of the world, in near-total obscurity, while the establishment continued to look the other way.


"A Meeting of Minds" is the first and only documentary record of that suppressed lineage. Filmed over a decade in Johannesburg and Brisbane, it is a film about friendship, about what genuine musical understanding costs, and about what happens when two men simply refuse to accept what they've been told the guitar is.


The documentary very nearly didn't exist. Institutional indifference, archival failures, insufficient resources, a subject who was difficult to film — the conditions under which it was made mirror exactly what it's about. That's not incidental. It's the point.


Alongside the film, I've been preparing articles and workshops on transcription and composition for the 10-string guitar, and composing new works myself — concert pieces and studies.


I'm also teaching again, having stepped back first during the pandemic and then to complete the documentary. If you're interested in lessons, stay tuned — I'll post details in a dedicated update at a later time.


More soon.

3 months ago | [YT] | 17

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

FRITZ BUSS TURNS 95 TODAY!

Today (26 December) Fritz Buss turns 95. To mark the occasion, I've republished my 2004 interview with him on Medium, with several additions:

• Audio recordings of Fritz from 1957 etc.
• 15-minute preview from my forthcoming documentary "A Meeting of Minds"
• Various photos, including some of those Fritz took of Yepes's hands during their time together in Torrevieja (1964)
• Playlists of the Yepes recordings Fritz recommends

The interview covers Fritz's decision to study with Yepes rather than Segovia (having received invitations from both), his first-hand experience of Yepes's dissatisfaction with the six-string in 1961, and touches on Yepes's teaching approach and technical innovations.

The Torrevieja photographs are particularly significant—intimate documentation of their friendship and study sessions that Fritz was uniquely positioned to capture.

Read the full interview:
https://medium.com/@10string/fritz-buss-narciso-yepes-10-string-guitar-interview-0e72ed0b2854 [Clickable link in Comments, below.]

This material (and much more) appears in expanded form in "A Meeting of Minds," my forthcoming 6-hour documentary on Fritz's life and his friendship with Narciso Yepes.


—Viktor

Note: This interview originally appeared on tenstringguitar.info in the early 2010s and has been cited in several academic studies. I haven't been associated with that website for several years. This Medium publication restores public access to the interview and is the only reliable source.

6 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 17

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

WHO INVENTED NARCISO YEPES'S TEN-STRING GUITAR?

For 60 years, the answer to this question has been systematically distorted. José Ramírez III claimed credit by conflating his failed prototype with Yepes's solution. Academics attributed it to composer Maurice Ohana. Players using D-C-B-A basses insist "Yepes invented nothing" because hyperhexachordal guitars existed in the 1800s.

All three claims collapse under scrutiny.

I've just published a 15,000-word forensic investigation that dismantles six decades of false attribution. Using patent law principles, Ramírez's own documentation, contemporaneous journalism, and Yepes's technical explanations across 30 years of interviews, the evidence is overwhelming:

Narciso Yepes conceived the invention. José Ramírez III and Paulino Bernabé built it. Maurice Ohana wrote for it.

The article exposes:

• Ramírez's 1994 typographical sleight-of-hand (placing two acoustically antithetical instruments under one heading)
• The 1965 "smoking gun" interview documenting Yepes's 14-year development arc
• Ramírez's own admission that Yepes provided complete conception via phone call
• Amalia Ramírez's chronologically impossible "several years of collaboration" (summer 1963 to March 1964)
• Why Segovia rejected the solution to the problem he'd complained about for decades
• How the "any ten strings will do" fallacy erases what Yepes actually invented
• And more...

What Yepes invented wasn't "a guitar with four extra strings."
It was a tuning system—C2-B♭2-G♯2-F♯2—that creates complete chromatic sympathetic resonance coverage - and more. The invention IS the acoustic solution, not the number of strings.

This isn't guitar forum speculation. It's documented institutional erasure, examined with the same forensic precision I've applied to Duarte's suppression tactics.

Read the full investigation:
https://medium.com/@10string/who-invented-yepes-10-string-guitar-8e62c83d0b41
[Clickable link in Comments, below.]

The evidence is irrefutable. Let them come with counter-evidence. They won't have any - only the usual, predictable logical fallacy and ad hominem tactics that already concede defeat.

6 months ago | [YT] | 42

VIKTOR VAN NIEKERK 10-𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘳

NEW ESSAY: Yepes's Principles of Three-Fingered Scale Playing for Guitarists

I've published the most comprehensive examination of Narciso Yepes's three-fingered technique ever written—26,000 words documenting principles transmitted through embodied teaching, now made explicit for the first time.

What's inside:

● Biomechanical foundations of Yepes's a–m–i technique
● Why alternative, "three notes per string" dogma is fundamentally flawed
● String-crossing hierarchy that actually respects hand anatomy
● Extensive fingering principles for different contexts
● 60+ fingered examples by Yepes, Fritz Buss, and myself
● Applications beyond scales: arpeggios, polyrhythms, polyphony, contemporary music
● Detailed comparative analysis exposing formulaic approaches

This isn't another rehash of classical guitar orthodoxy. It's a systematic deconstruction of rigid "systems" and a presentation of principles that actually work—grounded in hand biomechanics, not Segovia-era convention.

Who this is for:
Young guitarists who want understanding and options—not just orthodoxy to adopt uncritically and drill like beasts of burden. If you're working on transcription, new music, or refuse to accept formulaic thinking that compromises both music and ergonomics for pattern simplicity, this is for you.

Read time: 50-55 minutes (grab coffee)

The essay includes examples from music by Buss, Rodrigo, Asencio, Bacarisse, Scarlatti, Sor, Bach, Mateo Albéniz, Ruiz-Pipó, Balada, Le Roy, Pujol, Kellner, Roldán, Villa-Lobos, Rautavaara, Berio, and others—demonstrating how these principles work in real musical contexts.

Read it here: https://medium.com/@10string/yepes-three-fingered-guitar-scales-2dcb977277c5

Clickable link in the Comments.

If this helps your playing or understanding of technique, share it with guitarists who need to see past the orthodoxy.

7 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 17