Étude No. 1 By Leo Brouwer

I have a feeling that most guitarists do not need an introduction to Leo Brouwer. If you do, then here is a link to his Wikipedia page. It isn’t in-depth but will give you a general overview. This video is the playing of his Étude No. 1 from his Études Simples.

This is such a well-known piece to the guitar world. I am sure there are many other performances of this online. A student asked me to put my version up for their reference this past week. Therefore, here it is. Now, I am sure someone will critique the performance and notice the missed sixth string E around 0:35. Therefore, I’ll go ahead and get it out of the way for you. I’m not sure where it went, but hey, that’s performing and I’m not perfect!

Publications of Étude No. 1 by Leo Brouwer

The original of this piece came from Estudios sencillos (Études simples). For publication purposes, they were broken down into multiple series. This is obviously in the first series. You can find all of the series in one publication called Leo Brouwer Guitar Works I: Guitar Solo. The Royal Conservatory puts this piece at a Level 3 but it is not included in their books.

About The Piece

As mentioned above, this piece falls in the Royal Conservatory Level 3. The key is relatively E minor, but true to Brouwer style, strays rather nicely in other directions. The dominating feature of the song is the moving bass line. This can be considered the melody and depends much on the use of dynamics to balance the repeated statements. It’s an awesome and fun piece to play.

Chadwick Becks

I have two degrees in guitar performance and was privileged to study under Aaron Shearer, Tom Kikta, David Skantar, Ken Karsh, Tim Bedner, and currently Christopher Berg. Outside my editorial work on this blog, I teach full-time across many genres including classical, jazz, blues, rock, funk, and metal.