David Tanenbaum is one of America's top classical guitar performers and educators. In addition to concertizing throughout the world, Tanenbaum has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for 25 years and is the school's guitar department chair. Widely recognized as a champion of new guitar repertoire, he has commissioned and premiered works by contemporary composers Aaron Jay Kernis, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Hans Werner Henze, and others. In recent recitals, Tanenbaum has been featuring new pieces composed for the National steel guitar fretted in just intonation and in D A D G A D tuning. During a recent conversation, Tanenbaum shared some thoughts about how he encourages students to explore the changing world of classical guitar.

Did you have a mentor who served as a model for your teaching?

My two main teachers had very opposite approaches. I worked for about four years with a man named Rolando Valdez Blaine who was a Cuban man from New York City. He was an art teacher as well as a guitar teacher. He took his teaching very seriously. I’d go to his place in Greenwich Village and he’d get out a bottle of wine and a cigar and we’d commune with the guitar for about five hours. He would show me how to think on the instrument and we’d look at pieces in great detail. A lot of my thinking on the instrument came from him. It was like an old-school apprenticeship.

I later studied with Aaron Shearer, who is the dean of American guitar teachers. He taught Manuel Barrueco, David Starobin, Ricardo Cobo, and others. He was very strict and felt that the first thing the teacher should do was break down the will of the student. He believed there was only one way to move the muscles and play well. He taught that you had to avoid confusion and error at all cost, to the point that he discouraged sight-reading. He thought you should completely finger and memorize a piece before really playing it. All the work was theoretically done, and you only played perfectly when you played the guitar. He would hand me a new piece of music that had left-hand fingerings in red, right-hand markings in blue, phrase marks in green, expression marks in black and I was to execute it that way, never making a mistake.

They were, in a way, polar opposites. I chose a middle path for my teaching consequently. They were models in that they had interesting things to teach, but also showed me how I didn’t want to teach.

What's your approach during your first meeting with new students?

I spend time interviewing them. If you listen carefully to students, they will tell you how to teach them. Everyone learns in a different way. I ask them big questions, such as what their dreams are and what they want to do with the guitar. I get their list of repertoire and ask them to assess what they are good at and what they need to work on. I start to develop a plan through that conversation and from hearing them play. It is our duty as teachers at the conservatory level to make sure students understand the breadth of the repertoire. The guitar doesn’t have a deep repertoire in all style periods, but we play music spanning 500 years. If they are to go out into the world as teachers and performers, they need to possess stylistic awareness. I try to fill the holes in the repertoire of my students—and they all have those holes.

I also make an assessment of their technical strengths and weaknesses. Students tend to avoid the areas where they are weak. That might be okay later in a career when a player is over 40 and wants to go with his or her strengths. But in the beginning, you need to develop areas that are weak and make them better. You can learn from success. I try to observe and tell them how their body looks when they are playing something well, and get to help them apply that to the things they are not comfortable with. The body can teach itself in a way.

How do you work with a student who comes from a nonclassical background?

That's actually pretty common. If you scratch the skin of a lot of classical guitar players, there is a rock history under there somewhere. I find that there's a separation between what the students study at the conservatory and what they listen to when they go home at night. I want to know what they are listening to so I can help them bring the fun that they have with other styles into their classical experience. It's really important for students not to think of classical music as a museum piece. They need to know that it is alive and well and full of experimentation.

I work with living composers a lot and have been involved in the creation of some of the repertoire that I play. I get my students playing new music and encourage them to work with young composers at the school so that they'll be actively involved in the process of creating the repertoire they play. We also offer a transcription class where students make their own arrangements. Through these activities, they experience classical guitar music as a living art.

Are you noticing any trends among young players that you feel bode well for the next generation of classical guitarists?

Yes. Most students want to compose, and I find guitarists today are more open to ensemble playing. In the Segovia era, classical guitar was a solo-recital art. Solo recitals are not as big a part of the work for any instrument these days-including violin and piano. I think that's a healthy trend. I don't think you are going to become a rounded musician by sitting in a practice room playing by yourself all the time.

Guitarists are coming to me with better ensemble skills. They recognize that it's fun and you become a better musician by collaborating with others. Playing in an ensemble also helps to develop sight-reading skills. When players are reading by themselves and get stuck on a passage, they stop to fix it. That interrupts the flow. When sight-reading to get the sense of a piece the first time through, you have to keep moving. When reading with an ensemble you have to keep moving too. Students learn to reduce the music a bit if they can't keep a third line going or get every note of the chord the first time through. This improves sight-reading.

What do you find is the most satisfying aspect of teaching?

Seeing students perform is instructive and sometimes very exciting. I think I learn more about them by watching them onstage than any other place.

Teaching is full of surprises. Sometimes you have lower expectations for a certain student and then they really get it and take off. Back when I was studying with Aaron Shearer, Manuel Barrueco and Ricardo Cobo were studying with him too. In a repertoire class one day, Shearer looked around and said, "There are some people in this room who will change the guitar world." There was this quiet guy who was just an average student-it was Michael Hedges. No one had any expectation that he would do what he eventually did for the guitar. Students sometimes go in directions that you don't expect.