This September, 21-year old Christoph Barnett will have been playing classical guitar for nine years.

He began playing the piano, at the age of four, being given tuition by his mother. When he was 10 years old he lost interest in the piano, he said, and although he still played, he had no more real enthusiasm for music until he saw his cousin, Nathan Barnett Herrera, playing classical guitar at a family function.

The way the guitar was being played aroused his interest: "When you usually hear a guitar being played, it is being strummed. This was different, it was his ability to play the guitar with the complexity of an 'independent' instrument. By that, I mean that on the guitar it is possible to play not only the melody, or melodies, but also harmonies, creating a rich tapestry of musical voices. I had never heard that before."

Such a statement still does not explain why he preferred guitar to piano, however, because the piano has an even greater potential for multiple melodies and harmonies.

Part of the attraction, Mr Barnett explained, was that it possessed some of the 'vocal' qualities of the violin, while at the same time the ability to represent several layers of melody and harmony.

"With the piano, the 'voice' can get lost," he said.

It is this haunting, human element about classical guitar that many people find so attractive. It is really like a tiny choir, where the emotive intensity of the individual voice is not swamped by all the other voices.

The guitar is a very personal instrument, and can be played in ways that change subtlety according to the mood of the player as he internalizes the emotion of a piece.

"The (overall) sound, and the attention to the individual voices within the harmonies, these two, form a significant part of guitar technique," he explained.

The way an individual string can be plucked can vary in a multitude of ways, not only by playing heavily and lightly, but also by plucking at different points along the string, or using different parts of the fingernail; all these can change the quality, the emotional impact of a sound.

It was possible, Mr Barnett said, to contrast a bass note played in a 'coarse' or 'edgy' way, with a delicate melody line, in the same piece of music, thereby creating a tension between the two different kinds of sound, and therefore two different kinds of emotion.

Mr Barnett went on to speak about the language of music as a way of articulating emotion. While we tend to always associate emotion with words, the classical musician must learn to interpret the emotion of a piece directly. Music, and music alone is a self-sufficient language.

"The less you are mixing in words (as a way of expressing the emotion of a piece of music in your thoughts), the better your playing will be. One is quite well able to articulate emotions without words," he said.

Indeed, the language of music is often able to articulate complex and abstract emotions that words could never express.

Mr Barnett said that during a concert, he was involved in a kind of dialogue between himself and the guitar. By keeping his playing within that sphere, and not consciously projecting towards the audience, he is able, paradoxically, to maintain the artist integrity of a performance.

The audience can eavesdrop on to this dialogue, and in doing so connect with the intimacy of it, but if he were to be conscious of trying to connect directly with the audience, something would be lost.

The aim of the classical musician is to take a piece of music, and perfectly interpret the emotion of it, using the language of music.

It is the audience's level of familiarity with musical language that can therefore be the limiting factor in their ability to fully connect with a piece.

"Some of my best audience members are other musicians, because at the end, you can look at them, and know there's been a communication," he said.

christopher@caymannetnews.com