Jeffrey McFadden and the Bach Question Every Guitarist Asks

Every classical guitarist, at some point, stands in front of a Bach manuscript and asks the same uncomfortable question: who am I to play this? The music was written for a different instrument, in a different century, for a different world. And yet it speaks, immediately and personally, the moment the first note rings out. Jeffrey McFadden has spent a career living inside that question, and what he has found there is worth paying close attention to.

The Particular Challenge of Bach on Guitar

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his cello suites without a guitarist in mind. That much is obvious. What is less obvious is why these works have become such a central part of the classical guitar repertoire, and why they resist easy answers. The guitar is a polyphonic instrument with a voice range and sustain profile quite different from the cello. Translating Bach is not a matter of simple transposition; it requires interpretive decisions at every turn. Which voices do you bring forward? Where does the implied harmony live in relation to the melodic line? How do you honour the structure of the original while making the music breathe naturally on six strings? These are not academic questions. They are felt in real time, in every practice session, in every performance. As discussed in Vol. 01 No. 02, Jeffrey McFadden approaches these questions with both scholarly rigour and a deep personal investment in the music.

Arrangement as Interpretation

What makes McFadden's work with Bach particularly compelling is his understanding that arrangement is itself a form of interpretation. When you sit down to arrange a Bach suite for guitar, you are not simply transcribing notes from one clef to another. You are making arguments about what the music means, which elements are structural and which are ornamental, where the music breathes and where it presses forward. An arrangement is a reading, in the literary sense, a set of choices that reveals something about both the original text and the person doing the reading. McFadden's arrangement of BWV 1007 reflects this deeply thoughtful approach. It is a document of sustained engagement with one of the most studied pieces in Western music, seen through the particular lens of a guitarist who has taken the time to listen very carefully.

Teaching Through the Repertoire

One of the things that distinguishes serious guitarist-scholars like Jeffrey McFadden is their commitment to passing along not just the notes but the thinking behind the notes. To learn a McFadden arrangement is to inherit a set of questions as much as a set of answers. Where does this phrase want to go? What is Bach doing harmonically here, and how does the guitar allow us to hear it differently than the cello does? These questions, asked honestly, turn the practice room into a place of genuine inquiry. That is a rare thing, and it is part of what makes McFadden's contribution to the repertoire significant beyond the concert stage. The music he plays and the materials he produces invite the player to think, not just to execute.

Why It Still Matters

Bach has been played on guitar for well over a century. The question is not whether it can be done, but how it can be done with integrity and with freshness. Jeffrey McFadden represents an answer to that question rooted in both tradition and personal artistic conviction. His work reminds us that the classical guitar repertoire is not a fixed canon but a living conversation, one that each generation of musicians contributes to and reshapes. The Bach that McFadden plays is recognizably Bach, but it is also recognizably McFadden, and that dual fidelity is exactly what great interpretation looks like.

Engaging with Bach through a guitarist of McFadden's depth is one of the quiet pleasures this instrument offers. It turns listening into learning, and learning into something that lasts.

Listen

Hear arrangement become interpretation: McFadden performs his own arrangement of the Gigue from Bach's fourth cello suite.

The full interview and feature on Jeffrey McFadden appears in Vol. 01 No. 02 of MusiCurate, available as a single issue. His arrangements of BWV 1007 and BWV 1009 are published by MusiCurate in print and PDF. If you want to go deeper into the artists and ideas shaping classical guitar today, a subscription is a good place to start: musicurate.com/products/magazine-subscription.