{"id":8323,"date":"2017-11-13T14:51:42","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T22:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=8323"},"modified":"2017-11-13T20:50:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-14T04:50:50","slug":"classical-guitar-historian-music-publisher-and-controversial-gadfly-matanya-ophee-dies-remembered-by-colleagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/classical-guitar-historian-music-publisher-and-controversial-gadfly-matanya-ophee-dies-remembered-by-colleagues\/","title":{"rendered":"Classical Guitar Historian, Music Publisher (and Controversial Gadfly) Matanya Ophee is Dead; Remembered by Colleagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

On November 6, Matanya Ophee, the esteemed, influental and sometimes controversial scholar and founder of the music publishing house Editions Orph\u00e9e<\/a>, passed away at the age of 85. Israeli by birth, he lived on a kibbutz for several years, enlisted in the Israeli Air Force in 1952, and in 1955 began studying classical guitar with a series of teachers in various countries. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1965 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1970. For most of his professional life he worked as a commercial pilot in the U.S., but he seemingly devoted every waking moment away from that job to the classical guitar\u2014playing it, teaching it, researching its history, writing about it, commenting on it in various periodicals (and eventually a blog), and, starting Editions Orph\u00e9e.<\/p>\n

Ophee wrote many articles and reviews for Classical Guitar<\/em> beginning in the mid-1980s, educating and occasionally infuriating readers (and some of CG<\/em>‘s other writers) with his often frank and always very<\/em> confidently expressed opinions and commentary. Below, you’ll find a few reflections on Matanya Ophee from a few CG<\/em> “regulars,” as well as some short online tributes plucked from Facebook, and, to wrap up the package, a fascinating extract from some 1999 issues of CG<\/em> titled “Matanya Ophee Talking,” which is exactly what the title promises. An interesting guy, for sure!\u00a0 \u00a0\u2014Blair Jackson<\/em><\/p>\n

MATANYA OPHEE (1932-2017)
\n<\/strong><\/h4>\n

A Tribute by CG<\/em>‘s Graham Wade:\u00a0<\/strong>The passing of Matanya Ophee is a sad occasion for the entire guitar world. Matanya, one of the great guitar scholars of our epoch, opened up areas of previously undiscovered music, published superb editions of many historic composers, and provided a trenchant supply of critical comment encompassing a wide range of aspects, many of which became controversial.<\/p>\n

Matanya Ophee\u2019s contribution to guitar literature was immense and immeasurable. As a publisher\u2014he founded Editions Oprh\u00e9e in 1978 and was active with the company until his death\u2014he issued around 200 diverse publications, including guitar solos of many eras, Russian music in abundance, guitar duos, trios, and quartets, guitar-and-voice, chamber music, concertos, lute books, methods (such as the four-volume School of Guitar <\/em>by Emilio Pujol), and other seminal texts (such as The Segovia-Ponce Letters). <\/em>Throughout the years, he kept up a running commentary in copious essays published on the internet about a host of relevant guitar topics.<\/p>\n

Before turning his attention fully to the guitar in the1980s, Matanya pursued a career as an airline pilot, following earlier service as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force. His indefatigable energy and meticulous intellect thus metamorphosed from a life of extreme adventure to the very different world of music. He loved the guitar profoundly and threw himself into the 20th century mainstream study of the instrument\u2019s history with a unique sense of breadth and intensity.<\/p>\n

His aggressive instincts were legendary, and it was said by some that Matanya could start a fight in an empty telephone box. But such passion and devotion to the subject are essential if great achievements are to be realized. Looking back at his massive contribution, we now know how much scholarship he undertook and how revolutionary (in the finest sense) his creative energies now appear.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s Matanya and I conducted an ongoing correspondence in the pages of Classical Guitar <\/em>magazine. Some of it became quite overheated. But when I eventually met Matanya, I was impressed by his charm and composure. He was a man of natural authority, confident in his abilities, superbly articulate, and with a hawkish eye and ear for detail. His desire to move the guitar on from the quagmire of intellectual stagnation and the overfamiliar repetition of repertoire was deeply genuine. Most of all, he came over as warm and likeable, as well as being utterly formidable.<\/p>\n

Matanya was unique by his background, experience, and personality. We remember now not only the sheer individuality of such a man, but also the tremendous labor he undertook on behalf of the guitar. This scholar changed and shaped our attitudes and our direction of thought. We shall miss him very deeply.<\/p>\n

Maurice J. Summerfield (founder\/former publisher of Classical Guitar<\/em> magazine):\u00a0<\/strong>I was fortunate to have known Matanya Ophee for over 40 years.\u00a0In 1978, my music distribution company (Ashley Mark Publishing Company) became the first UK distributor for his Editions Orph\u00e9e music and books.\u00a0I would meet him annually at the Frankfurt Music Messe for many years and was always impressed by his enormous passion for the classical guitar and its repertoire.\u00a0When I founded Classical Guitar<\/em> magazine in 1982, he quickly volunteered to contribute articles and comment.\u00a0However, after a few years he said he did not like or agree with some of the reviews that had appeared in Classical Guitar<\/em> and told me he did not want to be associated with the magazine anymore.<\/p>\n

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Maurice Summerfield (L) and Mantanya, c. 2000<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Matanya was a man of brilliant intellect.\u00a0The fact that he could succeed in a career as a jet liner pilot, speak and write in at least seven languages, and play the guitar to a high standard is alone more than most men or women can achieve in their lifetime.\u00a0His passion to seek out the music of 19th century guitarists, such as Fran\u00e7ois de Fossa, Russian guitar music, and more would have drawn the admiration of \u00a0a Sherlock Holmes.\u00a0The quality and presentation of\u00a0 his music publications has not been surpassed.\u00a0The guitar world owes him a great debt \u00a0for these; without his endeavours the repertoire would be much poorer.\u00a0I particularly admired the fact if he liked a piece of music he would publish it, even if he knew there would be little or no demand for it.<\/p>\n

However, this passion, dedication, and brilliance did make him at times a complex and difficult character.\u00a0He was so convinced that his opinions and judgements were the right ones, he fell out with some of his contemporaries who \u201cdared\u201d to disagree with him.\u00a0When Classical Guitar<\/em> and some other magazines refused to publish some of his critical letters and articles, he began his own online blog.\u00a0It was beautifully produced and of course gave him the freedom to say what he wanted about anybody and anything. And this he did!<\/p>\n

At the same time, Matanya had a genuine warmth of character, could tell a good story, and I looked forward to his stimulating company whenever we met.\u00a0The last time I saw him was the GFA Convention in Louisville, Kentuucky, in\u00a0 2013.\u00a0He told me then that he had recently had a new laser treatment for prostate cancer and that this seemed to have cured his problem. He looked well and told me he was planning to give concerts with his seven-string guitar. While there, we got together each night with other guitar personalities\u00a0who were attending the convention.\u00a0One night, he insisted that his opinion was correct about some topic that had come up and I said, \u201cMatanya, you cannot always be right.\u201d\u00a0 He responded in typical fashion with a big smile and twinkle in his eyes and said, \u201cOh, but I am.\u201d<\/p>\n

The guitar world will miss this brilliant, unique, and irreplaceable academic and musician.\u00a0My thoughts and condolences at this sad time go to his wife Margarita Mazo, his siblings, and his children.<\/p>\n

Tim Panting (CG<\/em> writer and former Reviews Editor):<\/strong> As Reviews Editor and simply being involved with the classical guitar my paths crossed many times with Matanya. He was indeed a character. He let you know pretty quickly if he thought something was not correct and he almost certainly had intellectual back up due to his tireless research and investigation as a musicologist. There are probably hundreds of people with stories to tell regarding their relationship s with Matanya. I think I didn\u2019t offend him too much although there was always the review that got his ire due to some terrible gaffe by a reviewer or by their attitude etc.<\/p>\n

Julia Crowe (CG<\/em> writer):<\/strong> I met him at Towson University a million years ago at the First World Guitar Congress event and then I saw him again in Buffalo, New York, one year at the JoAnn Falletta Guitar Concerto Competition.\u00a0I cannot say I knew him as well, but we definitely did meet.\u00a0I\u2019d been prefaced first by someone else about him.\u00a0Whenever someone prefaces you before<\/em> meeting someone, then this image or shadow looms forth, larger than life.\u00a0However, I always found him to be amiable and down-to-earth in person; kind.\u00a0Online and in print is where he held court.\u00a0And yes, both online and in print, he could be a cantankerous, provocative buzzard, a preeminent puncturer of pretentiousness.\u00a0He enjoyed stirring the pot, but he was devoted\u00a0to classical guitar in a way that reminds me of a protective father who believes no suitor is made of the right stuff to propose to his daughter.\u00a0And if he dares to think so, then Matanya would be the one to put him through the paces.<\/p>\n

Some Tributes on Facebook:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Zigante:<\/strong> A dear friend and a musicologist to whom everyone who loves guitar literature owes something.<\/p>\n

Robert Trent:<\/strong> R.I.P.\u00a0Matanya Ophee. Your sharp tongue prodded all to think, speak and write clearly and articulately. Your generosity with discovery and resources were unparalleled in guitar research. Rest well on your laurels.<\/p>\n

John Saldivar:<\/strong> Sad to mark the passing of a colleague who was one of the guitar\u2019s great scholars and personalities:\u00a0Matanya Ophee. He was often outspoken and controversial, but always passionate about his chosen instrument.\u00a0Our small community of the guitar is poorer for his passing but enriched by the many fine editions he introduced to the world, which will surely be his lasting legacy.<\/p>\n

Cristiano Porqueddu: <\/strong>It is thanks to\u00a0Matanya Ophee\u00a0that I found the courage to write guitar music. It was the [Editions Orph\u00e9e] \u201cGorod na Kame\u201d [composition competition] in 2010 that allowed me to publish [Il Silenzio del Pendolo]. He was a <\/em>friend for many years and a valuable contact in countless cases. His contribution to [exposing] the music of Russian authors was fundamental.Despite the fact that I only met him three times, he was one of the very few people I met with whom I immediately established a strong bond; a bond that was constantly fed by mutual, immediate, silent availability, in every circumstance.<\/p>\n

Eduardo Fernandez: <\/strong>R.I.P.\u00a0Matanya Ophee\u2014controversial, intransigent, and questioning. We will miss you.<\/p>\n

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Scott Cmiel, Rene Izquierdo, Matanya Ophee, Mesut \u00d6zgen, and Gil Carnal at the Sierra Nevada Guitar Festival, July 2012<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MATANYA OPHEE TALKING<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Over the course of six consecutive issues beginning in April 1999, Classical Guitar<\/em> magazine printed a series of articles consisting entirely of Matanya Ophee\u2019s thoughts, transcribed from an interview conducted by CG<\/em>\u2019s Features Editor at the time, Colin Cooper. The series was called \u201cMatanya Ophee Talking\u201d and it provided a wonderful window into the mind of this brilliant and interesting man. Below, edited into one piece, you\u2019ll find the first three installments of the series, which cover a lot of interesting ground, including much on his own background, some deep history of the link between the guitar and the military, and all sorts of interesting and entertaining tangents. \u2014Blair Jackson<\/em><\/p>\n

First, here\u2019s Colin Cooper\u2019s introduction to the series:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Few guitar personalities have so many identities as Matanya Ophee: publisher, musicologist, researcher, arranger, performer, ex-airline pilot (used as a term of disparagement by certain of his critics), a stimulating and controversial writer. A man who can be both enlightening and infuriating, sometimes at the same time, he is one of those strongly-etched personalities without whose pres\u00adence the guitar world would be greatly impover\u00adished: generally benign but sometimes prickly, always ready to inform, a polemicist, quick to argue, and tireless in the pursuit of self-appointed goals which may or may not appeal to the general guitar public\u2014and certainly public indifference has no effect on his energetic promotion. There is, for one thing, his advocacy of the chamber music repertoire over the solo repertoire. His reasons are as much commercial as artistic: There is money in chamber music, more than there is in playing for guitar societies. His stated wish to destroy certain concepts about the guitar, including what he calls \u201cthe facile manipulation of history for personal gain so often exercised by guitarists in their pro\u00admotion,\u201d has, needless to say, not endeared him to those who fall within the scope of his disapproval. His views have often provoked shock and horror, along with a certain amount of personal abuse, all of which he takes with imperturbability.<\/em><\/p>\n

In our discussion, he immediately picked up on the word “identities” …<\/i><\/p>\n

MATANYA OPHEE: <\/strong>I have only one identity, and that\u2019s me. I do many different activities, but they\u2019re all interrelated into one thing: simply, my curiosity about the things that concern all of us, particularly the history of the guitar and its prac\u00adtice today. Whether it happened yesterday or 200 years ago, it\u2019s just as important to us. I always consider that these personalities of the past were exactly that\u2014they were people<\/em>, they were personalities, they were living beings, not just names we encountered in dusty books or pages of music. They were people with many of the same concerns as ours.<\/p>\n

The implication of that is the great debate we\u2019re having about how to interpret music of the past, particularly that which is found in printed edi\u00adtions. So, with my involvement with the publish\u00ading trade, I found something that is very simple: The technologies have changed, the way we put symbols on paper, the way we reproduce them and sell them to the public have changed; but the basic function has not changed at all. A composer writes a piece of music on paper \u2014 that\u2019s a manuscript. He gives it to the publisher, who has it engraved by whatever technology happens to exist at the time. Sometimes the composer gets a chance to make corrections, sometimes not\u2014even today. For example, with my publishing of Russian music, it is not always possible to get the composer to examine it. One has to do the best one can to represent in the final edition what one thinks the composer meant<\/em> to write, not what the composer had written. So this has not changed at all over the cen\u00adturies. It\u2019s still the same process.<\/p>\n

And when you consider that a person like Fernando Sor was someone with a real personal involvement with bodily functions, with emotional attachments to other people, to family friends, wives, mistresses, children\u2014legitimate or illegitimate\u2014and so forth, one can get a much clearer idea what this music is supposed to mean to us today, since we cannot talk to him. So the question of research is an overblown concept. \u201cI am a researcher, I am a musicologist, I am a PhD, I have a dissertation\u201d\u2014these are artificial limits people put on some\u00adthing very simple: the quest for knowledge. Curiosity. And that has nothing to do with who one is or was. Or with training. It\u2019s a matter of a personal quest for knowledge.<\/p>\n

I do research, yes. But the purpose is not research by itself; the \u201cpublish or perish\u201d syndrome is of no use to me. I shall not perish if I do not pub\u00adlish. It\u2019s simply a matter of wanting to know. I want to know what happened. So I engage in activi\u00adties that label me as a musicologist, although I have really no official training as a musicologist. All my training is something that I did myself. I found out how to find out information. Sometimes I was lucky. It\u2019s really a question of luck, the things I did discover, more than anything else. But it\u2019s still the same person. The fact that I was flying airplanes at the same time doesn\u2019t mean anything besides the fact that I needed to make a living. I need to feed my family. Some people do it by flying airplanes, some people do it by teaching in college, some peo\u00adple do it by getting involved in all sorts of commer\u00adcial activities. One does it the best way one can, and there\u2019s nothing wrong with that. Some people even do it by playing concerts!<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mind being called an ex-airline pilot, because the reason I was an airline pilot is that it was a much more efficient way for me, at the time, to provide for my family than to struggle as a gui\u00adtarist\u2014which, in the early \u201960s, was very difficult. It was a personal choice, and I feel no shame about it; it\u2019s a profession like any other. What I do resent is the implication that because I had a day job which is not directly related to music, some\u00adhow the results of my work are tainted.<\/p>\n

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Matanya Ophee at his “day job,” piloting jets for U.S. Airways<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Look at the beginning of the 19th century \u2014 peo\u00adple like Fernando Sor, for example. He was a pro\u00adfessional musician when he came out of Spain. Before that, he was a professional soldier, but when he left Spain, he had to earn a living and he chose to do it as a musician, by giving concerts, by teaching\u2014not only the guitar, but mainly teaching the piano and singing\u2014and by publish\u00ading and selling music. One statement that he made in his guitar method is a heart-rending cry, if you read beyond the dryness of the Merrick translation. He quotes Carulli, and apparently what he\u2019s doing is quoting something that must have transpired in personal conversation between them, although he doesn\u2019t say that. Carulli had told him that an author must live<\/em>. You have to live, because if you don\u2019t live you cannot create. So you do whatever it takes. Carulli\u2019s way of doing it was by publishing reams and reams of silly material for mass consumption, among which are a few choice jewels of human inspiration.<\/p>\n

Fernan\u00addo Sor also did that: He found patronage when he could get it. Patronage was already very much on the way out. Some princes and potentates still maintained their households, particularly in Rus\u00adsia\u2014which is probably one reason why he went to Russia, like many others of the time. That was the last vestige of royal patronage of the arts in Europe. And he got himself into very good circles in Russia; he got to the point where he was even invited to write the funeral march for Tsar Alexan\u00adder. There\u2019s a very good story behind it\u2014the Tsar didn\u2019t really die; the person on the bier was some\u00adone else! Nevertheless, he was well received by Russian royalty and well provided for, but it didn\u2019t last long. After a while, it seems that patronage dried up and he had to leave. Maybe his girlfriend, wife, mistress, whatever, kicked him out; she stayed behind. But all the way to Russia and on the way back, he did what everybody else did at the time\u2014stopped in various cities, organized concerts, played, sometimes to full houses, sometimes\u2026 we don\u2019t really know.<\/p>\n

Franz Liszt had a concert in one town, and there were only five people in the audience. So instead of playing the concert, he took them to a restau\u00adrant, where they all had a good meal. And I\u2019m sure this sort of thing happens today, to many artists, as it happened then. Giuliani produced a huge amount of material for commercial purposes. Some of it is good, some of it is not so good. The\u00a0idea was to sell paper and to get royalties, or whatever was the way they did it in those days; a lump sum from the publishers. And to give lessons, to teach privately. The guitar was never part of any conservatory until well into our centu\u00adry.<\/p>\n

Roughly about the middle of the 19th century, the guitar lost out to the piano. And those gui\u00adtarists who still wanted to play the instrument\u2014who were still enamored by the sound and by the repertoire\u2014had to do it privately. All of a sudden, you see that all the great virtuosos of the late 19th century had other occupations. They were doctors and lawyers and army generals. Ferranti was a librarian. As a matter of fact, his major contribu\u00adtion to human knowledge has nothing to do with the guitar; he was a translator. He translated the works of Lamartine into Italian. He was also very much involved with the Risorgimento in Italy, which was one reason why he had to leave and go and live in Brussels. Then he went to America for a while. And what he did in America is what the other traveling Italian musicians did: play con\u00adcerts and publish music, and stay for a couple of years until it dried up and they went back. But they did do other things besides being full-time musicians. The idea of a guitar scholar, somebody who studies the history of the guitar, did not really come into being until late into the 19th century, when people, mostly Germans, started studying the history of the guitar, collecting and assembling unknown pieces. If you look at the membership of the International Guitar Society of 1901 in Munich, they were all lawyers and doctors and military officers and merchants, and in a sense you would say that they were not professionals; they were amateurs.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a pejorative sense attached to the word \u201camateur,\u201d but I don\u2019t find that. The very first article I ever published, on guitar matters in Soundboard<\/em> in 1975, was titled \u201cGuitar Chamber Music\u2014Why? The View of an Amateur.\u201d Because I considered myself an amateur, based on the word \u201camore.\u201d I love it. And I think the important thing is not whether one makes a living with it or not. That\u2019s not the issue. Jacques Barzun once said, in one of the most important articles about the guitar ever pub\u00adlished (\u201cThe Indispensable Amateur,\u201d a reprint from The New Yorker<\/em> magazine), that what really defines the professional is only one thing: He can do his job well even when he doesn\u2019t feel like it. That\u2019s all. How much money he earns from it is beside the point. So when people call me an ex-\u00adairline pilot, that\u2019s fine. I am<\/em> an ex-airline pilot. I spent 23 years of my life flying airplanes for a liv\u00ading. So what? But I also spent a great deal of the same time doing some work on the history of the guitar that was never done before\u2014by anybody.<\/p>\n

Look at the history of music in general. Marin Marais was a physician by profession. Giovanni Granata was a barber by profession. And, of course, it\u2019s so easy to throw in the example of Charles Ives, the insurance salesman. And Borodin, the chemist; Rimsky-Korsakov the naval officer.<\/p>\n

One thing I always find fascinating is that the great majority of the real talent in the guitar world [before the 20th century] were military people: Fran\u00e7ois de Fossa; Antoine de l\u2019Hoyer; Fernando Sor himself, and his brother Car\u00adlos; the person responsible for the Regondi Etudes\u2014Ivan Andreyevitch Klinger, a Russian Tsarist army general, passionately involved with the guitar, a composer who, while being a general, published a huge amount of guitar music. Most of it has survived in the Royal Library in Copen\u00adhagen. But he was a military person. Does it have to do with the long, boring, garrison life when there\u2019s nothing else to do? Why the fascination for military people? I suppose it could be something to do with the fact that most military units always had a band, a musical band that belonged to the regiment. Of course there\u2019s no record of the guitar ever being part of a military band! But it was<\/em> portable; you could even take it on the battlefield.<\/p>\n

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Matanya’s Editions Orph\u00e9e put out many previously unpublished works by Fran\u00e7ois de Fossa.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We were lucky to have a few of these military people who wrote some of the best guitar music available. You know, the Napoleonic wars, in which Fran\u00e7ois de Fossa was deeply involved on the Spanish side, were bloody things: hundreds of thousands of people could be killed in one day. So how to pass a moral judgment on some\u00adone\u2019s activities and then listen to his delightful guitar music? How do you reconcile this? How do you reconcile Segovia with his anti-semitism? Or the real noise that was going on in the musi\u00adcal world about Wilhelm Furtwangler and his involvement with the Nazis? Or the Wagner fami\u00adly\u2019s involvement with Nazism? I don\u2019t know. Was Fran\u00e7ois de Fossa ever involved in killing peo\u00adple? I don\u2019t know. I know he took an active part in several battles. When he went over to the French side, he was part of the expeditionary force to Spain in 1823, and he became a com\u00admanding officer of the region of Barcelona. Were there any atrocities committed by him or in his name? I don\u2019t know. He then was involved in a war in Algeria in 1830. Was he involved in any massacres of the infidels? Who knows?<\/p>\n

Coming back to what we were discussing, we really must separate guitarists from their actual occupations. Sometime in the 21st century, somebody\u2019s going to write a dissertation, God forbid, on me. And they\u2019re going to come up with something very interesting. Because<\/em> I was an airline pilot, because<\/em> I had access to free air travel, I was able to do a few things in discover\u00ading guitar music that no one else had. Does someone have access to enlarging our common knowledge because one is a doctor or a lawyer? Probably. There\u2019s a strong possibility that this is the case. Because he\u2019s a doctor, because he\u2019s financially well off, because he has access to large amounts of money and is able to buy mate\u00adrial that has survived. There are a few cases of this in the history of music. Somebody bought it and prevented it from being lost. Because some\u00adone had money, because someone was a doctor. Not necessarily a doctor of musicology with a Ph.D, on the meager salary of an institute of high\u00ader learning that depends on university and gov\u00adernment grants to make any move.<\/p>\n

The contributions of people who do not earn their living directly by music is enormous, and to discount it with a pejorative\u2014\u201cWell, I couldn\u2019t possibly allow British children to be exposed to guitar music edited by an airline pilot\u201d\u2014 this is silly. Of course, I took offence. Not because of the insult to my person, but the insult to the work that I\u2019ve done. The work should stand on its own, regardless of who wrote it and how the per\u00adson earns a living.<\/p>\n

For 20 years I have been a music publisher. I started for one very simple reason\u2014nobody else wanted to do it for me. So I started what was really a vanity press. I\u2019m not a composer, but I thought there were a few things to do; nobody would do them, so I did them myself. Because I was an air\u00adline pilot, I had some extra cash lying around that I could spend on that. And I became a publisher. I must say that if it were not for the assistance given to me by Brian Jeffery at the beginning of this, it would have been a lot different. His help at the time I started was extremely valuable in mak\u00ading the process smoother. He shared with me a great deal of his intimate knowledge of the trade, and I owe him a great deal. However, we started off with the same motivation: our own vanity. We had something to say, and nobody would finance it, so we did it ourselves. It holds true of every single guitar specialist publisher.<\/p>\n

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On November 6, Matanya Ophee, the esteemed, influental and sometimes controversial scholar and founder of the music publishing house Editions Orph\u00e9e, passed away at the age of 85. Israeli by birth, he lived on a kibbutz for several years, enlisted in the Israeli Air Force in 1952, and in 1955 began studying classical guitar with a series of teachers in various countries. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1965 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1970. For most of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":8331,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/matanya_ophee-main.jpg?fit=710%2C469&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}