Hello everyone — I’m Anthony Giannini, and I’ve just joined the MFA Classical Guitar Academy with genuine gratitude (and a beginner’s reverence) for the discipline this instrument demands. My working life has been a long apprenticeship in integration: art and design, history and philosophy, education and philanthropy, alongside cognitive science at Harvard and ongoing work around human genius and artificial intelligence. What draws me to the classical guitar is its quiet severity — the way a single hand position can turn into a lifetime — and the way musical truth refuses jargon. I’m here to learn in public, practise in private, and become more precise, more honest, and more musical.

The guitar’s lineage feels, to me, like a centuries-long refinement of resonance: a migration from courtly ancestors such as the vihuela and the baroque guitar toward the modern form shaped in the nineteenth century by Antonio de Torres, then given a new poetic grammar by Francisco Tárrega, whose touch and technique helped define what we now recognise as classical guitar playing. In the same historical breath, Fernando Sor — whom Fétis famously called the “Beethoven of the guitar” — built a cathedral of studies where musical architecture and technique become the same thing: not exercises, but ethics. And then Andrés Segovia, carrying the instrument into the concert hall, widened its repertoire and public legitimacy, championing new works and transcriptions with the conviction that the guitar could speak as an orchestra in miniature.

That phrase — orchestra in miniature — is where my own compass points. I’m fascinated by the guitar as a self-sufficient universe of timbres: a laboratory of harmonics, interference, decay, and bloom; a place where the physics of vibration and the metaphysics of feeling become inseparable. My “quantum” language is partly metaphor and partly method: a way of noticing how tiny changes in contact, angle, intention, and attention can collapse a cloud of possible sounds into one inevitable tone. I’m honoured to study with Merce Font and alongside all of you — and I’d love to learn what you’re practising, what you’re listening for, and what you’re chasing in these six strings.

Anthony Giannini