Creativity Quote by Andres Segovia

Segovia’s jab lands because it plays innocent while swinging at a whole future. Phrased as a casual, almost folksy question, it’s really a gatekeeping verdict: if the violin, cello, and the human voice are “naturally” acoustic, then the guitar only earns legitimacy by behaving the same way. The wit is in the slippery logic. He doesn’t argue against amplification on technical grounds; he makes it sound faintly absurd, like asking for an electric sunset. By pulling “electric singer” into the lineup, he turns amplification into something vaguely monstrous: not improvement, but mutation.

The context is mid-century anxiety over the guitar’s identity. Segovia spent his life hauling the instrument into concert halls that treated it like a parlor toy. Amplification threatened to drag it back toward the tavern, the dance bandstand, the noisy marketplace. His question is a defensive cultural move: protect the guitar’s hard-won “serious” status by policing its volume and its associations. Electricity here isn’t just current; it’s modernity, mass culture, and the unsettling idea that sound can be engineered rather than earned.

There’s also a quiet self-portrait in the line. Segovia believed tone is moral: touch, wood, room, and restraint. An electric guitar short-circuits that ethos by making power portable. History’s punchline is that we did, in fact, get electric singers - via microphones, studio processing, Auto-Tune - and the world didn’t end. It just got louder, stranger, and more democratic than Segovia wanted.