rubato

RESEARCH & ARTISTRY

The same questions, on stage and on the page.

Most guitar teaching stops at “play this song.” Gabriel's doesn't — because his research is about why music works. He takes rigorous analytical tools from classical musicology and turns them on the music academia usually overlooks: funk, rock, and the electric guitar itself. The result is a way of teaching built on understanding, not imitation — and it's the reason the lessons are structured the way they are.

THE TRAJECTORY

Three schools, one line of inquiry.

  1. CLUJ-NAPOCA

    National Academy of Music “Gheorghe Dima.” Musicology & pedagogy; early grounding in aesthetics and musical form.

  2. LONDON

    Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP). Popular Music Performance degree (Guitar Major, First-Class); adapts formal analysis to popular music.

  3. PITEÅ / LULEÅ

    Luleå University of Technology, Piteå School of Music. Master of Arts in Music Performance (2026); integrates analysis with original composition.

THE WORK

Two dissertations, one argument.

ICMP LONDON · POPULAR MUSIC PERFORMANCE

An Introduction to Morphosyntactic Analysis from a Popular Music Perspective: Form and Function of Suspended Chords and the Hendrix Chord

Classical musicology has spent centuries building tools to explain how music is put together. Popular music rarely gets the same treatment. This dissertation borrows one of those tools — morphosyntactic analysis, which studies music the way linguists study language, from the smallest building block up to the whole phrase — and applies it to a funk classic: Average White Band’s “Pick up the Pieces.” The focus is two richly ambiguous chords, the suspended chord and the “Hendrix chord,” and what they actually do inside a groove. The finding: tools built for Bach work on funk too, and reveal things a normal chord chart never shows.

WHY IT MATTERSShows that serious analysis belongs in popular music — the conviction behind every Rubato lesson.

MORPHOSYNTACTIC ANALYSIS · MUSICAL FORM · HARMONY · SUSPENDED CHORDS · THE HENDRIX CHORD · MUSIC & LANGUAGE

  • READ THE PUBLICATION — LINK PENDING

LULEÅ UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY · MA MUSIC PERFORMANCE · 2026

Towards a Sonic Cosmogenesis: A Multi-Modal Analytical Approach to Modern Guitar Phrasing through Morphosyntactic and Spectromorphological Perspectives

This project asks how we can analyse the things that make electric guitar expressive but that notation can’t capture — tone, feedback, sustain, the bend of a note, the effect of the gear itself. It combines two frameworks: morphosyntactic analysis (music as language, from the earlier work) and spectromorphology (how the actual sound evolves over time). Then it does something unusual: instead of only analysing other people’s music, Gabriel wrote his own — Hexaemeron, a six-part composition inspired by the six days of creation — and used it as the laboratory. Analysis shaped the composition; the composition tested the analysis. Research and artistry become one process.

WHY IT MATTERSHis scholarship and his playing are the same activity — the strongest possible answer to “why study with him.”

MORPHOSYNTAX · SPECTROMORPHOLOGY · ELECTRIC GUITAR · TIMBRE · PHRASE STRUCTURE · ARTISTIC RESEARCH

  • EXPLORE THE RESEARCH CATALOGUE EXPOSITION — LINK PENDING
  • LISTEN TO HEXAEMERON — LINK PENDING

This is why the lessons work the way they do.

The research all points one direction: understand the language and you can play anything; memorise pieces and you stay stuck. That's not a teaching slogan — it's the conclusion of a decade of study. It's why Rubato lessons are prepared and adapted, and why the goal is your independence as a musician, as fast as possible.

Book a free lesson› See the method