Lorenzo Biguzzi - Turning Page (2024) Hi-Res

It took a long time for the guitar to enter and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked its entry into the 20th century was a very modern one: the Tombeau that Manuel De Falla dedicated in 1922 to Claude Debussy was pioneering at the time. The instrument had everything it needed to be ‘modern’: a small, but captivating chamber music sonority, a glorious past (at least in the then half­forgotten noble ancestor, the lute, whose place it took), and a technique still evolving and ready to be explored. However, despite Schönberg’s use of the guitar as early as 1924 in his Serenade, mainly owing to Andrés Segovia – the main architect of the instrument’s renaissance in the 20th century, who long dominated the scene with his own predilections and idiosyncrasies –, the repertoire remained linguistically linked to that debut moment until the 1970s: modern, but no longer contemporary.

It was then thanks to the work carried out in Darmstadt by Leo Brouwer (1939­), a talented Cuban guitarist and composer, and a few other performers – among whom we should mention at least Siegfried Behrend (1933­1990) and Angelo Gilardino (1941­2022) – that the first compositions for guitar built on elements that the composers of the second half of the 20th century had already been using for decades came to the public at large: aleatorism, serialism, free atonality, and extreme timbral research. When contemporary composers finally embraced the instrument, they did so with conviction, developing its full potential in the knowledge that it possesses the versatility necessary for the languages of our time.