FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Classical Spanish Guitar Music

Question:
I've included a 30-some second mp3 clip at 4th from the top of my Ampcast site to aurally illustrate my point. Where in any other national music are you going to hear a phrase written like that? Even the musically innocent can identify the nation associated with this music. Spanish classical guitar deep drills into the soul. For a few wonderful minutes it can turn a mall shoe clerk into a gypsy or a maja or majo. Would this news group even exist if there was no classical Spanish guitar music? Would English, French or German lute/guitar be enough to bring so many here?

Answer:
But the question is deeper than the existence of this NG. Spanish music was important, and is important to the repertoire, but it was NOT the foundation of the repertoire, until about 1910, with the emergence of Miguel Llobet and Andrés Segovia out of the narrow boundaries of the Iberian Peninsula, basing their concert careers on the interest in the genre built by Ricardo Viñes, Pablo de Sarasate, Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados. Sor did not write Spanish music, and neither did Aguado, Trinidad Huerta and Juan de Ciebra except on very few instances. Carulli and Carcassi did make some isolated attempts to write Spanish music, but not very successfully. The best Spanish music of the 19th century was written by Russian (Glinka) and French (Bizet, Chabrier) composers. The tragedy of the classical guitar is not that it was centered on Spanish music, but that because it acquired this tunnel vision of the repertoire, it ignored the rest of it. Thankfully, this is rapidly changing.