New World 80384-2

The guitar is the popular instrument par excellence. As apt for Brazilian sambass for Irish ballads or American blues, the guitar has also recently been adapted as a surrogate for plucked instruments from non-Western musical traditions; no idiom seems beyond its reach. When social history of the second half of the twentieth century is written, it may be seen that the guitar is as central to this era as the piano was to the nineteenth century. But while the piano was an emblem of upward social aspiration, the guitar is anything but. An instrument of the masses, its enormous appeal has to some extent derived from its antibourgeois associations, from its very opposition to the salon world of the piano. Unlike most other popular instruments, however, the guitar has an aristocratic tradition of its own. A collateral descendant of lute, vihuela, and Renaissance guitar, the modern “classical ” guitar, the modern “classical ” guitar has inherited the repertoire of the lutenist-composers of the Renaissance, as well as the incomparable musical legacy of Spain. Although the major eighteenth and nineteenth-century composers generally ignored the guitar, its noble tradition was preserved and passed on by a long line of (mostly Spanish) guitarist-composers. Over the past two or three generations, through th