It took a long time for the guitar to enter and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked it's 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 Schonberg's use of the guitar as early as 1924 in
his Serenade, mainly owing to Andres 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 it's full potential in the knowledge that it possesses the versatility necessary for the languages
of our time.