By the time the modern guitar had six strings and a standardized tuning system, keyboard, string, woodwind, and brass instruments had already arrived at their current state. Hence the literature for other classical instruments has been in development longer than that of the guitar and boasts contributions from some of history\u2019s greatest composers.<\/p>\n
With so many writing guitar music these days, an ongoing debate in guitar circles is whether a guitarist who has mastered the idiosyncrasies of the instrument, but is a self-taught composer, tends to get by more on the guitar\u2019s attractive idiomatic resources than on purely compositional ideals. Can such a composer produce work with the gravitas of Benjamin Britten\u2019s Nocturnal after John Dowland <\/i>or Joaqu\u00edn Rodrigo\u2019s Concierto de Aranjuez<\/i>? Countless non-performing composers have created hugely successful works for a range of instruments. But alternatively, among the great composers we find many virtuosic players (Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Mozart, and Vivaldi come to mind) who wrote extraordinary works for their own instruments.<\/p>\n
The concert repertoire penned specifically for the modern classical guitar is of fairly recent vintage, with a foundation laid by a core of 19th-century composer-virtuosi. In the 20th century, Andr\u00e9s Segovia sought to broaden the repertoire by commissioning new works from living composers\u2014specifically non-guitarist composers. Those efforts have continued with younger generations of artists, and a coterie of contemporary non-guitarist composers have created masterpieces for the repertoire\u2014works by the aforementioned Britten and Rodrigo, Manuel Ponce, William Walton, Luciano Berio, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and others are revered by guitarists and non-guitarists<\/span> alike.<\/p>\n We will not attempt to settle any debates here, but will examine different approaches and philosophies of these successful contemporary guitarist-composers.<\/span><\/p>\n
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