This article lists the classical guitar music in the classical guitar repertoire. It includes baroque guitar and vihuela music, but not lute music. This music is most commonly performed by classical guitarists and requires the use of a variety of classical guitar techniques to play.
During the Renaissance, the guitar was likely to have been used as it frequently is today in popular music, that is to provide strummed accompaniment for a singer or a small group.[ citation needed ] There also were several significant music collections published during the 16th century of contrapuntal compositions approaching the complexity, sophistication and breadth of lute music from the same period. Most Renaissance lute music has been transcribed for guitar (see List of composers for lute).
The baroque guitar (c.1600–1750) was a string instrument with five courses of gut strings and moveable gut frets. The first (highest pitched) course was sometimes a single string. It replaced the Renaissance lute as the most common instrument found in the home.
The romantic guitar, in use from approximately 1790 to 1830, was the guitar of the Classical and Romantic period of music, showing remarkable consistency in the instrument's construction during these decades. By this time guitars used six, sometimes more, single strings instead of courses. The romantic guitar eventually led to a different type of guitar in Spain: the fan-braced Spanish guitars of Torres, which may be seen as the immediate precursor of the modern classical guitar.
In the 20th century, many non-guitarist composers wrote for the instrument, whereas previously only players of the instrument had done so. [1]
A chaconne is a type of musical composition often used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line which offers a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. In this it closely resembles the passacaglia. It originates and was particularly popular in the Baroque era; a large number of Chaconnes exist from the 17th- and 18th- centuries.
Vincent Ludwig Persichetti was an American composer, teacher, and pianist. An important musical educator and writer, he was known for his integration of various new ideas in musical composition into his own work and teaching, as well as for training many noted composers in composition at the Juilliard School.
Boris Blacher was a German composer and librettist.
Angelo Gilardino was an Italian composer, guitarist, and musicologist.
Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer, a pupil of Paul Hindemith. He wrote a considerable amount of chamber music, including five string quartets and many instrumental sonatas, much of which is only now becoming accessible through modern recordings. Cooke also composed two operas, six symphonies and several concertos.
Harald Genzmer was a German composer of classical music and an academic.
The Sonata for guitar, Op. 47 is a composition by Alberto Ginastera. This sonata was written in 1976 for the guitarist Carlos Barbosa-Lima. The composer subsequently revised the work twice: first in 1977–78, then again in 1981. It is the only original composition for guitar by Ginastera.
Jacques Castérède was a French composer and pianist.
Renate Eggebrecht was a German violinist and record producer.
To a greater extent than most other instruments and ensembles, it is difficult to compose music for the guitar without either proficiency in the instrument or close collaboration with a guitarist. As a result, a large part of the guitar repertoire consists of works by guitarists who did not compose extensively for other instruments. Music prior to the classical era was often composed for performance on various combinations of instruments, and could be adapted by the performer to keyboard instruments, the lute, or the guitar. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, a significant amount of music has been written for the guitar by non-guitarist composers.
Timo Korhonen is a Finnish classical guitarist and is one of the most distinguished classical guitarists in his generation.
Léon Orthel was a Dutch composer, pianist and teacher.
Pierre Froidebise was a Belgian organist, composer, and musicologist.
Carl Frederick Dolmetsch (1911–1997) CBE was a French instrumentalist who specialised in the recorder.