Guitar & Magic Realism
The classical guitar scene is magic realist. Classical guitarists are mostly magic realists, as are most guitarist composers. By this I mean simply that the guitar is perpetually Baroque, or if not that, the guitar is pre-1918. The guitar attracts conservative musical sensibilities.
See Hermann Broch's essay Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and His Time. There, he explains that the political institutions that persisted until 1918 were instated in the Baroque. Therefore, ornamentation leading up to the war tended to be hypertropied Baroque when it was meant to serve the Empire. Think of the horribly gaudy Goldener Saal in Vienna. Jugenstil & Art nouveau have echoes of the Baroque when it appears like steamlined Baroquisms. Art nouveau tends to florish in Baroque cities, I've noticed. Turin & Paris.
Segovia loved Ponce's Baroque pastiches because he feared the post war chaos, including modern music, communism and globalism. His Spanish guitar predecessors Tarrega, Llobet, Pujol, were part of the Nationalist direction that music took in the late 19th Century. That was Segovia's world, and he didn't like the alternative. His idea of being cultured involved preserving that world. He said, in a letter to Ponce, I love your Prelude for guitar & harpsichord, *it is Picaresque*. We immediately think of Borges' *Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote*.
Barrios has three styles:
folkloristic, Chopinesque, Baroque
Villa-Lobos has three style:
folkloristic, modernistic (Paris-influenced), Baroque
Piazzolla is Baoroque, + tango with careful modernist florishes
The interwar, Stravinsky led neoclassicism & neobaroquisms went beyond music. We find it in Djuna Barnes' adopted Baroque English in The Antiphon and the Ladies Almanac.
Sophia Gubaidalina's little guitar solo springs into her modernisms from a Baorque pastiche.
These Baroque tricksters:
Schnittke
Jonathan Dawe
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey