JORGE CABALLERO

A technique that became prevalent in the 19th century can still improve your playing significantly. This video shows you the traditional and modern approach to this technique. Thanks for watching. If you'd like to support my channel, please subscribe. www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

Among the finest achievements of the celebrated Italian virtuoso Mauro Giuliani (1781 – 1829) are a collection of six fantasies built on themes from operas by Giacomo Rossini, aptly titled 'Rossiniana'. In Rossiniana No. 3, after an overture-like introduction, a collection of 5 arias from various operas by Rossini (Cendrillon, La dame du lac, Le Turc en Italie, Zelmira, and Ricciardo et Zoraïde) are set as theme and variation forms, where one can easily notice the ease and fluidity of Giuliani as a composer, his acute sense of drama, and the high virtuosity he doubtlessly owned when performing these works. It is no surprise then that Mauro Giuliani's name figures prominently in the guitar literature to this day. www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

This piece is part of a 6-movement work titled Midsummer Love Serenade, which I wrote between 2014 – 2017. The overall work is about 25 minutes long, and was premiered in New York in 2018. This was also my first composition using tone rows. My intention in this movement was to create a simple and gentle, song-like structure to create a counter-character to the 1st movement, written in sonata form. In time, I will record the full piece. Thank you for your support! www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com ©Jorge Caballero, 2021. All rights reserved.

Jorge Morel, Staccato Dance Sometime between 2003 or 2004, Jorge Morel told me that he was working on a short piece that he intended to dedicate to Bill Bay, his publisher. He described it as an Etude written in a style reminiscent of Bluegrass. Staccato Dance is that piece. Indeed, it is an etude that targets a right hand pattern (P-I-MA), with brief interspersions of Campanella-like textures which, due to their dazzling speed, are reminiscent of Bluegrass. It has been almost 5 months since Jorge Morel's passing. As someone who served as inspiration to many guitarists throughout the world, and whom I personally looked up to as an artist and human being, I feel forever fortunate to have the rich heritage of his music with which to remember him. www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

Although the guitar was regarded in Argentina as part of their national patrimony and captured the inspiration of artists, authors and musicians in academic circles from at least the mid 1850s, its induction into those same cultural spheres only arrived decades later, thanks to the endeavours of the first guitarists born there at the beginning of the 20th century. Jorge Gómez Crespo (1900 – 1971) is listed among the pioneers of the classical guitar in Argentina. A native of Buenos Aires, he studied guitar with Antonio Sinopoli and composition with Torcuato Rodríguez Castro. By some accounts, however, his studies were brief, finding himself drawn to the folkloric roots of Argentinian music, and using them as a source from which his interpretive and compositional imagination would spur. An introvert by nature, Gómez Crespo’s activities as a performer consisted mostly of appearances on radio while keeping a low profile in public performance. In 1938, he created the guitar studies program at the Manuel de Falla Municipal Conservatory in Buenos Aires; a position he held for many years. While the works he composed during his first period (roughly from 1925 until 1937) exhibit his academic training, it is after 1938 that Gómez Crespo would employ the gestures of his definitive musical language through the subtle stylization of Argentinian folklore. Norteña, written in 1940, is his first published work, and doubtlessly his most famous, due to Andrés Segovia adopting it into his repertoire in 1942. Its title, ‘Norteña’ (‘northern’ in English) is indebted to the music from the Argentine Northwest, a region of rich diversity that borders Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay. The far away and longing character of the opening Vidala or Vidalita (a kind of musical piece often accompanied with a caja or tambor in 3/4 anacrusa meter) leads to a simple melodic idea set in choral form that repeats continuously with subtle variations. After a reference in minor mode to Julián Aguirre’s Triste No. 4, the piece is brought to a climax that leads to a repeat of the introduction. The sense of longing and solitude brought by the piece is present up to its final harmonic cadence, where 2 harp-like chords bring Norteña to its distant conclusion. Sources: Ricardo Jorge Jeckel, María Luisa Anido, Jorge Gómez Crespo y Antonio Luna: La construcción de un imaginario del noroeste argentino en la guitarra académica de mediados del siglo XX, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Facultad de Artes y Diseño, Buenos Aires, May 2010, https://www.academia.edu/44825459/Jeckel_Tesis_Maestr%C3%ADa_Imaginario_Noroeste_Argentino_en_Guitarra www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

Among the vast body of works by the renowned Paraguayan guitarist and composer Agustín Barrios Mangoré (1885 – 1944), the Vals Op. 8, No. 4 is one of the most often played, recorded and performed. Also called "Vals Brillante," it was composed in Paraguay in 1923. Formally speaking, this waltz is also one of the most elaborate compositions left to us by Barrios, with a structure that contains 4 parts in addition to an introduction (played twice) and a coda, at the center of which sits an ingeniously brilliant and rather intricate 'Campanella' – a compositional texture built of flowing arpeggios that imitate the sounds of bells. The light-hearted, yet operatic flow of its musical narrative, make the Vals Op. 8 No. 4 a significant contribution to the guitar repertoire, and it offers us a window to the music of Paraguay during the 1920s, where the influence of European music commingles with the flair and exuberance of the Paraguayan folklore. www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

While most of Johann Sebastian Bach's instrumental music is thought to originate from his years at Anhalt-Cöthen (1717 – 1723), the surviving copies of the so called "Lute Suites" span decades around that period. It should also be noted that there is no direct evidence that designates the lute as the intended instrument for these suites. The Suite BWV 996 is probably the earliest of the four "Lute Suites", dating roughly before 1712. Stylistically, it bears similarities to the keyboard works Bach wrote during that period, with its Toccata - styled Prelude and classic French form overall. www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

Largely regarded as one of the most important guitarists from Latin America, Agustín Pio Barrios Mangoré (1885 – 1944) led an itinerant life that took him from his native country of Paraguay throughout the Americas and Europe, eventually settling in El Salvador some years before his death. In his wake, he left us a beautiful collection of guitar music, where European romanticism and Latin American folklore are easily perceived. The Vals Tropical here is an example of these influences. Cover picture by Otto Rauch (http://www.ottorauch-guitars.de/index_e.html) www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com

Aside from the two Royal Winter Music sonatas by the renowned German composer Hans Werner Henze (1926 – 2012), the Drei Tentos is a beautiful collection of three short pieces that are part of a larger work titled Kammermusik, written in 1958. Dedicated to Benjamin Britten, Kammermusik is a 12-part work for tenor, guitar and eight instruments, thus bearing resemblance to Britten's own Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. The Drei Tentos also mark a clear aesthetic departure from his earlier, 12-tone, Darmstadt School influences and shows him embracing a Stravinsky-an neoclassicism. Of Drei Tentos, the composer himself said that they "sound much as I imagine Greek music must have sounded and are characterized by the interplay of thematic structures and harmonic textures found throughout the piece as a whole: each of them functions as a nucleus that provides material for the rest of the piece." – Henze, Hans W. and Spencer, Stewart, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). www.jorgecaballeroguitarist.com