JORGE CABALLERO

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

Celso Garrido Lecca (born 9 March 1926) is a Peruvian composer. He was born in Lima and studied composition with Rodolfo Holzmann in Peru's National Conservatory. He concluded his studies in Chile. He was admitted into Universidad de Chile's Theatre Institute as composer and music advisor, and worked there for 10 years. Celso Garrido Lecca entered Universidad de Chile's Composition Department, and was eventually chief of that section. In 1964, he was awarded a scholarship in Tanglewood, and studied there with Aaron Copland. He returned to Perú in 1973, and taught composition at Perú's National Conservatory. In the year 2000, he was awarded the Ibero-American "Tomás Luis de Victoria" prize, the most important award for Ibero-American composers, among whose recipients we find Xavier Montsalvage, Marlos Nobre and Leo Brouwer. His most important works include "Antaras" for double string quartet and double bass, "Laudes I" and "Laudes II", "Elegía a Macchu Pichu", "Sonata Fantasía" for cello and piano. He is a member of Colegio de Compositores Latinoamericanos de Música de Arte. Simpay was written in 1988 for the guitarist Javier Echecopar. According to the notes in his published edition of this work, Simpay is the Quechua word for "braided." The composer uses this word as a symbol of the profound interrelation between the musical style of the Peruvian Andean music (particularly from the region of Ayacucho), and the expressive means of compositional techniques and idioms of the modern guitar. Although typically understood as a continuous work, Simpay is divided into three movements: Agitado, Calmo, and Rustico con vigor. I first worked on this piece at the age of 15 with the composer. It is a great pleasure to bring it back and perhaps shed some light into a piece that deserves much more recognition than it has. (Artwork by Fernando de Szyszlo)

Fernando Sor (1778 – 1839) was one of the most important guitarists in his time, and his vast collection of guitar music is considered part of the canon of the guitar today. While a superficial appreciation of Sor's compositions may qualify it as light-hearted, or perhaps superficial, deeper observation shows a sensibility an attention to the dramatic effect of details reminiscent of Schubert's music, and an understanding of the tonal properties of the guitar that is difficult to match to this day. This simple Menuet from his Op. 24 is an example of the richness that can be found in his music.