Thursday, 14 November 2024
4:00pm CST
Red Lacquer Ballroom

The organological changes of the guitar between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries witness the disruption of social and technological developments felt across the Western world. From an instrument whose strumming fueled the fancy of singers and dancers in the Baroque era to one that never matched the demands for ever-louder instruments in the late-nineteenth century (until the advent of amplification), the history of the guitar reveals the anxieties of progress and the obstinacy of audiences and musicians who are still persuaded by too soft and too harmonically limited an instrument within the classical music discourse.

Musical progress demanded physical sacrifices from the guitar, resulting in the loss of strings. Thus, the Baroque guitar traded its double courses for single strings tuned from high to low, and gut bass strings were slowly replaced by metal-wound strings. These and other technical developments reflect the effort of builders and musicians to bring the guitar along the epochal changes between these eras and to position it in the popular music of the time, securing its existence. Little did they know how the guitar would become, arguably, the most popular instrument in the world. Just not that kind of guitar.

This performance by Carlos Cuestas explores themes of change and development in music spanning the early-eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries played on historical instruments. The program features three compositions of the Afro-colonial fandango genre written in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries respectively, played on historical guitars. Santiago de Murcia (1673–1739) notated a fandango for the Baroque guitar with reentrant tuning, allowing complex melodic passages to be played over multiple strings (campanela). In the nineteenth century, Dionisio Aguado (1784–1849) composed a set of fandango variations (op. 16) for a relatively new instrument: the single-string guitar. Aguado punctuates the genre’s cyclical Phrygian cadence with a French-style introduction, a lyrical middle section, and a dazzling coda in D major. As the fandango simultaneously became one of the most popular flamenco genres, twentieth-century composer Joaquín Rodrigo (1901–99) penned his own version in 1954. Highly impressionistic, Rodrigo’s “Fandango” obscures the harmonic progression further by bookending the genre’s traditional harmonic tension between minor and major modes with two sections in major while maintaining its polyrhythmic complexity. Between each iteration of the fandangos, this program will feature representative pieces of each period: a set of Baroque dances, theme and variations over a theme from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and Manuel de Falla’s single guitar composition “Homenaje sur le tombeau de Claude Debussy.”

Three centuries of guitar-making are represented in this concert. The Baroque guitar used here was built in Veracruz, Mexico, a highly significant presence given the genre’s origin. The nineteenth-century or Romantic guitar is a René François Lacôte replica, one of the most sought-after builders of the period. Finally, the modern guitar is an Antonio de Torres 1888 replica, built after one of the first models that spurred contemporary guitar-making.

Performer

Carlos Cuestas is a multi-instrumentalist and scholar based in New York City. He has performed as a soloist and in chamber, orchestral, and traditional music ensembles on different plucked instruments in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Ireland. Carlos’s research spans eighteenth- and nineteenth-century guitar repertoire, particularly music for keyboard and guitar, and the art of improvisation in the style of the early Romantic period. Carlos has participated in numerous projects as a continuo player, including opera and oratorio productions in New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco. As an ethnographer, Carlos is an expert on the centuries-old son jarocho tradition from Veracruz, Mexico, playing a consort of traditional instruments, and is a former member of the Radio Jarocho ensemble in New York City.