Lorenzo Marcolla

Who was Sigr Canaby? And why did the great Parisian publishers Le Clerc & Boivin, in 1741, decide to publish his Sonatas for Transverse Flute and Bass, thus immortalising the blurry figure of this nowadays obscure musician among those of fundamental late Baroque composers such as Leclair, Rameau or Blavet?

It took a long time for the guitar to enter and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked its entry into the 20th century was a very modern one: the Tombeau that Manuel De Falla dedicated in 1922 to Claude Debussy was pioneering at the time. The instrument had everything it needed to be ‘modern’: a small, but captivating chamber music sonority, a glorious past (at least in the then half­forgotten noble ancestor, the lute, whose place it took), and a technique still evolving and ready to be explored. However, despite Schönberg’s use of the guitar as early as 1924 in his Serenade, mainly owing to Andrés Segovia – the main architect of the instrument’s renaissance in the 20th century, who long dominated the scene with his own predilections and idiosyncrasies –, the repertoire remained linguistically linked to that debut moment until the 1970s: modern, but no longer contemporary.