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It took a long time for the guitar to enter and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked it's entryinto the 20th century was a very modern one the Tombeau that Manuel de Falla dedicated in 1922 to Claude Debussywas pioneering at the time. The instrument had everything it needed to be 'modern' a small, but captivating chambermusic sonority, a glorious past (at least in the then halfforgottennoble ancestor, the lute, whose place it took), and atechnique still evolving and ready to be explored. However, despite Schonberg's use of the guitar as early as 1924 inhis Serenade, mainly owing to Andres 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 linguisticallylinked to that debut moment until the 1970s modern, but no longer contemporary.It was then thanks to the work carried out in Darmstadt by Leo Brouwer (1939),a talented Cuban guitarist and composer,and a few other performers - among whom we should mention at least Siegfried Behrend (19331990)and AngeloGilardino (19412022)- that the first compositions for guitar built on elements that the composers of the secondhalf of the 20th century had already been using for decades came to the public at large aleatorism, serialism, freeatonality, and extreme timbral research. When contemporary composers finally embraced the instrument, they did sowith conviction, developing it's full potential in the knowledge that it possesses the versatility necessary for the languagesof our time.
