Essay On Heitor Villa-Lobos

Heitor Villa-Lobos: An Overview of His Guitar Music Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was one of the most influential and acclaimed Latin American composers of the twentieth-century. As an avid nationalist, he not only elevated the music of his home country, Brazil, to new heights, but he also took advantage of his unique heritage and personal experiences to create his own sound and to shape his identity as a composer. Villa-Lobos original, experimental, and nationalistic approach to composition were important marks of his style and we see the influences of Brazilian folk music throughout all of his works. However, Villa-Lobos’s accomplishments as a composer are not limited to the music of Brazil. The focus of this research paper is to briefly discuss his contributions to Western art music as a whole – especially in regards to his great influence on the classical guitar repertoire. For classical guitarists, Villa-Lobos’s guitar music provides a collection of musical and technical prospects that were never thought

By the end of the Romantic period, the guitar entered into a phase of almost complete obscurity. This time was dominated by the gigantic works of composers like Richard Wagner. The guitar couldn’t keep up with the extreme-chromaticism and grandiosity of such works. When Romanticism reached its peak with Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, the guitar had lost its relevance as a concert instrument and the guitar repertoire suffered tremendously. By the 1920s, the situation started to be remedied when virtuoso classical guitarists such as André Segovia (1893-1987) began to demand a serious formal repertoire. Thus, the guitar works of Villa-Lobos were crucial in the re-establishment and advancement of the classical guitar in Western art