Keywords
nineteenth-century guitar, sonata form, historical guitar technique, Latin American classical music, Peruvian-Bolivian composers, guitar historiography
Abstract
Born in Arequipa, Peru, Pedro Ximénez Abrill y Tirado was a virtuoso cellist and guitarist who composed over forty symphonies, forty masses, dozens of chamber pieces with interesting instrumentations, and over three hundred solo pieces for the guitar. He moved to Lima for a period and later became Maestro di Capilla at the Sucre Cathedral in Bolivia. At the time Sucre was one of the wealthiest cities in South America, if not the wealthiest.
Abrill's renown was such that he was published in Paris by Richault and was written about in Hugh Bonelli's published travel diary (London, 1854). His music is well composed, and he employs techniques that would not reappear in the classical guitar canon until the mid-twentieth century.
This article presents updated biographical material on Abrill together with a detailed examination of his single-movement First Sonata in D, a remarkable work from both a compositional and technical perspective. A facsimile of the composer's manuscript of the Sonata is included.
Notes
This article was first published in the Guitar Foundation of America's quarterly magazine Soundboard, vol. 52 no. 1. We are grateful to the author and to Soundboard's editor, Robert Ferguson, for permission to make it available here in Soundboard Scholar.
Recommended Citation
Savino, Richard. “Pedro Ximénez Abrill y Tirado: Another and Deeper Look.” Soundboard 52, no. 1: 6–20. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/sbs/vol11/iss1/5/.