With every classification you have a category that you can’t place anywhere. So that will be the Various category. Here you will find my recordings of music by Carrie Hayden, Alfred Cottin, Leo Brouwer, Antonio Cano and Gisèle Sikora.
Carrie Hayden
Carrie Vanessa Hayden (1866 – 1950) was the daughter of the American guitarist and composer Winslow Hayden (1839 – 1886). She played the guitar herself and composed salon music in America.
Alfred Cottin
Alfred Cottin (1863 -1923) lived and worked in Paris. He was a student of the Catalan Jaime Bosch and had a music practice in the French capital. He was also active in the Parisian music salons with his brother Jules and sister Madeleine.
Leo Brouwer
The Cuban composer Leo Brouwer was born in 1939 in Havana. His father encouraged him to play the guitar, later he made it his profession. He started composing at a young age. His early compositions were strongly influenced by the folk music and rhythms of Cuba, later he focused on atonal music and minimal music.
Antonio Cano
Antonio Cano-Curriela (1811-1897) was a student of Dioniso Aguado. Cano didn’t immediately start playing the guitar and composing. He started out as a physician, a surgeon, but at one point exchanged his scalpel in favor of the guitar.
Gisèle Sikora
Gisèle Sikora (1952-2006) was an all-round musician and guitar teacher. She lived in Belgium. Her father was an instrument maker and her mother was a famous accordion player. When she was eight years old, she started taking music theory and piano lessons and studied classical guitar, solfège, harmony, chamber music and music analysis at the Antwerp Conservatory.
Gaspar Sanz
The compositions by Gaspar Sanz (1640 – 1710) in his Instruccion Sobre la Guitarra Espanola provide a pleasant impression of the musical forms of Spanish music that were popular in his time.
Gaspar Sanz was born around 1640 in Calanda in the Spanish district of Aragón. He studied music, theology and philosophy at the University of Salamanca. After an apprenticeship for various instruments in Italy, he obtained a position with the Spanish Viceroy in Naples and Don Juan, an illegitimate son of the Spanish king Philip V.
Sanz is mainly known from his three volumes of compositions for Baroque guitar. Instruccion Sobre la Guitarra Espanola was the first and served as text book for his patron Don Juan.
Sanz noted down his music with almost no embellishments. In his time, it was custom that every musician used it as source material only, developing embellishments and variations themselves.
Juan Buscaglia
Juan Buscaglia (1893-1958) was an Argentine guitarist and singer who rose to prominence in the 1920s. He played in clubs, on the radio, and with circuses in the countryside with his wife, a circus performer.
Although he was active as a composer, much of his work is forgotten. A few pieces escaped oblivion because the tango singer Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), with whom Buscaglia collaborated, recorded several of his classics.