Thinking About Guitar History with Robert de Visée’s Suite in D Minor
Mr. Barrett considers the role of arrangements of early music in developing the modern guitar repertoire and the array of textual and interpretive choices available to modern guitarists. Taking the 20th-century performance history of Robert de Visée’s Suite in D Minor (1686) as a case study, this lecture argues for a repositioning of 20th-century transcriptions as distinct musical entities from the original work. This perspective emphasizes the role of performers in creating canonical repertoire and reevaluates approaches to early music that have fallen out of favor in recent decades.
This is the first of a two-part series.
About the Speaker
Andrew Barrett is a Ph.D. student in musicology at Northwestern University. His research focuses on music from Spain and intersections between music and performance studies. He previously earned an MM in guitar and an MA in musicology from Indiana University and a BM in guitar from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 2019, his paper “Shared Visions of the Eternal: Joaquín Rodrigo’s Fantasía para un gentilhombre and Francoist Spain” won the outstanding student paper award at the fall meeting of the American Musicological Society’s Midwest Chapter.
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