The historically curious guitarist – Early music performance practices applied to contemporary fingerstyle

Could the modern guitar, viewed from a broad historical perspective and stripped of its vernacular associations, be fully perceived as part of the same instrumental lineage as its more classically established predecessors?

This research investigates how today’s historically “informed” — or perhaps more accurately, historically curious — composing guitarist can engage deeply with early European performance practices for plucked instruments. The project focuses on the role of the instrumentalist composer in relation to the guitar as an ever-transforming instrument, and examines the interplay between compositional forces and organological change.

By approaching the past–present continuum from this perspective, this research seeks to bridge the philosophical divide between historically authentic performance practice and the act of fully inhabiting one’s own time when producing new music. In doing so, it proposes the contemporary guitar as both a tool and a lens for revisiting repertoires that have remained comparatively reserved to period-authentic reinterpretation, yet whose paradigms are strikingly “modern”.