Publications

The discovery of the Tobarra Guitar Music Collection manuscript is undoubtedly a milestone for recovering and sharing the province’s musical heritage — heritage that deserves to be regarded as just as significant as that of the architectural, fine-arts, literary, historical or scientific spheres, as part of the integral cultural development of any society.

This publication includes the cataloguing and description of the collection’s works, a study of their dating, authorship and notation, biographies of every composer mentioned, audio and video recordings of a selection of the works, and a critical score edition of the recorded pieces. It also presents images of the original manuscript and a biographical and stylistic study of Robustiano Hernández, all in a bilingual Spanish–English edition included on the multimedia CD.

The manuscript was rediscovered in Tobarra in September 2009, in the private collection of the heirs of the Aragonese composer and conductor Pedro Gil Lerín. It was copied roughly between 1860 and 1885 and contains 83 works for guitar and one song for voice and guitar, 59 of them unpublished. These compositions were written between 1820 and 1877.

The works of the Tobarra master Robustiano Hernández are catalogued in this study, and the composer can be counted among the “intermediate generations” or “lost generation” — crucial to understanding the link between the world of Sor and Aguado in the early years of the century and that of Tárrega and his pupils Llobet, Fortea and Pujol well into the 20th century.

The pedagogical material found in the Tobarra Collection sheds light on the practice of learning the guitar during the period of its copying, a time when no method books for this purpose are known to have been published in Spain.

The three newly found pieces by Hernández are among the 59 unpublished works in the Tobarra collection, thereby enriching the guitar repertoire of a period that has been rediscovered in recent years.

The collection contains unpublished works of great expressive and virtuosic value, some by composers as prominent as V. Bellini, G. Donizetti and J. Strauss, alongside others that, being copies of sources known from printed editions, shed light on doubts or errors found in those.