Biblioteca de la Guitarra y Cuerda Pulsada

In recent years, guitarists—as well as the wider music world—have embraced the novel medium of the guitar quartet. At the time of this writing, an Internet search of the phrase "guitar quartet" yields in excess of 2500 "hits," dramatically illustrating the genre’s widespread popularity. Many of these are the World Wide Web home pages of professional quartets, amateur groups, and school ensembles actively promoting their concerts, repertory, and in many cases, their recordings. Now, after the turn of the century, a hundred-year retrospective of the genre would be in order, and the following overview will focus on the activities, personnel, and repertory of perhaps the first professional guitar quartet. This serves as a pretext for an introduction to the life and music of Heinrich Albert (1870-1950), an important German virtuoso guitarist of the early twentieth...