Roberto Gerhard’s Cantares : Seven Songs of Absence … and a Presence

Far from being a minor work, the collection of popular melodies Cantares, composed by Roberto Gerhard between 1956 and 1957, constitutes an interesting case study that raises important questions regarding the composer’s roots, his compositional style, his relationship with, and integration into, English musical culture, and the development of the music of his time. Despite their conventional appearance, these pieces constitute a milestone in the guitar repertoire of the twentieth century, which had predominantly ignored the instrument’s usual accompaniment function focusing rather on the highly virtuosic, as embodied by Andrés Segovia. This chapter aims to investigate the composition of Cantares as an example of sympoietic process that explains the creation of a work of distinctly Spanish character within the core of support for British—and especially avant-garde—music.