Jorge Gómez Crespo: Norteña – Jorge Caballero, guitar

Описание: Although the guitar was regarded in Argentina as part of their national patrimony and captured the inspiration of artists, authors and musicians in academic circles from at least the mid 1850s, its induction into those same cultural spheres only arrived decades later, thanks to the endeavours of the first guitarists born there at the beginning of the 20th century.

Jorge Gómez Crespo (1900 – 1971) is listed among the pioneers of the classical guitar in Argentina. A native of Buenos Aires, he studied guitar with Antonio Sinopoli and composition with Torcuato Rodríguez Castro. By some accounts, however, his studies were brief, finding himself drawn to the folkloric roots of Argentinian music, and using them as a source from which his interpretive and compositional imagination would spur. An introvert by nature, Gómez Crespo’s activities as a performer consisted mostly of appearances on radio while keeping a low profile in public performance. In 1938, he created the guitar studies program at the Manuel de Falla Municipal Conservatory in Buenos Aires; a position he held for many years.

While the works he composed during his first period (roughly from 1925 until 1937) exhibit his academic training, it is after 1938 that Gómez Crespo would employ the gestures of his definitive musical language through the subtle stylization of Argentinian folklore. Norteña, written in 1940, is his first published work, and doubtlessly his most famous, due to Andrés Segovia adopting it into his repertoire in 1942. Its title, ‘Norteña’ (‘northern’ in English) is indebted to the music from the Argentine Northwest, a region of rich diversity that borders Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay. The far away and longing character of the opening Vidala or Vidalita (a kind of musical piece often accompanied with a caja or tambor in 3/4 anacrusa meter) leads to a simple melodic idea set in choral form that repeats continuously with subtle variations. After a reference in minor mode to Julián Aguirre’s Triste No. 4, the piece is brought to a climax that leads to a repeat of the introduction. The sense of longing and solitude brought by the piece is present up to its final harmonic cadence, where 2 harp-like chords bring Norteña to its distant conclusion.

Sources:
Ricardo Jorge Jeckel, María Luisa Anido, Jorge Gómez Crespo y Antonio Luna: La construcción de un imaginario del noroeste argentino en la guitarra académica de mediados del siglo XX, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Facultad de Artes y Diseño, Buenos Aires, May 2010, https://www.academia.edu/44825459/Jec...

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