Aaron Rabushka wrote: >The version of the Stravinsky/Segovia encounter that I heard involved >Stravinsky's telling Segovia that he wanted to write a guitar work for him >and Segovia's totally rejecting the offer since he didn't like Stravinsky's >work. As I understand things many guitarists now curse Segovia for that. If you look at Segovia's repertoire, it consisted mostly of traditional Spanish stuff and baroque transcriptions (the many pieces he commissioned are mostly along traditional Spanish lines, and the baroque transcriptions he did himself). He had a particularly elegant style of playing, and was very concerned with establishing the guitar as a "legitimate" classical instrument. There is another story that illustrates this. When he met Villa Lobos at a Paris party, VL grabbed a guitar and played some down and dirty Rio street music for him, so alarming Segovia that he fled the party, after asking VL to compose something for him. VL responded with the Etudes, of which Segovia as far as I know only ever played No. 1, which is in the style of Bach; he ignored the other, highly Brazilian-flavored ones. Thus, it is likely that he would not have wanted to play a Stravinsky work (unless it were closely tailored to his style of playing, which Stravinsky could certainly have done if he had wanted to, considering the great variety of compositional styles he adopted through his career). As to whether guitarists curse Segovia because Stravinsky didn't write anything for guitar, they might well have cursed even louder if he had done so, because it would probably have been ferociously difficult! In any case, it is fascinating to speculate about what kind of composition he would have turned out. Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]