But pardon my bemusement.

I've been out on an archaeological dig, so to speak, mining the earth for artifacts of a
forgotten civilization. And, guided by an expert's steady hand, I've broken into a sealed vault and found buried
treasure... All right. Let's test an axiom ourselves. What if there exists an archive of forgotten Spanish guitar music,
buried fifty years or more, that for sheer quality eclipsed virtually everything in the field that we did know? What if-let me try to state this diplomatically--the Spanish guitar music not written for, and performed by, Andrs Segovia
were to turn out to be immeasurably finer than the stuff he did commission and play? Major names immediately
come to mind. We are just now, thanks to the late Leif Christensen, rediscovering Miguel Llobet, composer and
arranger. We have yet to fully explore the many wonderful compositions of Emilio Pujol. There are others. And then
there's the "Generation of 1927"... Generation of who? Yes, I know. You've never heard of them. Neither had I until
a little while back. But I've been going through some scores, listening to unreleased tapes, and reading a bit of
modern Spanish history--particularly that of the short-lived Spanish Republic (1931-1936) and the brutally
sanguinary Civil War (1936-1939) that put paid to it once and for all. Thus, looking over the shoulders of the
Spanish intellectuals whose careers were gutted by the War, I began to develop a totally different view of 20th
century Spanish music than the one I'd been used to. Spain, like Ireland, is a nation of vaticides. James Joyce,
speaking of Irish art, called Ireland "an old sow that eats its own farrow," but he might just as well have been
speaking of Spain. The cyclic seizures which have devastated Spain every so often over the centuries have
repeatedly confronted its best n-dnds, its best artists and thinkers, with unpleasant choices: shut up, get out, or die.
So it was with Spain's Moors and Jews, the nation's intellectual elite, in 1492. So it was with Fernando Sor's
generation, swept up in the tide of the Peninsular War. And so it was with the young poets, artists and musicians
who came up in the wake of the great older generation which produced Manuel de Falla, Joaquin Turina, Rafael
Alberti, Jos Ortega y Gasset, Juan Ramn Jimenez, Juan Gris, and Pablo Ruiz Picasso. When the Spanish Civil
War at last broke out, polarizing the country and setting brother against brother, the first casualties included a nest of
young artists and thinkers who figured among the friends and associates of the retiring Spanish intellectual who
reigned as high priest of the classical guitar in Madrid during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Regino Sainz de la
Maza. These friends included the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who dedicated two poems to him; the far-seeing and
influential critic Adolfo Salazar, who, upon leaving Spain, left his magnificent music library in Sainz de la Maza's
care; the rising composers Julian Bautista, Salvador Bacarisse, Gustavo Pittaluga, Rodolfo Halffter, Rosita Garcia
Ascot, Fernando Remacha, and other members of the so-called "Group of Madrid." Of these the most spectacularly
gifted and promising was Antonio Jos (Martinez Palacios; he never used his family names), of whom Ravel said,
"He will become the Spanish composer of our century." Spain and the world of music expected much from these
people, and all of the composers among them wrote guitar music for Sainz de la Maza to play and publish.