Dos sonatas novohispanas para guitarra del siglo XVIII: un caso de Musicología forense

Abstract

In an article published in 1939 the Mexican musicologist Miguel Bernal Jiménez revealed the existence of a series of fourteen sonatas, described as “for two guitars”, in the musical archive of Santa Rosa de Valladolid (now Morelia, in the state of Michoacán), nowadays lost. On the other hand, two sonatas for guitar from the same archive were played in a concert of music from New Spain, organized by the same Bernal Jiménez in 1939, by the guitarist Renán Cárdenas Pinelo, whose scores, in a modern copy, have survived. A study of these scores shows that the original was probably intended for guitar and continuo, in the same style as the sonatas that appear in the copy from Veracruz of the guitar treatise by Antonio Vargas y Guzmán, dating from 1776, modified in order that they could be played solo, and that the may belong to the series mentioned by Bernal Jiménez in 1952 whose whereabouts is at the present time unknown