The Twelve Etudes of Heitor Villa-Lobos: Didactic purpose within concert repertoire

Abstract

The subject of this document is the embedded didactic purpose of concert pieces for the guitar written by Heitor Villa-Lobos that have been titled etude. The Twelve Etudes of Heitor Villa-Lobos are unique examples of virtuoso concert pieces that also serve as studies of numerous aspects of guitar technique; I will attempt to demonstrate how these didactic elements are contained within these works and how they can be used to improve technique by performing a brief pedagogical analysis of each piece. This document will be limited to six of the Twelve Etudes for Guitar written in 1929 and first published in 1953. Each etude will be analyzed from a pedagogical perspective. A pedagogical analysis is the analysis of a piece to extract any didactic purpose the composer clearly had implied from the music; that is, not creating new exercises out of patterns or certain technical difficulties, but using the piece only in its original form. The existing literature concerning the Twelve Etudes for Guitar by Heitor Villa-Lobos has been limited to theoretical analysis and historical matters, with the exception of the work by Abel Carlevaro. The use of these pieces lies primarily in concert performance because of the compositional quality and technical difficulty. Also, any didactic intention of most of the etudes is not easily seen on the surface as with many other collections of works titled etudes. Therefore, the need for a study such as this is evidenced primarily in this lack of attention to the purely pedagogical significance of these etudes.