Fandango “Santiago de Murcia“

Santiago de Murcia (1673 - 1739) Codex Zaldivar No.4 Mexico Spanish composer Santiago de Murcia is considered the last great exponent of the Spanish five-course Baroque guitar, a transitory instrument between the lowly Renaissance guitar and the modern Classical guitar. De Murcia privately published a major collection and treatise on guitar playing in Madrid in 1714 entitled Resumen de Acompanar, and his work is known from three manuscript collections, among them Passacalles y Obras, located in the British Museum since 1880, and Codex Saldivar No. 4, named after Gabriel Saldivar, who discovered the manuscript in Mexico in 1943. Codex Saldivar No. 4 was not related to de Murcia until the 1980s, and at one time it was common to open biographies of de Murcia with the line “very little is known about him.“ Nevertheless, through new works discovered and the diligent research of musicologists Monica Hall and Craig Russell a coherent historic profile has begun to emerge of de Murci