The first of Joaquín Rodrigo's Tres piezas españolas might strike the unfamiliar listener as just darned wrong. The guitarist—necessarily a virtuoso of high sophistication—goes to sweep the six shiny strings with polished thumbnail and produces a massive, and massively crunchy, six-note chord. What makes the sensual dissonance a cognitive dissonance as well is the chord's ringing origin? It is a big major chord, its rhetoric the big major-chord rhetoric of pompous Spanish pageant music, processions, and showy dancers. In injecting his famous wrong notes into not one but three all-string chords, Rodrigo makes two declarations: first, that he remains faithfully entrenched in national traditions (the title is "Fandango," the motives unmistakably Spanish in contour); and second, that he simultaneously remains Modernist in his perspective. Not perhaps a Schoenberg-modernist, but still donning the goggles of modernism, through which the confidence in the enduring reality of the old and everyday begins to dissolve or mutate, and in which traditional languages, for instance, break and reveal cracks or transform upon reflection into abstractions and absolute designs. From this perspective, Rodrigo is perhaps the mid-twentieth century's arch-modernist of the guitar. All of Rodrigo's creations for the instrument incorporate the archetypes of the Spanish guitar tradition in order to distort or re-conceive them. This preservation of tradition may be conservative, but plenty of modernists were utterly dedicated to maintaining the traditions they re-worked, under critique. One hears the inflections of this kind of critique in all three of Rodrigo's Piezas españolas. The outer movements, the aforementioned "Fandango" and the concluding "Zapateado," employ Spanish dance models with confident openness; but they also play with the expected gestures and harmonies so as to shift their guise from native to new soil. In this, they develop an effect brought to culmination in Rodrigo's guitar masterpiece from 1962, Invocation and Dance. The massive middle movement follows a common trope in artistic modernism, whereby a material of folkoric origin (in this case, Spanish elegy) is housed within a foreign, unfolkloric frame (in this case, the Baroque passacaglia). Here, a wrong-note harmony unfolds an expressive countenance whose gravity clearly derives from Bach's own ground-bass works. There is a strange, magical tension between folk gestures like the mid-movement eruption of flamenco-inspired rasgeado chords and the abstract, learned seriousness of the formal genre. But the wrong notes and distorting forms are perhaps not modernist in derivation; their skewed perspectives and crossed eyes look further back. Milder in estrangement effects than Picasso, Rodrigo seems to share with his roughly contemporary compatriot the Spanish awareness of rifts between pride and folly, stentorian majesty and the subversion of the jester. The location of these rifts, and of the poignant goofiness underlying the most serious postures, has been Iberian by right since Don Quixote chased windmills, dreamt of Dulcinea, and cluelessly wandered into the pages of his own book.

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