La Guitarra

Michael Winikoff’s La Guitarra is a secular work for SATB choir, setting Spanish lyrics that paint a vivid, emotional scene. The music likely mirrors the text’s imagery of a weeping guitar, its lament broken only by the dawn. The poet describes the guitar’s sorrow as incessant, like water or wind on snow, crying for distant things – a hot southern sand, a white camellia, a fruitless arrow, a day without a morrow, or a bird dead on a branch. The piece concludes with a direct address to the guitar, calling it a heart wounded by five swords, a potent metaphor for its deep and inexpressible pain.