The Musical Rest as a Polysemous Sign in Guitar Works of Fernando Sor

Abstract

Through the study of numerous guitar works of the famous musician Fernando Sor (1778-1839), we have discovered that this artist, in addition to using the musical pause written with the usual purpose of indicate a temporal suspension of sound in a score, he has also used occasionally this symbol giving it an unconventional additional function: a change of left hand position. In this article we present this not obvious function that we called rest-signal, exemplified by some relevant musical fragments.