Creativity Quote by Andres Segovia

Segovia frames his origin story like a rescue mission: the guitar wasn’t merely overlooked, it was trapped in a “vicious circle” of mutual neglect. That phrase is doing heavy lifting. It’s not romantic suffering; it’s a diagnosis of a cultural market failure. Composers don’t invest prestige and labor in an instrument that lacks star interpreters, and performers can’t become stars without new, serious repertoire. Segovia’s brilliance is in presenting that stalemate as both injustice and opportunity - a system ready to be hacked by one sufficiently ambitious musician.

The subtext is self-mythmaking, but the useful kind. He positions himself not just as a virtuoso but as a catalyst who changes the incentive structure. He didn’t simply play; he created demand. Commissioning, transcribing, championing new works - these weren’t side projects, they were strategy. In his telling, virtuosity becomes cultural infrastructure: build the performer, and you conjure the composer.

Context matters: early 20th-century concert life still ran on hierarchical notions of “serious” instruments, with the piano and violin as gatekeepers of legitimacy. The guitar, associated with folk traditions and salon entertainment, had to argue for its seat in the recital hall. Segovia’s line flatters composers while quietly challenging them: if you ignored the guitar, it wasn’t because it lacked expressive range, it’s because no one had made it impossible to ignore yet.