Héctor Ayala (11 April 1914 – 12 March 1990) was an Argentine guitarist, composer, arranger, and teacher, born in Concordia, in the province of Entre Ríos. He spent most of his adult life in Buenos Aires, where he made his debut in 1936, alongside guitarist Roberto Grela, accompanying tango and folk singers. In the years that followed, Ayala joined the guitar ensembles known as the Escuadrones de Guitarra (“Guitar Squadrons”), led by Abel Fleury — large ensembles comprising anywhere from about twelve to thirty guitarists, which performed regularly on Argentine radio. From the 1950s onward, he was also active as a radio musician and performed as a member of the tango quartet of the legendary bandoneon player Aníbal Troilo.
Alongside his career as a performing musician, Ayala devoted considerable effort to teaching his instrument: in 1962 he co-founded the publishing house Editorial Aromo and authored a four-volume pedagogical method for classical guitar. His son, Héctor Ayala Jr., later made a name for himself as a member of the rock duo Vivencia, which in the 1970s became, among other things through the concept album Vida y vida de Sebastián and the successful Mi cuarto (1973), a classic of Argentine rock music of that decade.
The Guitar Works
Ayala composed exclusively for the guitar and created an extensive body of work characterized by a close fusion of classical guitar technique with the rhythms and forms of Latin American folk music. His works draw not only on Argentine dance and song forms such as the zamba, milonga, and vidala, but also engage with musical traditions from Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay — a deliberately pan-American orientation already reflected in work titles such as the Serie Americana, the Suite Sudamericana, the Suite Argentina, and the Cinco Piezas Sudamericanas.
Compositionally, Ayala’s music is marked by melodic directness, rhythmic vitality, and a pronounced idiomatic command of the instrument. Unlike more academically or concert-oriented composers of his generation, Ayala foregrounds clear, songlike melody, carried by the characteristic dance rhythms of the respective regional source material. His compositions have been performed and recorded by numerous distinguished concert guitarists, including Eduardo Falú, Jorge Morel, Manuel López Ramos, Irma Costanzo, Narciso Yepes, and Timothy Walker; his works also appear on notable albums such as David Russell’s Sonidos Latinos (2010) and Victor Villadangos’s Guitar Music of Argentina, Vol. 1.
Significance
As already touched upon in earlier essays on Carlos Guastavino and the composers featured on Naxos’s “Guitar Music of Argentina” series, Ayala belongs to that group of twentieth-century Argentine guitarist-composers who — much like Abel Fleury or Eduardo Falú — deliberately transferred their country’s folk musical tradition into the concert guitar repertoire. Ayala’s reputation as one of Argentina’s foremost “folklorically inspired” guitarist-composers has steadily grown in recent decades; his compositional legacy was made accessible to a wider international audience, among other things, through the collection Selected Works of Hector Ayala, edited by Rico Stover (Querico Publications, 1997). Ayala died in 1990 in Buenos Aires, leaving behind a body of work still regarded today as an important contribution to the fusion of Latin American folk music and classical guitar artistry.
His works are under copyright restrictions.