It took considerable time for the guitar to make its mark and establish itself in contemporary music. Yet the piece that marked its entry into the 20th century was a remarkably modern: Manuel De Falla’s Tombeau, dedicated to Claude Debussy in 1922. The instrument possessed all the attributes necessary to be considered ‘modern’: a small but captivating chamber music sonority, a prestigious lineage (tracing back to its then partially forgotten noble ancestor, the lute), and a technique still evolving and ready to be explored. However, despite Schönberg’s use of the guitar as early as 1924 in his Serenade, mainly owing to Andrés Segovia – the main architect of the instrument’s renaissance in the 20th century – the repertoire remained linguistically linked to that debut moment until the 1970s: modern, but no longer contemporary. It was through the efforts of Leo Brouwer (1939), a talented Cuban guitarist and composer, alongside a handful of other performers – including Siegfried Behrend (1933–1990) and Angelo Gilardino (1941–2022) – that the first compositions for guitar, incorporating elements that composers had been employing for decades, such as aleatorism, serialism, free atonality, and extreme timbral experimentation, reached a wider audience. When contemporary composers finally embraced the instrument, they did so with conviction, developing its full potential in the knowledge that it possesses the versatility necessary for the languages of our time.