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Francisco Mignone became a composer in a moment of inflection in Brazilian culture: São Paulo, the city in which he was born in raised – no longer a mere commercial outpost – was rapidly expanding to become the financial and industrial center of the country. A city in which a few neighborhoods quickly became, due to widespread immigration, something like an extension of Italy, Mignone grew up immersed in what can be described as a musical battle between Italian canzonettas, country music, and urban popular idioms with heavy African influence, such as the batuques and maxixes. This period was also the age in which aesthetic debates, driven above all by Mario de Andrade, sought to “conform the human production of the country with national reality,” a search for national character in Brazilian classical music that had the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 as its shining moment. In this context, Villa-Lobos worked relatively independently while the youngsters Mignone and Camargo Guarnieri were actively mentored by Andrade. With a robust musical background, Mignone felt comfortable absorbing various influences and mirroring them in music. In the short seasons in which he lived in Europe, he incorporated traces of Italian, Spanish, French, and Russian music, purposefully distancing himself from a German “philosophical” idiom less appropriate for the social debates that raged in his homeland. His music, thus, became more or less attached to folklore with the passing decades, responding to the ascension and fall of the various periods of nationalistic authoritarianism that characterize the global landscape of the 20th century. (His work in the 1960s even included a predominantly atonal phase). In a self-deprecating quip, he admits that his music is the fruit of influences that he finds impossible to reconcile and that, from the heights of his technical talent, he could choose how to compose without ever signing onto a specific aesthetic agenda. As with Prokofiev or Kurt Weill, Mignone’s music was read in parallel to the historical and political forces that animate the 20th century. One hundred years later, his music can, at last, be listened for what it was, and not for its relationship to avant-garde experimentalism or conformity, that is, for its connections to the various aesthetic movements then in vogue. This is, indeed, what unfolds in the 12 Studies for Guitar composed in 1970, a moment in which Mignone reanimates his nationalistic tendencies from the 1920s, alienating many of his younger colleagues. Today, the fluency with which he transitions between nostalgic inspiration, naïve and/or sentimental writing, and a precise control of the structural unraveling of the composition make these works something of a reinvention of the very genre of the guitar étude, a modernist response to Liszt’s transcendental study.