To date, 20 of Bonfá’s songs have been officially published across two anthologies, one minor collection, and a graduate dissertation. These include:
There is also a mysterious entry in the GSP catalog for two volumes of Bonfá’s music for the “Great guitarists of Brazil series” by Geoff Stewart (GSP 69, 70). Sadly, this never seems to have seen the light of day.
Note: three of the songs in this collection- Batucada, Manha de carnaval, Samba de Orfeu- have in fact previously been commercially published, however the versions of these songs on which my transcriptions are based are different from the ones on which the previously published scores were based.
In addition to the published material, there are also a handful of fan-based transcriptions of Bonfá’s songs that numerous guitarists have made available on sites like youtube over the years, some available for free, and some for a fee. The most comprehensive appears to be William Dee’s youtube channel, where he has posted a number of arrangements of Bonfá songs, and videos of him playing them. These can be easily accessed online by a simple search. They were not however referenced as I was preparing my own. This site is meant to exist alongside the work that other Bonfá fans have put forward, as a means of promoting Bonfá's music, and increasing the available resources for guitarists looking to learn Bonfá's songs. Links to the work of some of these fellow transcribers can be found in the "Bibliography" section.
Bonfá seems to have conceived of the classical guitar repertory as being uniquely modern in its openness to including new forms and styles beyond its established literature : “The guitar’s repertory can exist independently of that repertoire that has existed for several centuries” (Hodel, p. 22). This “new repertory” on which he was working on was one that according to him fit somewhere between “classical" and “popular” music. (ibid, p. 22). The songs which are on his 1972 album Introspection are perhaps those that one might consider as being most likely to find a place in the repertory, as they are more impressionistic and classical in character, with some having an unmistakeable classical feel - Missal (Estudo), for instance, with its syncopated, chugging pedal note ostinatos in the bass, and subtly unfurling, melancholic melody, evokes the solemn early Spanish music written for the vihuela, as well as Rain, with its highly idiomatic writing that is almost Leo Brouwer-like in its use of chromaticism. Some of Bonfá’s earlier pieces too fit a similar stylistic mold, such as his prelude-like rendition of the Gentle Rain theme for the OST of the film, in which he gives the popular song a semi-classical treatment, making use of the guitar’s open strings to create expressive and haunting arpeggiated passages over various restatements of the main melodic theme, in some of his best idiomatic writing for the guitar. Other pieces, however, which are of a more popular-music character, could nonetheless be said to also exist in-between both musical styles, as they often combine the popular sound with the technical demands and overall intricacy of classical pieces. His arrangements of North American jazz standards (I’ll Remember April, Yesterdays, Night and Day, Tenderly) feature a complexly intricate choreography between hands, with the bass in the right hand thumb moving independently of the syncopated rhythms of the other fingers, requiring a fiendish level of nimbleness on the player’s part. The result of these efforts however is a dazzling and propulsive sound, making the guitar, to tweak the famous quote of Andrès Segovia, sound like a jazz ensemble viewed through the wrong end of binoculars*. Tenderly, in particular, is Bonfá at his most lyrical and affecting; a masterful adaptation of the song to the solo guitar, covering, through the use of different techniques, a wide range of colors and timbres that the instrument is uniquely able to produce.And while some of his more abstract pieces, such as “Murder” from “Solo in Rio”, which the album liner notes refer to as an "improvisation" - and in which one can almost hear a style similar to the pensive, exploratory improvisations with which Roland Dyens would often open his recitals (Dyens being another artist whose music sometimes blended genres and styles, and successfully expanded the boundaries of the guitar repertory with his unique, contemporary sound) - are perhaps best considered not as fully fledged pieces, they are nonetheless not without interest, and can instead be viewed as as a sort of musical object containing brief musical moments that can seem revelatory (Weller, 14) - such as the brief melodic passage that follows the darkly dissonant chords early in the piece, or the glowing, beautiful sequence of artificial harmonics near the end - as well as offer a glimpse into Bonfá’s musical imagination and his exploration of the expressive potential of the instrument. At any rate, perhaps where Bonfá’s pieces belong in the repertory is perhaps a question that will be left to audiences and performers to decide over time.
There is the question of how “straight” (that is, with regard to the score) these pieces ought to be played. For one, many of these songs were recorded multiple times, and there are often discrepancies between recordings; some minor, such as slight rhythmic variations*, and some greater, such as entire reworkings of a song. Listening to these various recordings, one can infer that Bonfá rarely played any of his songs the same way twice (Weller, p. 13). While no doubt an indication of his restless musical imagination, it poses a problem as to the definitiveness of any version. The slight rhythmic variations therefore would suggest a more improvisatory mindset in their performance, as opposed to the typical relation between performer and score in classical music, where the score is to be adhered to as closely as possible, note for note. Finally, since there are no known manuscripts by Bonfá’s hand for these songs, it is hard to know which version, if any, could be considered more definitive than any other. In that respect, the degree of fidelity which one pays to the scores while playing is a choice ultimately left to the performer.