Carolina Barenbaum is an Argentine musician, composer and performer on guitar, charango and ronroco. Her music draws together Latin American folk traditions, classical music and jazz, with a particular focus on timbral, harmonic and rhythmic exploration. She has performed at major festivals including Guitarras del Mundo and Charangos del Mundo, has released five studio albums — among them the solo recordings Inimaginario (2020), Simisonte (2021) and Tras el reflejo (2025) — and received the Composition Prize of the Americas Society in New York. Her recent guitar duo work Luca's Passeggiata was premiered by Dan Lippel and Mak Grgić.
For this Siccas Media recording, made in Buenos Aires in 2026, she plays her own solo composition Cero on a 2020 guitar by Andrés González González.
About 'Cero'
Cero ('Zero') is built on a texture of rapid arpeggios that alternates between energetic and introspective passages. The piece is strongly driven by rhythm: shifting metric accents and syncopations rooted in South American musical traditions keep the music constantly in motion, creating what the composer describes as a dynamic and expressive musical discourse.
Hearing a composer play her own music is always revealing. There is no interpretive layer between intention and sound — the rubato, the voicing of the arpeggio textures, the weight of each accent come directly from the person who imagined them. Pieces like Cero also show how vital the Latin American tradition of the composer-guitarist remains, a lineage that runs from Agustín Barrios through the great Brazilian and Argentine players of the twentieth century to the present day.
Composer-Guitarists and the Modern Repertoire
The classical guitar has always been unusual among concert instruments in how much of its repertoire comes from players themselves. New works like Cero keep that tradition alive and expand the instrument's language — in this case with the rhythmic vocabulary of Argentine folk music and the colouristic sensibility Barenbaum has developed across guitar, charango and ronroco.
If contemporary guitar music interests you, you will find many more premieres and rarities among our Siccas Media recordings, alongside the canon collected in our overview of famous classical guitar pieces.
Watch the Performance
Discover more artists shaping today's guitar world in our profiles of the great classical guitarists, and explore the instruments they play in our collection of classical guitars.
