Wedding Music

Well, I have an upcoming wedding with some musical requests - music that I don't know, of course - so, I've been learning some tunes that are not strictly speaking on my itinerary, but I'm sure they will come in handy later on anyway.

One "bleg" I'd like to ask for: One of the pieces requested is the Pachelbel Canon in D. I found a guitar arrangement of it on the web that I was able to download for free - and it seems to be pretty good - but if any of you think you know of an "ultimate" guitar arrangement of it, I'd be interested in aquiring it.

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For a really small town Alpine gets some amazing musical groups touring through, and there are an awesome group of local musicians out here. We have a guy who used to own the most prestigious guitar shop in Dallas where Stevie Ray Vaughn bought most of his axes, a guitar builder formerly of Austin who's electrics start at about $3K (And who was in the Austin Lounge Lizards), as well as some former rock and roll/MTV jock who now plays "classical" guitar (That would be me). Then, there is the Railroad Blues, which is a great venue.

Well, one of us talked to another of us who passed word to an old friend and - OK, I didn't actually have anything to do with it - but anyway, Eric Johnson agreed to come down from Austin and do a gig at The Blues! Since San Antonio is my home town, I've been a fan of Eric's since the early eighties; long before the rest of the world knew who he was. I even play one of his pieces, The Desert Song in my set. Soooo...



I got a ticket laying among some of the other stuff I've been distracted with.

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Yup... It's official: Spring Fever.

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Blogging Doldrums

I'm progressing nicely with learning my new compositions on the guitar, but since the Fugue is in three voices - and it has a lot of technical requirements that are new for me as a result - it's pretty slow going. I figure the Fugue will take about three to six months to get performable, but then the Ricercare ought to be easier to learn since it will have very similar technical demands. The Extempore could be a PITA again, as it uses another novel (for me) set of techniques. Writing pure music for guitar is not easy, but it is rewarding. I've been through this process before with other compositions I've written in the past, so I know what to expect: It's no fun and it takes a lot of time, but nothing is easy that is worth doing.

Unfortunately, none of this provides much interesting material for blogging.

The G-Axis Study in E-flat Major is now re-memorized, and I'm deciding on the next new miniature to learn: I'm leaning toward one of the Lineal Studies since that is a new class of technical study for me, and I've noticed some interesting things about them which will allow for them to be performed in very, very "non-guitaristic" keys: This will further my goal of having at least one piece in all twenty-four keys in the Irreducible Essence series. That'll probably be the subject of the next post.

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HA!



Thanks to Bart, I finally got a hit from Alaska! Now my little blog is five-by-five and corner-to-corner world wide, baby. LOL!

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NO SURPRISE HERE: I'm a 100% perfectly pure Libertarian.



Take the world's smallest political quiz here.

It's funny: In my twenties I was a liberal-bordering-on-socialist; my thirties saw me becoming progressively more conservative, and then I realized that all forms of socialism are - in fact - social and spiritual poison, so now I'm a Libertarian. It's been a "long and strange trip", to borrow from The Grateful Dead.

If you read the writings of the founders of the US - Jefferson, Franklin, et al - they could only be classified as Libertarians today.

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I think I really just have a simple case of spring fever.

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Theoretical Past Tense

I had an interesting experience the other day: I dug out an old piece I wrote about ten years back to re-learn it (I haven't played it in probably about six years), and I was so surprised by the musical content in it that I had to analyze it to figure out what on earth I was thinking when I wrote it. Turns out it's a pretty nifty little idea this tiny miniature is built around.

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This is the very last of the Eighteen Axial Studies that I wrote, and it's unique in a couple of ways compared to the rest of them. This is a free-vioced piece that ranges from two to four parts (Three to five if you count the G-Axis as a voice, which I do not do), and all of the others are strictly two voices by my reconning. There are also only two sections to this study, while the rest have three sections.

But, the cool thing about this little ditty is the theoretical device that I used: I introduced secondary dominants in the A section, developed them into so-called Italian Augmented Sixths in the B section, and topped it all off with a doubly-augmented fourth augmented sixth sonority at the climax.

Since I have a jazz harmony background, I'm always thinking of the sonorities created by neighboring tones and whatnot, and I have included those in the analysis in parentheses. As you can see, the simple parallel thirds device of the first line creates some nice passing and neighboring sonorities, some of which are very dissonant and colorful.

In the second part of the phrase I introduced a simple series of secondary dominant sevenths, and this phrase gives me the impression that it has existed forever, and I just uncovered it. It really is quite nice in a simple but elegant kind of way.

At measure ten the B section begins, and as you can see I started using a series of secondary so-called Italian Sixth sonorities, which I have given functional analyses as the altered dominants that they actually are.




The ascending series of simple augmented sixths is capped off with a doubly-augmented fourth augmented sixth over a tonic pedal point in measure seventeen. I'm never exactly sure how to analyze this chord functionally because it usually proceeds to a second inversion tonic chord - which is usually just functioning as a suspended dominant sonority - so it really has a secondary dominant function. In this case, however, it gives the impression of being more akin to the primary dominant chord because of the tonic pedal in the bass. It's a super-cool effect in any case.

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The reason I have not played this piece in so many years is because that last lick is very high up on the guitar's fretboard, and on a standard non-cutaway acoustic classical guitar it's very difficult to execute accurately. On the cutaway Godins, however, it's not too bad.

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I managed to work another secondary dominant into measure nineteen, and since the A-natural is an open string, the dramatically wide voice separation is actually a cinch to play. I used a fully diminished seventh on the second degree - spelled enharmonically - to split the voices off smoothly from two back to three again, and this phrase too has a kind of universal inevitability to it, despite the deep theoretical device the section is built around. I just love it when I discover that pieces I wrote years back have some cool and interesting features to them.




What is it with the high-heel shoe fetish, anyway? I've never understood that. It just seems comical to have a woman in a bathing suit on a beach wearing heels, doesn't it?

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Slow Going

I'm kind of burried up to my eyeballs with learning the fugue I'm working on. It's sort of a watershed/seminal piece for me as it's the first of the pure music/non-idiomatic pieces that I've written for the guitar that I've decided to learn how to play. There have been remarkably few problems associated with the process, and I'm happy with how things are going. Unfortunately, there isn't much to blog about.

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One thing I do think is cool is that even with a teeny-tiny, itty-bitty blog like mine, people from all over the planet can read it.



If I only had a reader in Alaska, I'd be completely worldwide from corner to corner. I'm sorry, but I think that's cool as hell: A composer/guitarist in Alpine, Texas - in a county six times larger than the State of Rhode Island with a population of only 10K (i.e. A little guy in the middle of absolutely nowhere) - can be "discovered" by readers all over Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South America... and America. Well, it's neato, isn't it?

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So, what's up with Africa? I don't think I've ever gotten a hit from Africa other than Egypt.

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Fingering and Articulation III

Playing on the Godin-Reynolds eleven-string is coming along better than expected: I can comfortably play through six of the twelve suites in my set now, and most of the rest are coming along well enough that I may try to play an entire gig on it soon. I've been doing all of the fingerings for this fugue on it, and there's nothing like constant piddling with an axe to get one comfortable on it.

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The PDF score and MP3 track for this fugue are now on my Downloads Page with the fingerings and articulations completed.

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My philosophy with respect to fingering and position indicatiors in music this complex is to just include all of them in the score. I reached this standpoint after many years of agonizing over how much was too much and how little was not enough: If you put it all in the score, you don't have to worry about those decisions. Not only that, but when learning a piece you can start at any point and know exactly where you are (That's a weird sounding sentence, but you know what I mean). Obviously, using a two-stave system for the music makes this quite a bit easier to pull off without the result getting messy.

As far as position indicators are concerned, I use them to indicate not only which fret the index finger is on, but also which fret the index finger is over if it is not actually deployed: Reading music on the guitar is difficult enough as it is, so every little hint helps. The layout logic is just a practical matter: Whatever falls most immediately within the line of sight and doesn't look cluttered.

All of these pages are pretty much in the bag, but as I get the piece up to speed, there will undoubtedly be numerous minor changes to the details.




Arranging the left hand fingerings to allow for the ties in the suspension/resolution chains required a few more position changes than would have otherwise been required, but as you can see they actually worked out very smoothly with the 4-3 and 11-10 chains on this page.




Concerning the musical changes I was contemplating in the previous post, I ended up splitting the difference: The F-sharp was a good addition to measure thirty-five, but measures thirty-nine and forty-three - where there are third relationships versus sixth relationships - did not really need any changes. On the other hand, adding the B-natural to the interior voice of measure forty-seven - where there are sixths again - is a definite improvement leading into the sixteenths that go to the final episode. Neither the changes in measure thirty-five nor those in measure forty-seven ended up causing any significant complications vis-a-vis the fingerings. In fact, the changes were quite simple to make.




I made some minor changes to the right hand part during the final episode, and it seems to flow quite a bit better now. The position indicators here really help with the reading, that's for sure.

The fingerings in measure fifty-nine and sixty cause abrupt position changes, but it's really not a problem at this tempo. There was a similar abrupt shift back in measure thirty-nine which isn't really all that bad either.

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I've never had any luck with flowers. In fact, a couple of comic-tragedies have attended me getting the idea into my head that giving flowers would be a good idea. Some guys swear by them though. If you get a reaction like this, I could see why.

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Fingering and Articulation II

A lot of little errors seem to occur during this process, which are no doubt the result of the speed at which I try to get the task accomplished, and the "situation" I find myself in while performing it: I'm sitting in front of the computer on a performance chair, left foot on a footstool, and I have a guitar in my lap. As I work out a measure or so, I reach forward, grab the mouse, and put the symbols in the score. As a result of this, I have been catching a lot of little sh... er, stuff as I re-read my way through the score.

Since adding the right and left hand fingerings is just the first stage of this process - there are also position and string indicators to consider (Though this cute little fugue will probably not require any string indications) - I'm just going to add the second two pages today. There are a couple of minor changes to the first pages, but nothing significant enough to re-post them yet.


Another aspect of this process to consider is that the sheer number of possible solutions in some of the situations - especially with respect to right hand options - means that revising details of the fingerings really continues right up until the piece is ready for performance, and sometimes even beyond that point.

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Happily, I was able to add the ties back in for the 2-3 and 7-6 suspension chains, just as I did for the 4-3's. This again resulted in less than the most immediately idiomatic fingering solutions, but the musical result is definitely worth the effort. Also in keeping with the overall scheme of pattern making with the articulations I again eliminated the ties in the concluding measures of the thematic phrases - measures thirty-five, thirty-nine, forty-three, and forty-seven on this page.

However, this has lead me to contemplate making an actual musical change to the piece: Since the removed tie is in the lead voice in measure thirty-five, the resulting re-attack of the open E string is now less than fully satisfying. It's as if the phrase now wants an F-sharp on the fourth sixteenth note of the measure, and since the upper two voices are a sixth apart, this would work out just fine from a musical point of view. Not only that, but at the the corresponding points in measures thirty-nine, forty-three, and forty-seven there are thirds or sixths in the same positions, so I could make a thematic element out of the change. Since this significantly adds to the fingering complexity, I'll have to think about it, but I am leaning toward making this change at this point.




For the non-contrapuntal episode which starts the final page (And which is a harmonized version of the subject in augmentation), I had two different goals: First, I needed to get from the upper reaches of the guitar's fretboard back down to open position, and second I wanted to achieve a keyboard-like effect akin to pedal and release on the piano to allow the harmonies to ring. So, I used a simple series of chord forms that just naturally descend back down the neck (This will be more obvious when I add the position indicators). As for the right hand fingerings here, I have used my "c" finger since before I played in the classic style, so this is just the natural way that I execute passages like this. I doubt any other classical player would - or could - use these right hand parts. My philosophy here is that I compose these pieces for myself, so they are going to reflect how I play them, and not how I think a classical guitarist would want to see them (The twin staves are likewise just the way I prefer to see and work with the music).

Finally, I was able to add the ties back into the final suspension chain in the concluding stretto section, and because of all of the open strings involved, this was actually the easiest passage to do that with.

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Wonder how many errors I'll uncover when I go back through this again tomorrow.




I love this Armstrong: The first time I saw it I did a double-take because I thought it was a nude. I'm sure that must have been his intent. Clever use of color and texture.

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Fingering and Articulation

The pinnacle of all polyphonic solo instruments is the organ: There is just no competing with two or more manuals and a bank of foot pedals blasted through hundreds of pipes in an acoustically gargantuan listening space. Infinite sustain and no breathing related phrasing limitations are also major plusses. Next to the organ is the harpsichord, since the piano has an overly strident timbre and a regrettably abrupt attack, neither of which are friendly to contrapuntal music (In fact, I've heard an arguement put forward which actually blames the piano for the decline of polyphony).

I absolutely love solo organ and harpsichord music from the Baroque through the Romantic eras (If you have never heard Franz Liszt's late solo organ music, you have no idea how significant of a composer he really was), and so I hold those idioms forth as my ideals... for the guitar.

As with solo music for any instrument, much of the solo guitar repertoire has been written by virtuoso performers. The obvious problem with this is that virtuosic technique creates it's own musical demands, and while the results may be exciting and idiomatic, they are often lacking in musical content or gravitas. That is especially true for the guitar repetoire: There have been no musicians of the caliber of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Brahms who have written for it.

Obviously, if you are a guitarist/composer this can be viewed as an opportunity: But without quality models to study and learn from, where do you start? Well, I went 'round and 'round with this issue, and gravitated initially to the most obvious models, which were Bach's lute suite pieces. Despite all of the interviening centuries these have never been bettered, and yet they are not 100% idiomatic for the guitar because 1) They are lute pieces, and 2) Bach actually wrote them on a keyboard instrument which immitated the lute's sound (Yes, it has a name. No, I don't remember what it is). There is only one Sarabande where this transcribes into an impossible reach for the guitar (That I am aware of) - and it may be perfectly fine on the lute, I'm not sure - so that is actually better than the results which 99% of non-fretboard playing composers achieve. The quality of the music is, of course, superb; even in the smallest of the pieces.

Bach's examples got me off and running, but I wanted to find a different approach that would allow for the most pure musical conception possible (As close to the organ and harpsichord idioms as the guitar could get), and yet which would also allow the resulting music to be reasonably idiomatic (Playable but not necessarily idiomatic to the guitar in the strictest sense of the word).

What I came up with is a two-part process that basically involves composing a sort of an urtext first (A pure music version that is theoretically possible to play on the guitar) which doesn't make any more concessions to the idiom than absolutely required. Then, as I learn to play the piece, I allow the guitar to give some input as to the details of the articulations.

This is the simplest way I could come up with to describe what I'm doing here: Just keep in mind that over thirty years of familiarity with the guitar is involved in just creating the urtext version. And, even with all of that time in on the guitar, I still have the occasional D'OH! moment when I write something that is actually physically impossible to execute. It is that second time through when I add the fingerings and articulation details that I "catch" these things.

It would be incorrect to assume that I am diluting the original version in any way when I add the fingerings and articulation details, because exactly the opposite is true: The piece ends up being a better guitar piece and a better piece overall by having these character details added to it.

I am half way through fingering/articulating/learning this piece, and so I'm far enough along that I've gotten some pleasant surprises.




The first articulation details I changed were in the interior voices in measures twelve and fifteen: By re-attacking the A's in those measures a better effect was achieved: Both musically and idiomatically. That these were the only details which required changing in the exposition and first episode is pretty darned good: This means I'm getting proficient at fingering and articulating three part counterpoint in my head while I write, which I've been working on for years.




In what turned out to be a very pleasant surprise, I was able to add the ties back into the suspension chains on this page (Not sure about the 2-3/7-6 chains yet, but the 4-3's work out fine. When I was just piddling around with this, trying to use the longest string lengths/lowest fret positions for the notes made this impossible, so I dropped them. By simply using some shorter string lengths/higher fret positions I was able to get them back. These syncopations are excellent examples of effects that are not immediately idiomatic to the guitar, but when you pull them off the musical result is excellent.

I again re-articulated the attacks of the interior voices in measures twenty-three, twenty-seven, and thirty-one: When I make changes in articulation, I make sure the resulting alterations create patterns which are just as logical as the musical architecture is. When the music is purely conceived and logically laid out from the beginning, this isn't much additional trouble.

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I'm not sure how scintillating a topic fingering and articulation logic is, but I've decided to simply blog on what I'm involved with. This approach is obviously also applicable to creating transcriptions for the guitar.

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