Guitar Pieces

This piece is from my early days learning about music history and exploring music by Bach, Robert de Visée, and other Baroque composers.

Chamber music for solo instruments in the Baroque period often took the form of a suite of movements, each of which had features characteristic of a recognized dance form. This allowed for a pleasing variety of tempos and textures. This suite form was originally intended for people to dance to, but over time as composers brought more and more complexity to the individual pieces, the dancing became less frequent and the suites became played more often just for the pleasure of listening.

Sarabandes have often been my favorite movements in studying these suites. They are slow, and they often use minor keys or have sad affects even when their overall suite is mostly in a major key. The slow tempo provides a chance to really sit with the harmonies and the moments of dissonance. And it also makes them somewhat easier for players to realize, which can be a welcome respite from fast and complex counterpoint!

The second beat of each bar in a Sarabande is often stressed a little. In this Sarabande, I exaggerate that beat by repeating a deep, somber fifth on the lowest open strings. (The low E string is tuned down to a D.) All the other harmonic movements in the upper voice occur over the backdrop of this repeated fifth.

In my head, I imagined this like a tolling bell under a funeral dirge.

That constant drone provides a static harmonic anchor, such that every time the upper voices move through other chords (like the C minor, the E-major-to-A-minor cadences, and the very dissonant chords in the second half) you are forced to sit with a hanging feeling of both tension and inevitability. I like the effect, though it could come at the risk of being considered dull and repetitive.

I remember that the other imagery in my head while composing this was Roger Zelazny’s description of Oberon’s cortège in The Courts of Chaos:

Led by the pale trumpeters came a mass of horsemen mounted on white steeds, bearing banners, some of which I did not recognize, behind a man-thing who bore the Unicorn standard of Amber. These were followed by more musicians, some of them playing upon instruments of a sort I had never seen before…
A deep noise came to us then—slow, rhythmic, rolling beneath the notes of the trumpets and the sounds of the musicians—and I realized that the foot soldiers were singing…
An occasional roll of thunder passed by, but this could not drown it; nor did the winds which assailed the torches extinguish any so far as I could see. The movement had a hypnotic effect. It seemed that I had been watching the procession for countless days, years perhaps, listening to the tune I now recognized…
Then, as my eyes drifted back along those lines, another shape emerged from the glistening curtain. It was a cart draped all in black and drawn by a team of black horses. At each corner rose a staff which glowed with blue fire, and atop it rested what could only be a casket…

It’s all very psychedelic and Symphonie Fantastique.

Download

Here’s a transcription of the piece if you’re curious. I’d love to hear your thoughts!