A bloviated blog (S1/E7)

If E6 had been given a subtitle, it would have been something like Glorious Inconsistencies. This one, more like Into the Weeds! I have decided to try illustrating my earlier text with musical examples. I have overcome some hesitation with regard to this matter. I am an old-school composer, and do not own DAW equipment, even though I could comfortably afford it. (What I couldn’t afford would be the bottomless rabbit hole it would involve in mastering some of those dauntingly arcane modern editing techniques!) I do not play guitar and do not, as it happens, have three players standing by to record the fragments that I have in mind!

All I do have is the capacity of my music processor (Finale) to play back the already notated music. This is enormously useful to me in two ways: as a proofreading tool, and in that it enables me to generate sample mp3 files to share with prospective performers. (My op. 80 is a set of ten studies for solo guitar. One of them involves 3 against 4 in a beat, and it was catching one performer up short. All she had to do was hear the audio file I had made and she was able to execute it flawlessly. The computer on which she played back my sample did the… computing for her!)

So the quality of the sound is not as sophisticated as we are accustomed to hearing even in synthetic recordings these days. Given that as caveat, here goes. (I will limit myself today to illustrating the text in E4, which you might want to review before going on. That is to say, the theme and first three variations.)

Here is the initial theme, as played by Guitar 2. I mentioned that it consists of four two-bar phrases, all in the same rhythm.

I can go further into the weeds. If A is the first phrase, and B is the second, the third could be called B-prime (B'), in that it is a variant on B. It begins the same, although an octave lower, but ends differently. Then the fourth and last phrase could be called A'. It again begins the same as A, even within the same octave, but ends differently in an exuberant final clinch.

Here is A.

And here is B.

Followed by B', which begins an octave below the preceding.

Finally we have A'. Its ending dovetails with the beginning of the first variation.

Variation 1. The theme is played an octave higher by Guitar 1, accompanied homorhythmically by 3.

Variation 2. A waltz played finally by all three instruments. At the end it spills over into a transition to the parallel minor, the key of Variation 3.

Variation 3 is dominated by turns in the melodic Guitar 3. Let me define that for non-musicians. Four notes. The main note is preceded by the note just above it; then, the one just below it, followed by the main note itself. Guitar 1 is limited almost exclusively to gestures in imitation of these turns. In its final one, it provides a link to the highly contrasting ebullience of the hornpipe over drones that is Variation 4. To be continued.