Concert Music for 4 guitars (2006)
Commissioned by Douglas Rice for the Tacoma Guitar Quartet
Premiere: May 2006, Seattle WA

Live recording, May 2006
Tacoma Guitar Quartet

Note

The classical guitar quartet is a wonderful medium, one with remarkable flexibility and capable of great expression. It allows for a lushness of harmony and variety of orchestration nearly unparalleled by any other instrumental quartet. Much of the literature for the genre, however, fails to utilize this great potential. In response to this, the quartet’s aims are threefold: first, to utilize fully the harmonic, contrapuntal, and timbral capabilities that make the guitar so different from other stringed instruments. Second, to explore a denser, more angular harmonic language than is predominant in the heavily triadic guitar repertoire. And, lastly, to treat form as an organizing framework, but not a rigid structure clearly demarcated by literal repeats.

The single movement quartet follows a broad arch form, beginning with richly layered, fortissimo arpeggios that quickly settle into a steadily rhythmic introduction. The first main idea, a nine-note row, is presented clearly by the first guitar before undergoing a series of transformations. A brief transition leads to the second main section, distinguished from the first chiefly by a shift from a row-based melodic idea to an octatonic one. The octatonic theme is alluded to before its first clear statement. Contrapuntal variations follow. The third section, the center of the arch, consists of slow, ethereal melodic treatments of the opening row, as though it were revisited in a dream. As the first two sections are recapitulated, in reverse order, the material is transformed and alluded to, but not repeated literally. The quartet ends with a slow chorale, a quiet coda answering the dense and rhythmic music that precedes it.

Concert Music is about the place where complexity meets expressivity; where harmony is particularly dense, active rhythms provide coherence. Conversely, singing melodic lines organize sections of free, fluid rhythm. The quartet is a response to the existing repertoire, for better and for worse. While it is, in many ways, a departure from tradition, it is just as much indebted to it.

Concert Music for Four Guitars was commissioned by and is dedicated to Douglas Rice.