Medium and Mediator

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The Medium and the Mediator:

Two Studies in Composer-Performer Collaboration

Jonathan Leathwood

Paper submitted in partial ulflment o the

requirements or the degree

Doctor o Philosophy in Perormance

Supervised by Dr Stephen Goss, Reader in Composition

Department o Music and Sound Recording

University o Surrey2009



ii

Contents

Introduction 1

1 Developing a Medium: Te Collaborative Process in Stephen Goss’s Oxen of the Sun (2003–4) 4

i A solo or six-string guitar and ten-string guitar 4

ii Britten in metamorphosis 11

iii Te anxiety o the dedicatee 25

2 ‘Unguarded Moments’: A Conversation with Chris Malloy about his Millions of Mischiefs or

en-string Guitar 34

Epilogue: Te Collaborative Space 53

Reerences 58



1

Introduction

In 1920, Manuel de Falla contributed a short guitar piece to the December issue o the Revue

musicale. Te issue was dedicated entirely to the memory o Debussy, who had died two yearsearlier, and alongside the articles appeared a remarkable supplement: ten compositions by some

o the leading composers o the day (among them Bartók, Ravel, Satie and Stravinsky), under

the heading ‘Le ombeau de Claude Debussy’. Falla’s piece, an Homenaje pour guitare, matched

the occasion to sublime efect: a sad but eloquent habanera, reminiscent o Debussy’s habaneras

and even incorporating a quotation rom one o them, ‘Soirées dans Grenade’ rom Estampes.

Falla thought enough o the piece to make a piano version immediately he called it Homenaje,

pièce de guitare and towards the end o his lie, to orchestrate it as one o his our orchestral

Homenajes (1938–9).

For guitarists, Falla’s miniature was a milestone in the repertoire. It was the rst substantialsolo work by a composer who did not play the guitar, one who had won international acclaim or

his orchestral and operatic work. In retrospect, it also unlocked a Pandora’s box o issues, all cen-

tring on the role o the dedicatee. Falla wrote the Homenaje or Catalan guitarist Miguel Llobet

(1878–1938), a virtuoso perormer and gied composer, and a transcriber o genius. Aer its pub-

lication in the Revue musicale, the Homenaje was not made generally available until 1926, when

Chester published it as Homenaje: pièce de guitare écrite pour ‘le ombeau de Claude Debussy’ , in

a ‘new edition revised and ngered by Miguel Llobet’. By then, the music had undergone some

changes, nearly all o which reect Llobet’s perorming practice and that o his contemporaries

(as Llobet’s recordings, compositions and transcriptions attest). Example 1 ofers a striking in-stance early in the piece: the Bb in bar 13 is the rst note in the piece to depart rom the governing

diatonic collection (A major with minor sixth and minor seventh). In his edition, Llobet ngers

1 In the Revue musicale the title was misprinted as Homenaja.

poco affr.

f

a Tempo11 41

poco affr.f a tempo

Falla, Homenaje (Revue musicale, 1920)

a) bars 11–13

b) bars 41–42

3 3 3

Falla, Homenaje (‘New edition revised and fingered by Miguel Llobet’; London 1926: Chester)

2 4 1 1 3 4

e

2

w 3

4

e

2

1

w3

2

41 4

4r

2

0 0

2

3

3

r

t

0 0

4

0 0

2 0

3 33

Example 1 Two passages rom Falla’s Homenaje (1920), comparing the original printing with the

revised and fngered edition by the dedicatee, Miguel Llobet (1926). Numbers in circles denote strings



2

this sensitive note on the ourth string, where it has greater resonance and potential or vibrato.

Te ngering entails a dicult shi, but Llobet incorporates a consonant grace note in the start-

ing position as a launching point or a slide up to the main note. O course, the expressivity o the

portamento is part o the intended efect, working hand in hand with the resonance o the nger-

ing. In example 1b, the rhythm has been altered in order to allow another portamento, again toenable a resonant ngering in a higher position and no doubt or the expressive value o the slide

as well.

Tese portamenti would have come naturally to Llobet and no one doubts that the changes in

the later version were his suggestion. At the same time, no documentation survives other than

the scores. We know nothing o what kind o conversation composer and dedicatee might have

had about them; Falla’s attitude might have ranged rom active encouragement to disinterested

neutrality. What can be said is that by 1984, so ew guitarists played the work exactly as in the

published version that Chester published a new version edited by John Duarte, whose main pur-

pose seems to have been to purge the work o Llobet’s inuence. Yet Duarte’s edition was not astraightorward return to the 1920 Revue musicale printing. In a couple o cases it drew on Falla’s

version or piano, not just in its articulation markings but in some details o register and orna-

mentation, thus introducing a bewildering element o reverse transcription into Falla’s work. Te

only way to account or this step (i there is a way) is the change in perormance practice over

the previous sixty years: Duarte appears to have reasoned that a guitarist o today might have

encouraged Falla to make his guitar writing closer to his piano writing, given the extent to which

guitarists have shaped their musicianship on pianistic models.

Llobet was not to undertake a collaboration o this sort again, but Andrés Segovia, who re-

corded Falla’s Homenaje, quickly recognised that i the guitar was to convince as a vehicle or se-rious music, there would need to be many more such works by composers rom the mainstream.

Or rom what he perceived as the mainstream: Segovia’s musical outlook was not modernist, and

the repertoire he commissioned includes large-scale works by composers such as the Spaniards

urina, orroba and Mompou, the Mexican Manuel Ponce and the Italian Mario Castelnuovo-

edesco. Te extent to which Segovia viewed these commissions as collaborations is conrmed

by his remarks to Graham Wade:

Always I have to modiy many things. But we do this so as not to betray the music and so

that we do not omit what the music has to ofer, but in order to make the music better or the

instrument. I am accustomed, you know, with the composers who have written or me, to

modiy something or other in almost every bar. (Segovia in Wade 1986)

And so it is that Segovia’s editions are starting to meet a similar ate to Llobet’s Falla. In an at-

tempt to erase Segovia’s deep i idiosyncratic involvement, Manuel Ponce’s œuvre or guitar has

twice been published in versions that reproduce only whatever o his manuscripts remain, even

when they appear rather sketchy and provisional. Te edition by Schott under ilman Hopp-

stock’s editorship (backed up, it has to be said, by Hoppstock’s extraordinary recordings) conten-

tiously includes the word Urtext on its cover. Angelo Gilardino and Luigi Biscaldi have produced



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a number o new editions o works by other composers rom the Segovia repertory, with more on

the way.

It seems only a matter o time beore all o the guitar’s modern repertory becomes shrouded

in such equivocation. For wherever there is a major work by a mainstream composer, there is

a collaborator the guitarist or whom the work was written whose work reects the tastesand practices o the time: aer Llobet and Segovia come gures such as Julian Bream (dedica-

tee o works by Britten, Henze, ippett et al.), David Starobin (Babbitt, Carter, Crumb, Schuller,

Wuorinen…) and Eliot Fisk (Berio, Maw, Rochberg…). Te history o the guitar’s twentieth-cen-

tury repertoire is a history o collaboration.

o attempt a revision o the Llobet and Segovia repertoire is to raise complex issues: perorm-

ance practice (which has certainly caught up with the 1920s!), the notion o a unitary ‘original’

and its concomitant prestige, the denial o the composer’s own trust in the dedicatee and thus a

selective, idealistic attitude towards the composer’s ‘intentions’. I shall return to these issues in

due course; in any case, I have not cited these repertories in order to arbitrate but to situate mysel as a collaborator. Te disdain that one hears voiced so oen in the guitar community towards

the eforts o historical collaborators shines a glaring light on my own attempts to collaborate

with composers who tend to expect, in my experience, an interlocutor: one who will engage

intensely with the music as it is written and help them to map their soundworld onto the gui-

tar to sound like themselves. Having ofered suggestions to composers at every stage o a piece’s

development, rom ideas as to the most guitaristic o possible courses the composer is thinking

o to tiny tweaks in voicing, I have oen wondered at what point in this process another guitarist

could step in, long aer, and reverse it, to restore it to some ‘untainted’ state.

What ollows are two attempts to examine the collaborative process with these issues in mind.In the rst paper I attempt to narrate an unusual collaboration with Welsh composer Stephen

Goss that took place between 2003 and 2005, one in which the relationship was particularly uid,

not least because improvisation played a role and the rst perormance was never intended to

mark a cut of point in the development o the work, but rather a major test. Rather than trying

the reader’s patience with every single detail, I point to watersheds in the process, including the

sense I had o the music along the way, raising more general issues about collaboration in the -

nal section. In the second paper, I interview American composer Chris Malloy with similar ques-

tions in mind, attempting to put our two perspectives in conversation with one another.

Both collaborations involved the ten-string guitar (in the case o Goss’s work, in combination

with the six-string guitar), a highly idiosyncratic instrument that was unamiliar to both com-

posers. And in both cases I approached the composer with specic requests, thus colouring the

compositional process rom the start.



4

1. Developing a Medium: The Collaborative Process in

Stephen Goss’s Oxen o the Sun (2003–4)

- -

en versus Six

When Narciso Yepes launched his new ten-string guitar in a perormance with the Berlin Phil-

harmonic in 1964, it was aer a period o consultation that involved not only the celebrated

maker Ramírez, but composers as well: even beore the Berlin premiere, Maurice Ohana had

composed a hal-hour cycle or Yepes’s ten-string guitar (Si le jour paraît…, 1963) that plumbed

its possibilities with extraordinary thoroughness and condence. For Yepes, the ten-string guitarwas a straightorward improvement to the traditional instrument. It is obvious rom its tuning

(example 1) that he was not concerned primarily with extending the guitar’s bass register: the so-

called ‘re-entrant’ strings 8 to 10 ollow the lead o many old stringed instruments by jumping to

the octave above as soon as it becomes dicult to produce strings o sucient quality and ocus

o sound. Rather, his principal concern was resonance:

When I decided to use the ten-string guitar … my reasons were purely musical, and the rst o

them was that the guitar was not properly balanced. Tere was no equilibrium, because o the

twelve notes o the scale, only our E, A, B, D had any resonance. I you play one o thosenotes and then stop the string with your nger, you will hear the sound lingering. But i you

play one o the other eight notes o the scale, the sound dies immediately. On the ten-string

guitar, I have resonance on all twelve notes. (Narciso Yepes in Kozinn 1981)

Yepes is certainly right in ascribing a ar greater evenness o sympathetic resonance to the ten-

string guitar, and along with a limited number o new works and transcriptions, he continued

to play six-string guitar music on his expanded instrument, not necessarily seeking to play the

extra strings but relying on them or resonance.

I came to the ten-string guitar principally or its repertoire, attracted as I was by Ohana’s large-

scale cycles. Within a ew months o taking up the instrument, in 1994, I had commissioned anew work or it rom Rob Keeley. And yet notwithstanding Yepes’s characterisation o the ten-

string instrument as a universal guitar, I soon came to eel that I could play six-string guitar

p o i u y t r e w q

Example 1 Narciso Yepes’s tuning or the ten-string guitar, oten reerred to as the ‘modern’ tuning.

Circled numbers denote strings; strings 6–1 match the stringing o the six-string guitar



5

music most reely on its intended instrument: the uneven response o the six-string guitar has its

own charm, while the extra resonance o the ten-string guitar can be a little overpowering and

dicult to control. And so I reconciled mysel to taking two instruments to every perormance.

Beore long I started to think about the idea o combining the two instruments in some way,

with the six-string guitar placed on a bench in ront o me. A good deal o experimentation led toa careully planned improvisation, which I would sometimes perorm at the beginning o con-

certs. I retuned the six-string guitar and added a capo to raise the pitch o the instrument by a

perect h: this way, the combined open strings o the two instruments gave a gamut o sixteen

pitches, though with a strong diatonic basis (example 2, a–c). My improvisation ended with an

arrangement o a Galician olk song which I had originally made or guitar duo, ending with a

chord swept across both guitars at once (example 2, d).

I was quite unaware that the idea o playing a solo on two guitars had already been tried at least

twice. I now know that Gavin Bryars’s Te Fox, the Squirrel and the Ricketty-Racketty Bridge was

written as long ago as the sixties; more recently, Moritz Eggers has written a work or nylon- andsteel-string guitars, Vermilion Sands (2000). Although both works are substantial pieces, neither

attempts at all to research ways o combining the two instruments to create unusual textures.

In Bryars’s piece, no notes are plucked and retted in the ordinary way: all notes are sounded by

hammering on to the ngerboard with the right or le hand. In Vermilion Sands, notes are pro-

duced normally or the most part, but the two guitars are used in an antiphonal way, and the two

sonorities are scarcely ever mixed.

In my own exploration, I intended rom the start to interlace the sonorities o the instruments,

so I began to devise ways o playing chords simultaneously on both guitars and o moving rom

one instrument to the other within a phrase or gure. I was attracted initially by the purely sen-suous possibilities, the magical resonance o the combination. Because even a moderate tempo

presented ormidable technical and cognitive diculties, I thought less o the combination as a

a. Scordatura for ten-string guitar

p o i u y t r e w q

b. Scordatura for six-string guitar(capo at fret 7)

y t r e w q

c. Combined gamut

d. Goal chord of improvisation

ff

Example 2 An open-string gamut or improvisation, enrichable with retted notes and harmonics



6

vehicle or virtuoso display. Nonetheless, I thought there was some potential to develop the me-

dium. I began to think o commissioning someone else to write an extended solo or my two

guitars, but I thought it would have to be a composer with a player’s knowledge o the instrument,

and one who would relish both the dramatic and virtuosic possibilities as well as the potential

or sheerly sensuous texture. Stephen Goss is one o very ew composers to meet this descrip-tion, and so in 2002 I changed my long-standing request to Stephen or a ten-string guitar piece

to a work or both guitars together. I proposed to perorm the work or the rst time in London’s

Bolívar Hall in a concert or the Venezuelan Embassy’s guitar estival, a concert that would also

eature Ohana’s cycle Si le jour paraît… or ten-string guitar, along with some six-string works.

Stephen was somewhat taken aback by the commission. First, as ar as we knew, no piece like

this had ever been written beore. Tere were no models, and time was relatively short or the

concert I had in mind. Second, he thought that no one would ever play the piece apart rom me;

much later, we were surprised at the interest aroused by the publication and recording o Oxen

of the Sun (as the work came to be called), although there have not yet been perormances by other ten-string guitarists. As or Stephen’s rst objection, we arranged to meet so that I could

demonstrate to him a repertory o techniques and explore ways o adding to it. We had only one

extended meeting to go into the various resources, but Stephen careully wrote them all down.

As the commissioner o the work, it was very important to me that the piece should justiy the

trouble and the theatre o having two guitars on the stage, combining them as ully and inven-

tively as possible. Certainly, the two guitars produce ascinating sonorities together, but they also

impose rustrating limitations, since it is impossible to move rapidly rom one guitar to the other

i the note on the rst guitar is plucked with the right hand and retted with the le. o play con-

tinuous passagework there must be pivot notes notes played with only one hand. Tese can only be open strings, natural harmonics (played with one hand) or occasionally, hammered-on notes.

Somehow I never clearly ormulated this ‘rule’ in my discussions with Stephen. Still, my rst re-

quest was that there should be some continuous passagework in the music.

It was more or less assumed at the outset that as in my improvisations, the six-string guitar

would be the one placed on the piano bench in ront, since all the extra resources o the ten-string

guitar would be more easily accessed with it held conventionally. It is inevitable with this ar-

rangement that the ten-string guitar will have to play more notes than the six-string, but we were

keen to minimise this efect. Te use o a capo to mechanically raise the pitch o the six-string

guitar and thus diferentiate the open strings o the two guitars also seemed a given.

Te Compendium

Beore writing any music, Stephen sent me a copy o the ‘compendium’, or repertory o tech-

niques, that he had compiled rom our meeting. I reproduce it in table 1, numbering each one

and adding to the right an indication o how the various techniques came to be used in the work.

In the end, not every technique eatured. Some were so thoroughly explored in a movement that

there was no need or additional ones; and then, a ew additional ways o combining the instru-

ment emerged in the process o composing: the compendium grew.



7

1 The standard ‘modern’ 10-string tuning:

F# (top ret 12), G# (12), A# (12), Low B or C (13), E

(14), A (16), D (17), G (18), B (19), E (19). Listen to

Jonathan’s recordings with the ten-string, par-

ticularly Beaser’s ‘Barbara Allen’ and Poulenc’s

Caprice Parisien (string 7 = low A), and live record-

ing o Ohana

2 The 6-string could have an odd tuning and a capo

3 The 10-string could have a capo over the top (or

bottom) 6 strings

4 Chord o open strings and harmonic doublings

5 Chromatic clusters and diatonic clusters6 The 10-string is excellent or bridge percussion

7 Sustained cross-string patterns

8 Rich chord o harmonics

9 2-guitar dialogue: hammer-on 6 note chords

10 Strum 6-string with tamb. on 10-string

11 Both hands doing hammer-ons on 1 or 2 guitars

12 Hammer-on all 6 strings while playing a chord on

10-string

13 trem on 10-string (good on G#) with a dramatic

backwards hammer-on/pull-o melody on

6-string.

14 The harp, open strings and natural harmonics

10-string, 6-string. Harmonic chords at various

rets up to 6 (or 10) notes

15 Harmonic chords dampened higher up (i.e. pluck

ret 12 harmonic and them brush at ret 7 (5, 4 etc)

16 Let hand on 10-string can produce very clear

hammer-ons in the bass. A singing bass line

would work well.

17 harmonic pattern on 10-string, cello melody

on 6–string

18 ostinato on 6-string (pizz/harm or as percus-

sion instrument) with hammer-on melody on

10-string

19 fngered harmonic chords

20 Subtle clustery chords: points, not big

brushstrokes.

21 Big chords across both instruments, double

strikes or big gestures

Standard ‘modern’ tuning used, with lowest (7th)

string in B

Throughout, but the capo is removed in ‘Circe’,

replaced in ‘Narcissus’ and then removed again.

[not used]

[not used]

[throughout]‘Pan’, ‘Aeolus’, ‘Circe’

‘Pan’, ‘Orpheus’, ‘Arethusa’, ‘Narcissus’ (version 2)

‘Circe’

‘Narcissus’ (version 2)

‘Pan’, ‘Circe’

‘Aeolus’

[not used]

‘Circe’

‘Orpheus’, ‘Arethusa’, ‘Narcissus’ (version 2)

‘Aeolus’, ‘Circe’

[not used]

‘Circe’, though the melody on 6-string turned out

to be in open strings and harmonics

[not used]

‘Circe’

‘Pan’

‘Circe’, ‘Narcissus’ (version 2)

Table 1 The Compendium for Oxen of the Sun

Compendium (precompositional) Eventual application in work



8

For the most part, the compendium deals with ways o combining the two guitars, and does

not reect an important aspect o our discussion that day: the striking resources that the ten-

string guitar afords on its own. Still, the impression that the table gives that ‘Pan’, ‘Aeolus’,

‘Circe’ and ‘Narcissus’ (in its second version) draw on the compendium the most corresponds

quite closely with the nished work. In the case o ‘Sirens’, the rst movement, the repertory o techniques hardly applies, because the movement enacts a gradual awakening o the six-string

guitar lying in ront o the perormer. Te six-string guitar only echoes the ten-string solo beore

becoming suddenly and dramatically independent in the second movement, ‘Pan’.

But why is the compendium spread so unevenly over the other movements? Stephen had writ-

ten in his diary:

Te piece may well be a number o miniatures or mood pieces, based on something like the

arot Cards (but not the arot Cards), a kind o compressed . Could be a lmic, literary or

artistic source.

We talked about what the piece might do. Jonathan would like something that has action, but

is not necessarily ast. He showed me a compendium o possibilities. Te piece will be about the

instrument and the perormer. A music box, box o tricks, the sounds will be unique, intriguing

and novel. A cross between a harp and a guitar. Inventions as variations? Tere could be a very

simple harp movement a theme in the middle or at the end? ry not to duplicate Jonathan’s

olksong arrangement idea. One piece will be just natural harmonics. ‘Te Harp o Orpheus.’

Sympathetic Strings. 6 Metamorphoses aer Ovid as a model or starting point? Metamorphoses

aer Britten?

A ‘box o tricks’: it is easy to suppose that the compendium will generate ‘set-piece’ episodesand striking gestures, bloques sonores that will quickly exhaust themselves, leaving the com-

poser with the task o nding an intuitively correct arrangement to build a larger orm. In act,

the nished seven-movement structure is ar less obvious. It is already apparent in his jottings

that Stephen intended one or more movements to ocus on a single sound. Te central move-

ment, ‘Orpheus’, treats the two guitars as one, a kind o harp or lyre, in a hypnotic exploration o

a single technical idea. ‘Arethusa’ builds on this technique, moving twice as quickly and adding

stopped notes and ten-string sweeps.

Te remaining movements the ones that can be called episodic draw on the compendium

to very diferent ends. In particular, ‘Aeolus’ is a genuinely dramatic structure, in that it invokes

contrasts o stability and instability, statement and development. As table 2 shows, it is in one

sense a ‘box o tricks’. Tere are our episodes o similar length, each labelled with a character:

Light and clear , Strong and heavy , Scherzando and Faster . Each o these episodes draws on the

compendium or presents a similar, strongly idiomatic efect in a clearly dened way. Indeed,

neither guitar is played quite conventionally until the nal section, which is a solo or ten-string

guitar. But the last episode is a reprise o the rst, transorming its static, ostinato-like guration

into a orceul climax and decay. Te rising passage in bars 50–54 is made out o motives rom

1 Looking Glass ies (2001) is a work by Goss or solo guitar, discussed below (pp 15–17).



9

Table 2 ‘Aeolus’, coordination o the orm with extended techniques

section character bar no. instrumental eatures

Statement [] q.= 60–66 Light and clear 1–18 10-string: harmonics

6-string: tambora on open stringsDevelopment [] q.= 112–20 Strong and heavy 19–32 Both guitars: hammered-on notes with

separate hands

Scherzando 33–49 10-string: tambora on low strings;

resonance transormed into harmonics

10-string: improvised tambora on low

strings, tinged with harmonics

6-string: arpeggio fguration

Reprise ['] Faster 50–69 10-string alone, played conventionally

55

62

p mf

fff

slap strings withside of thumb

fff

pp an echo in thedecaying sonority

bar 9

pppp

bar 1

49

p mf

fff

bars 11–12

fff

pp

pppp

Example 3 ‘Aeolus’, bars 50–69, cross-reerenced with ideas rom the opening section



10

bars 10–12 in the opening statement, while the decay links bars 1 and 9 into a stuttering sequence

(example 3).

In the context o this arch structure, the two central episodes emerge as developmental. Tey,

too, take aer rhythms and melodic shapes rom the slower opening statement, but in a distorted

orm (example 4 shows the beginning o each central episode). Te sense o distortion is palpable

in the choice o techniques taken rom the compendium, as well. Whereas the opening statementhad exploited the gamut o ten-string harmonics, already amiliar rom the rst two movements,

Strong and heavy asks or quavers to be hammered on, a technique (no. 11 in the compendium)

which sounds a subsidiary indeterminate pitch along with each written note. In the second epi-

sode, Scherzando, the chords marked tambora are produced by striking the strings with an out-

stretched nger around various harmonic nodal points, transorming the high pentatonic tamb-

oras o the opening statement into a ‘dirty’ and indeterminate mixture o bass cluster, harmonics

and noise. Here Stephen had in mind technique 6 in the compendium: in his original dra o the

Scherzando, he had asked or ‘some kind o magical bridge percussion sound’, leaving the exact

realisation up to me. But we had discussed this technique o ‘harmonictambora

’ and I chose to

use it here because I thought it would heighten the developmental, distorting quality o the cen-

tral episodes.

six-string

guitar

Beginning of B (bar 19)

y

f

rh hammer-ons

lh hammer-ons

ten-string guitar

Beginning of A (bar 1)

w

ppp l.v. sempre

r i e o p

Scherzando

Beginning of Scherzando episode, bars 33–35

pp l.v. sempre

harmonic tamb. ad lib.

bars 2–3

p tamb.

0

Example 4 ‘Aeolus’: section B’s two episodes take as their starting point distortions o opening

material



11

In Joyce’s Ulysses, ‘Te Oxen o the Sun’ is the title o the ourteenth episode, in which Joyce re-

capitulates the development o English prose in a series o pastiches and parodies. Not that

Stephen’s work attempts such a eat in music in act the seven movements o Oxen of the Sun are more stylistically unied than in much o his output. But the title reects the diversity o

styles ound in Stephen’s work as a whole and the multiplicity o inspirations or Oxen’s schema.

Tree movements take their titles rom episodes rom Ulysses (Homer and Joyce): ‘Sirens’, ‘Aeolus’

and ‘Circe’. Te image o the two instruments as a lyre denes the central movement: ‘Orpheus’.

As or the remaining three, ‘Pan’, ‘Arethusa’ and ‘Narcissus’, not just their titles but their musical

material may be sourced in Britten’s Six Metamorphoses aer Ovid or solo oboe, op. 49.

A ew years beore Oxen of the Sun, Stephen had written an article on one o the major works in

the guitar’s repertoire, Benjamin Britten’s Nocturnal aer John Dowland , op. 70 (Goss 2001). As

editor o the journal and as someone who shared Stephen’s passionate preoccupation with thework I entered into a process o revision and collaboration with Stephen that rather presaged

our work on Oxen of the Sun. We shall come back to Nocturnal specically in due course, but

Stephen is a composer who thrives on the association o ideas, and I was not surprised to nd

that he was looking or ways to incorporate the music o Britten into the new piece. On January

24th, 2003, he wrote in his diary:

I’ve spent the morning thinking and reading around the 16-string piece. I am pretty sure that

it will be called Oxen of the Sun. Orpheus’s lyre had 9 strings, 2 more than Apollo’s (9 + 7 =

16). Tere will be parallels to Te Odyssey and Ulysses. Six o the movements will come rom

the Britten Ovid Metamorphoses. Tey will be recomposed expanding and contracting the

original material and making use o the compendium. Single models.

…

I not 9 movements, then 7. I may not use all the Britten movements. I need to work on them

next and a movement plan.

…

I might not recompose all the Britten, although ‘Narcissus’ is a gi or reections in the water.

‘Arethusa’ is a good one a ountain o notes.

Within a couple o days, Stephen had arrived at the plan or the nished piece:

I don’t want the movements to be long. Te Britten pieces should be distillations,

concentrations o the originals. Tere is a theme developing o lust, temptation and retribution.

…

Te Joyce episodes or consideration are:

‘Sirens’ seduction and Orpheus link, slow and sexy

‘Circe’ enchantress, c. Kundry

‘Aeolus’ wind …

2 In Joyce’sUlysses, ‘Te Sirens’ is episode 11, ‘Aeolus’ is episode 7 and ‘Circe’ is episode 15.



12

Plan 3 almost nal

1 Sirens slow Homer/Joyce rich chords & beautiul song

2 Pan aster Ovid–Britten cross-string resonances

3 Aeolus ast Homer/Joyce high pitched? moto perpetuo

4 Orpheus medium Te Lyre Cage open strings o the lyre 7 & 95 Arethusa ast Ovid–Britten waterall/ountain music

6 Circe slower Homer/Joyce magic music

7 Narcissus slow Ovid–Britten 2 guitars in dialogue

As an avowed pluralist with an ambivalent attitude towards notions o authorship and originality,

Stephen has made no secret over the years o his use o samples and models rom other compos-

ers past and present. Sometimes the work o others is echoed in a relatively recognisable orm; at

other times it is apparent only to those in the know, occluded as it is by lters or other distortions

in the compositional process. Either way, it is easy to dwell too exclusively on Stephen’s borrow-

ings in Oxen: the entire span o ‘Aeolus’ just discussed provides one o many passages throughoutthe work that are composed rom scratch. Nevertheless, models and samples abound. ‘Orpheus’,

or example, is based loosely but audibly on John Cage’s 1948 piano piece, In a Landscape, at times

down to the merest grace note.

Te reerences to Britten’s Metamorphoses describe a continuum. Example 5 illustrates how

the rst movement o Britten’s to be treated, ‘Pan’, is passed through a kind o instrumental and

gestural lter. One o the solo oboe’s particular strengths lies, o course, in expressive and ow-

ing melody, and in the opening forte and mezzo-forte phrases, Britten evidently set out to build

his arabesques with no intervals other than diatonic steps, encompassing just a major ninth in all.

In this way Britten’s oboe conveys the rustic essence o Pan’s ute. Te two guitars, on the otherhand, are capable o producing rich clusters, and that is the instrumental lter through which

Britten’s melodic arcs are passed. Te tuning o the two guitars ofers a gamut o harmonics and

open strings which correspond exactly to the diatonic collection expressed in Britten’s ‘Pan’. As

they are transormed into clusters, just enough o the original line is retained to make the model

recognisable and recognition, surely, is one o the responses allowed or in this recomposition.

Indeed, the presentation o the opening ‘hook’ is strongly marked as the climax o the previous

movement.

Recognition, on the other hand, can hardly be expected in the contrasting so section that

makes up the second part o Stephen’s ‘Pan’. Te repeated notes and arching, chromatic gestureso Britten’s orginal are verticalised into attenuated chords in harmonics, depicting a static land-

scape that is particularly characteristic o Stephen’s music. Te model is buried.

By contrast, the h movement, ‘Arethusa’, brings Britten’s original more into the open by ol-

lowing its melodic outline and dynamics closely, now employing a series o pitch lters that be-

gins with the open strings and harmonics o the two guitars. Te moment o change rom one

pitch collection to another corresponds closely between model and reworking (example 6).

In the rst version o Oxen of the Sun, the presence o Britten’s Metamorphoses culminated in

the last movement, which presented a literal transcription o ‘Narcissus’ (no. 5 in Britten’s set).



13

How this movement came to be replaced with an entirely diferent ‘Narcissus’ is a question we

must soon come to, but rst let us discuss the original version, which I perormed a number o

times throughout 2003 and 2004.

5

6

oboe

Britten: ‘Pan’ from Six Metamorphoses after Ovid

f

Senza misura

f

mf

6

six-string guitar

Goss: ‘Pan’ from Oxen of the Sun

Senza misura: take plenty of time

t

ten-string guitar

f l.v. sempre

f

f

pp

5 5 7

ff

gently strike strings with index fingerat 19th fret, leaving finger on strings

Very slow, free and calm

long pause

ppsemi-pizz.

pont.

pp (accel.)

(3)

mf

[Britten’s movement

continues…]

long pause

semi-pizz. pont.

pppsemi-pizz.

pont.

Attacca Aeolus

Example 5 Goss’s ‘Pan’ is derived rom Britten’s by converting scales into clusters



14

Largamente

10

19

oboe

f espress. f

six-string guitar

Largamente e = 126c.

ten-string

guitar

f espressivo, l.v.

f

f

f

mf cresc.

mf

Example 6 Goss’s ‘Arethusa’ is modelled on Britten’s in rhythm, contour and modifcation o pitch

collections (bars 1–26)

ranscription and appropriation: the rst ‘Narcissus’

Although the 2003 ‘Narcissus’ quotes Britten’s movement unchanged and in its entirety (themodels or ‘Pan’ and ‘Arethusa’ are truncated) it is something more than a literal quotation;

or, as example 7 shows, it makes explicit in live perormance, visible the dialogue between

Narcissus and his reection, or as Britten depicts it, between melody and inversion. Tis is the

most palpable instrumental lter o all, in which one guitar becomes the reection o the other,

and the efect o it became heightened in perormance by a discovery I made while preparing the

rst perormance: it was easier to play the transcription i I reversed the arrangement o the two

guitars, holding the six-string in the normal playing position and putting the ten-string guitar

on the bench in ront, playing the inverted echoes on the ten-string (as in example 7). Swapping



15

the two guitars around made or a theatrical gesture on stage, one that to Stephen and me seemed

to embody the kind o ullment that the last movement was intended to represent o the

Britten model and o the apparently weaker six-string instrument. It visibly mirrored the set up

o the preceding movements at the moment that the mirror music begins. As right as this discov-

ery elt intuitively, I cannot recall our putting any o it into words.

Tis was scarcely the rst time that Stephen had imported another composer’s piece in its en-

tirety into a multi-movement work. Tat, I believe, had been in 2001, in Looking Glass ies or

solo guitar. Tis nine-movement work is no longer available (almost all o its movements have

pp più f

Lento piacevole

p cresc.

6

mf mf f

10

pp pp pp

f mf

17

p pp

ff pp

Tranquillo 22

dim. pp dim.

rall. 26

six-string guitar

6

six-string guitar

mf espress.

ten-string

guitar

4

4

Example 7 Goss, Oxen of the Sun, the frst version o ‘Narcissus’: a transcription o ‘Narcissus’ rom

Benjamin Britten’s 6 Metamorphoses after Ovid , op. 49. This movement was to be replaced with a

dierent one in 2004



16

been reworked by Stephen in later compositions) but in the place o a central h movement, so

to speak, one nds a transcription made by Stephen o Scarlatti’s Sonata 25. Even here, there is

a lter, though o a most unusual kind: a direction that the sonata should be perormed ‘in the

style o the Russian piano school’ Stephen suggests a recording o Mikhail Pletnev’s as a model.

In this way, Stephen pays tribute in admiration, I believe to Pletnev’s way o playing Scarlattiwhile wryly separating the playing style rom the musical content. It is a separation that must

disconcert the perormer, because it makes sel-conscious what should be instinctive, and asks

the perormer to play the sonata a certain way irrespective o how he or she might ‘hear’ the piece.

In this context, Scarlatti ’s music will tend to become a vehicle or the style: although ew listeners

may be able to pinpoint the provenance o the interpretive style, some might sense nonetheless

that the perormer is playing a role.

Te rest o Looking Glass ies is replete with quotations and allusions, and yet it provides no

clue as to the ‘meaning’ o the Scarlatti sonata in the work as a whole, unless as one o a number

o distancing strategies. In his introductory note to the score, Stephen explained that ‘the diverseportraits that make up Looking Glass ies are reworkings o existing pieces displayed in a new

light and rom a diferent perspective pieces through the looking glass.’ Tis is putting it mildly

in the case o the Scarlatti, which elevates the arranger to the status o the composer. Te sonata’s

intrusive presence aggressively denies traditional expectations o originality. And i doubts arise

in the mind o the listener is this is a gimmick? then Stephen could reply that he is the com-

poser o those doubts.

Similar appropriations in Stephen’s output help to dene his notion o quotation and its role.

In another solo guitar work, Raise the Red Lantern, commissioned in 2004 by the Chinese vir-

tuoso Xueei Yang or an album o works with a Chinese theme, a transcription again eatures,this time o ‘Von der Jugend’, the third song o Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. Mahler’s song-

symphony is based on Chinese texts; although the text is lost in the transcription to solo guitar,

the chinoiserie o the music is unmistakable. Te main test or the culturally aware listener, then,

is to recognise Mahler’s music at all, beore pondering on the signicance o the quotation among

movements which otherwise allude to recent Chinese cinema.

Mahler appears again in Stephen’s 2004 guitar duo, Te Raw and the Cooked . Te h move-

ment, ‘Caught Between’, transcribes a song rom Des Knaben Wunderhorn: ‘Des Antonius von

Padua Fischpredigt’, which Mahler had himsel adapted or the Scherzo o his Second Symphony.

InTe Raw and the Cooked

it is preceded by another transcription, this time o the eighth song

rom Schumann’s Dichterliebe, ‘Und wüßten’s die Blumen, die kleine’. As always in Stephen’s

music, wit is part o the motivation: the transcription continues innocently into the introduction

to Dichterliebe’s next song, ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’; but beore long Schumann’s music

turns seamlessly into Mahler’s.

Te link between Schumann’s ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’ and Mahler both ‘Des

Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ and the Second Symphony Scherzo has been discussed ex-

tensively in the Mahler literature. Abbate points to the musical connections (1991, 265, n.13) be-

ore turning to the connection between the Heine poem o Schumann’s song and Mahler’s own



17

description o the symphonic scherzo. But in Te Raw and the Cooked , what had previously been

shown in prose and the odd musical example is now illuminated in perormance space, though

still at a distance these are guitars we are hearing, aer all, and the title, ‘Caught Between’, un-

derscores the doubt as to whose music this is, whether Schumann’s or Mahler’s. Finally, the lis-

tener to Stephen’s version in Te Raw and the Cooked might well be reminded, via Lévi-Strauss aswell as the music itsel, o Berio’s reworking o Mahler’s Scherzo in his Sinfonia (1968–9). Berio’s

masterpiece is a locus classicus o postmodernism in music, with its ceaseless divagations into

quotations rom other musical masterpieces and the anxious reections on originality pursued

in the singers’ texts. Goss reverses Berio’s conception by pointing Mahler’s Scherzo back towards

its source.

In all o these examples, then, the listener is drawn into a maze o reerents which can never be

grounded into a coherent structure, since these block quotations are not integrated into the rest

o the work, and the music seems to comment on itsel, its own aims and expressive aspirations,

in an unsettling (i oen light-hearted) way. Nor is this the ambiguity and open-endedness o thesymbolism o a hundred years beore, in which the very wordlessness o music was celebrated:

there can be little doubt that Stephen intends to provoke, among other things, thought in the

orm o words verbal association and a kind o wordplay encoded in the music; not symbolism,

but semiosis in the literary sense that modern thought has tended to give it, an interest in music

as text.

Since the late nineteenth century, transcriptions have eatured heavily in the repertoire o

many guitarists. One o today’s leading players, Paul Galbraith, plays transcriptions almost ex-

clusively, and a comment on his website represents, I think, the credo o all practitioners o the

art: ‘It’s so easy to play transcriptions in a way that merely excites nostalgia or the original ver-sion. Te great thing is or the transcription to be convincing to the point that you eel it was orig-

inally conceived or your instrument’ (Galbraith 2004). As a guitarist himsel, specialising in

two areas with a scarcity o repertoire guitar quartet and voice and guitar Stephen Goss has

made many transcriptions that reect these values, though increasingly, those too have become

increasingly ‘unaithul’ and allusive. In his compositions, the transcriptions are done just as

skilully; one suspects, however, that to sound ‘originally conceived or the instrument’ is ar

rom his aim. Indeed, ew guitarists, surely, would consider programming a straightorward

transcription o, say, ‘Von der Jugend’, or exactly the reasons that Galbraith adduces. But place

the work within protective quotation marks, asRaise the Red Lantern

does, and perorming it

becomes a possibility. Te guitar’s timbre and perhaps even the guitarist’s struggles to realise

something like a Mahler song or tenor and orchestra both make their ironic point. Te more

aware the listener becomes, the urther away the music seems, whether through the distanc-

ing action o the transcription or through the distancing appeal to verbal (and oen erudite)

thought and then, most drastically, the insouciance towards notions o compositional voice

and the sanctity o the work.

3 See or example Carmen Fantasy (1998) and Gnossiennes aer Erik Satie (2002), both or guitar quartet.



18

By now it is perhaps clear just how exceptional the nal quotation o Britten’s ‘Narcissus’ in

the rst version o Oxen was. For one thing, the transcription works almost in the traditional

way stunningly so, as the dialogue between each phrase and its inversion alls on to the two

guitars as though intended or them. For another, its appearance and placement are part o a

much more traditionally coherent scheme than is present in any o the works just discussed. Atleast to those who know the Metamorphoses aer Ovid , there is not only integration within the

work as a whole but also a sense o progression. ‘Pan’ briey alludes clearly to Britten beore bury-

ing it; ‘Arethusa’ partly reveals its model by paraphrasing it throughout; ‘Narcissus’ at last states

Britten literally and in ull. Above all, it brings an element o variation to the multi-movement

orm. Example 8 shows how an inversion o ‘Narcissus’ is the point o departure or the whole

work. Since Britten’s ‘Narcissus’ also inverts its melody in its call-and-response orm, the con-

nection is partly made or the listener when the nal movement arrives. Tis opening movement,

‘Sirens’, is o course one o the ‘Joycean’ movements in the set, and another version o the melody

appears in one o the others, ‘Circe’.By stating its melody clearly, then, the original version o ‘Narcissus’ brings a sense o com-

pletion, even resolution, to both threads in the work: Britten and Joyce. Te central movement,

‘Orpheus’, stands outside the process. Deep in the background, Oxen becomes a theme-and-

variation set in which the theme is placed at the end. Tis is the very orm adopted by Britten in

the Nocturnal which Stephen and I had worked on a couple o years beore Oxen (as well as other

Britten works such as Lachrymae or viola and piano). It is worth recalling, too, that variations

were already a possibility in Stephen’s mind in the diary entry quoted above: ‘Inventions as vari-

ations? …[A] theme in the middle or at the end?’ o the extent that Oxen of the Sun in its rst

version is a theme-and-variation set, there is nothing shocking about the presence o an en-tire movement by another composer: what could be more traditional than to quote the theme on

which the rest o the work is based?

So it was that in March 2003, I perormed Oxen of the Sun or the rst time, with the tran-

scription o Britten’s ‘Narcissus’ as the closing movement. And yet paradoxical as it may sound,

Britten, Narcissus bar 11, echo6

Goss, Sirensmp

rt

Goss, Circe (line 3 in opening section)

f

Example 8 Comparison o Britten’s ‘Narcissus’ with Goss’s ‘Sirens’ and ‘Circe’



19

coherence on so many levels was too good to be true, especially in a work by Stephen Goss, who

revels in hints, discontinuities and blind alleys. In one way, Oxen of the Sun marks a turning

point in Stephen’s attitude to multi-movement orm, away rom pluralist potpourri towards a

greater degree o interrelation between the movements. Perhaps Stephen’s Sonata or guitar o

2006 could not have been written without Oxen. But the movement that ties so many threads to-gether, the transcription o ‘Narcissus’, was to be replaced with a new nale that would leave the

structure more open-ended, more tantalising yet more cathartic.

A New ‘Narcissus’

Aer the premiere, I was surprised that the only review (in Classical Guitar magazine) did not

so much as mention the extensive quotation at the close o the work (the movement appeared

in the programme as ‘Narcissus [Britten]’). But the work was received all the same with some

excitement, and not only or its ostentatious instrumental concept: many listeners ound the

work touching. A ew, it is true, ound the preponderance o slow and quiet music excessive, butI elt that the work was asking listeners to accept this preponderance in a legitimate way that re-

minded me o the music o Federico Mompou.

Even so, although I was delighted with the work and played it in almost every recital or the

next eighteen months, I elt that the ending was not as efective as it might be. Te sense o re-

lease that might be provided by Britten’s more traditional tonality and phrase structure does not

come out o any agitation: the only big climax happens rather early, towards the end o ‘Aeolus’. It

seemed to me that the end o ‘Circe’ needed to extend and accelerate into a climax at least as big

and to project a virtuosic image or the last time beore settling into the Britten quotation, rather

as the nal passacaglia o Nocturnal does beore settling into the music o Dowland.Something else was on my mind. My sense o the possibilities o the two-guitar combination

had developed somewhat through the experience o working on Oxen. New ways o creating a

continuous texture with the two guitars more rapid than that o ‘Orpheus’ or ‘Arethusa’ had

occurred to me, and I was hoping to have them incorporated into some extra passage just like

the one described, or even into another solo or two guitars. I had ound one o them while play-

ing ‘Narcissus’. At the climax o the dialogue between Narcissus and his reection I had slightly

redistributed Britten’s part-writing or the sake o more speed and ease (example 9). In this redis-

tribution, the right hand plucks open strings on one guitar, and the le hand hammers on and

pulls of retted notes on the other. Both the speed and the sonority o this technique are rather

striking and much more obviously virtuosic than anything I had been able to show Stephen in

the past. It occurred to me that a whole range o tetrachords could be played this way probably

enough to make an extended passage, despite the limitation that two o the our notes must be

open strings.

In short, I had developed as an exponent o this Siamese-twin-like combination, precisely

because o playing Oxen of the Sun. Indeed, two urther additions to the compendium had oc-

curred to me that I elt pushed the boundaries o the medium towards greater virtuosity and



20

Example 9 ‘Narcissus’ (frst version): the approach to the climax

22

oboe

six-string guitar

ten-string guitar

Britten, ‘Narcissus’

ff

Goss, transcription of ‘Narcissus’

right hand

ff

left hand alone

drama. Te rst possibility was that o combining ull strummed chords on the open strings

with chords hammered on by the le hand. Te alternation o hands would give time to moverapidly between guitars, and although it would be dicult to hammer on anything other than

barred chords, some interesting harmonies might still emerge rom the combination o the open

strings o one guitar with the barred chord o the other. Te other technique which I had been

experimenting with was again rather tied to the open strings, but was capable o generating some

speed, and that was simply to alternate the right and le thumbs on the two guitars.

Meanwhile, we were starting to look towards the possibility o publishing and recording Oxen,

and the question o copyright to the Britten movement remained a nagging one. Stephen had

contacted the Britten estate and obtained permission or the transcription, but we wondered how

the estate might react to its incorporation into a work by another composer, not least in a record-ing. At the same time, Stephen had always intended to revisit and revise the work, since he had

been under some pressure to complete it in good time or the rst perormance. He agreed in

principle with the suggestion o placing another climax aer ‘Circe’, but to my surprise began

instead to plan an entirely new nal movement, still entitled ‘Narcissus’. In December 2004, I

stayed with Stephen or a couple o days so that we could work on the new techniques to be used.

Beore my visit, Stephen had already made a plan or the movement:

Ideas or a new ‘Narcissus’ 29th November 2004

uning

10-string open 6-string with a capo at ret 4

Tis generates a 9-note 2-octave open-string scale built using major 3rds and semitones:

E, G#, A, C#, D, F#, G, B, D#, E

(It’s very similar to my HCE scale B natural, C, E which generates a 24-note scale over two

octaves with every chromatic note twice by alternating minor 2nds and major 3rds.)

A beautiul open-string strum is 6-string top-down, 10-string bottom-up.

4 Te reerence here is to a collection used in Goss’s Dreamchild (1994–5), a song cycle or soprano and large

ensemble.



21

Te Piece

Te piece will start on B the ulcrum note in the scale, on both guitars alternating (2nd string

on 10-string, 3rd string on 6-string). Some kind o single-note ast passage with occasional

2-note chords with one note per guitar. Tere may be echo moments or reective pauses.

As the piece gains energy and momentum and the intensity builds up, chords alternatequickly between the guitars and Ginastera-style strum damping helps to accentuate the

rhythm. Te rhythm should be irregular with groups o 2, 3, 4 and 5 all mixed up. A climax or

crisis moment is reached. I am undecided about the ending either a dance to the death or a

wind down. A dance to the death probably. Something insanely virtuosic.

OK, that’s it so ar. It would be most useul i we could get together and work something nal

out. I have so many questions about hands and position and what things sound like. I want to

use a number o things that we discussed last time, but I wonder how much urther we could

go. I think i we spent a couple o hours together, I could nish things of quite quickly. It may

just be a case o getting you to improvise around these ideas and then take all the gestures andnalise the piece. Collaboration indeed.

Example 10 illustrates the tuning and pitch collection reerred to in the quoted passage. It was

clear that the open-string gamut provided by the previous movements needed varying or the last

movement; just as importantly, the new note collection had a unison B surrounded by symmetri-

cal intervals, suggesting Narcissus’s reection in the water.

I had already mentioned to Stephen that I had new ideas or ast, open-string passagework and

strumming on the two guitars. Now I had to show him my idea or the ast tetrachords I had

also ound that I could play harmonics with the right hand alone instead o open strings, mak-

ing it possible to play tetrachords in the high register. And so it was that we spent some timeimprovising on these techniques (I played and Stephen made suggestions) until we had discov-

ered some particularly attractive sounds: unisons between the two guitars, tetrachords with both

open strings and harmonics and bass strings that would combine with them, and combinations

o strummed open-string chords on one guitar with bar chords hammered on to the other gui-

tar. Aer a couple o hours, even the order in which these ideas would occur had been decided.

Stephen recorded our improvising and later wrote the shape down, with some extra details, in

his diary:

30 December 2004

Narcissus2

Section 1

Starts with open Bs played with the thumbs

Example 10 Tuning or ‘Narcissus’ and nine-note scale

10-string guitar 6-string guitar(capo at fret 4)

scale on nine open strings



22

Moving to thumbs on all the other strings, 10–6 all the time

Movement to the F#s, one open (6-string), one as an octave harmonic (10-string)

Gradual descent to the low G#s loud and strong

Section 2

Low open strings are used to colour the G#, particularly F# and low B

Gradually this moves into the 4-note pattern

Te 4-note tetrachord or trichord patterns work their way up (not directly) to the D #, E, C#,

B. Tese should try to contain 3 open strings and one stopped note. Hands can be changed,

by going back to Bs and slowing down enough to swap over. Down to triplets and duplets in

time rather than rallentando? Slowing down and speeding up will help. Open strings on the

10-string sound very good here track 4 [on recording].

Section 3

Te bass notes are gradually added the A and C#

together, some subtle dissonancesGradually the strumming takes over and the capo is removed

Section 4

Te strumming section

Section 5

Te nal gesture:

1, both open string sets played together

2, 10-string 12th ret harmonic semi-damping

3, 6-string 12th ret harmonic semi-damping4, ade

Because this movement grew out o live improvisation, learning the nished composition pre-

sented perhaps ewer diculties than any o the previous movements. I suggested only one

change to the nished score, and that was two insert two climactic chords in high harmonics

right beore the nal open-string gesture. In example 11, the inserted chords are marked in bar

34 (in the last line o the example). Aer these chords comes the gesture described in section 5

o Stephen’s plan, which sounds the open strings o both guitars and converts them to octave

harmonics. I elt that this gesture, which we had worked out in our meeting, lost some o its efect

because the climax o the strumming section (bar 33) also sounds only open strings. Te secondo my two inserted chords converts the open strings into harmonics sounding a major third and

two octaves above (the h partial), orming a dissonance with the octave harmonics o my rst

inserted chord.

Not only does this dissonance create a moment o instability just beore the cadence, ollow-

ing the model o many a tonal cadence, it sums up the pitch organisation o the movement. Te

top line o example 11 recalls what example 10 has already shown: that in section 1 all the pitch

material is derived rom the open strings o the two guitars, with the six-string guitar transposed

up a major third by the use o a capo. In section 3, the capo is removed, so that the open strings



23

1–6 o the two guitars match in pitch: line 2 o the example shows how at the moment the capo is

removed, all o these pitch relationships are made explicit. In bar 17, the straightened le index

nger is used like a capo to rehearse the major third open-string transposition once more on

both guitars. In the strumming section that ollows (section 4), the index nger continues to be

used in this way, but on diferent rets. At the end, the inserted chords in combination with the

nal gesture convert the complex o open-string transpositions (unison/octave and major third)

into natural harmonics.

15

33

Broad

‘Narcissus’: open strings of the two guitars,generating much of the pitch material throughout

6-string hascapo at 4th fret,bars 1–15

capo removedfrom 6-string,bars 15¤

‘Narcissus’, bars 15–17

f

remove capo

and soundchord pp

ff

ff

(l.v.)

f

(l.v.)

‘Narcissus’, ending

L L R L

L R

× many

accel. possibile

fff

chords added by JL

4

L

f possibile

lightly touchstrings at fret 12

to sound harmonics

12

rasg.R

lightly touchstrings at fret 12

to sound harmonics

Example 11 ‘Narcissus’



24

At the centre o the movement is the tetrachord ound at the climax o Britten’s ‘Narcissus’ (ex-

ample 9). Tis is the only reerence to Britten in the movement, but i the moment o climax can

be said to include or imply the movement as a whole, it is a telling residue.



25

Te Notion of the Original

When is a piece o music nished? In the piano literature, Chopin and Liszt spring to mind as

composers who revisited their music over long periods, efectively creating a series o Urtextsand or the interpreter, some ascinating choices. In the guitar’s twentieth-century literature, the

question may be more intractable still: when is a piece started? Ever since the guitar’s rst serial

collaborator, Andrés Segovia, began to commission works rom the composers he avoured, the

rst air copies o the resulting music have had in many cases a rather provisional look, lacking

the idiomatic eatures that the published editions maniest. And i the composer who returns to

revise an early work is on occasion judged to have interered rather than improved, in the case

o the guitar repertoire there is usually a much more suspicious presence to deal with: the dedi-

catee. Many o the landmarks in the guitar’s modern repertoire are the result o a collaboration

with an inuential perormer, whose ngerprints may usually be discerned in the published edi-tion. Te editions made by Andrés Segovia o the works written or him, or instance, contain a

number o idiosyncrasies that dissatisy many guitarists o the present day. And yet there is no

guarantee that a search or the ‘original’ will turn up more than a dra, ull o impracticalities

and guesswork.

Example 11 shows two versions two states o ‘Arethusa’, the h movement o Oxen of the

Sun. Te upper system shows Stephen’s rst dra (I received it by email on February 14, 2003),

the lower as it appears in the edition published around three years later. Stephen’s note in bar 15,

‘Use six-string when easible’, gave me the task, in efect, o nishing the piece, and I quickly real-

ised that the way Stephen had chosen to divide the guration between the guitars was largely im-possible. I had particularly asked him to write some continuous music or the medium, but had

never spelt out that one can move rapidly rom one guitar to another only while playing a note

with one hand (the ‘pivot notes’ that I dened in part I).

For the time being, our collaboration had to progress by email. In his note accompanying the

dra, Stephen had written:

‘Arethusa’ is going to be the most tricky movement to play. It is a companion piece to ‘Orpheus’

as the other harp-like piece. Some o the cross-guitar stuf might prove impossible; i so,

just put the notes on the 10-string and don’t worry that the 6-string isn’t so involved in this

movement.

Te next day I replied:

Yes, ‘Arethusa’ is going to be very hard, and I can’t always get rom one guitar to the other in

time. For example, I can’t think o a way o stopping and plucking notes on the ten-string and

then interpolating six-string notes, as in bars 23 f. Beautiul passage! But I’m experimenting,

and new ideas come up every time I sit down and try again.

For example, just this moment I’m experimenting with playing bars 14–22 o ‘Arethusa’ on

the ten-string, and bars 23–27 on the six-string, reaching over and stopping strings with my



26

10

19

25

six-string

guitar

First draft, February 14, 2003

Largamente e = 148–160

f espress. (or p espress.)

sim.

sim.

ten-string guitar

f

six-string guitar

Published version, 2006Largamente e = 126c.

ten-string

guitar

f espressivo, l.v.

f

use 6-string when feasible

f

f

mf

mf

f

+

f

Example 11 A comparison o the frst drat and the published version o ‘Arethusa’ (continued overleaf )



27

le hand as necessary. It’s just an idea: the le hand has to think in reverse, with 4 playing the

lowest ret and 1 the highest. Maybe it won’t work in the end. But I’m thinking all the time o the

visual interplay between the two hands and the two guitars, and also the sound. I’m not oen

satised with the sound o the le-hand ngers plucking on the six-string with capo, but it

sounds ne very quiet, and I’m learning to pluck with my le-hand thumb and nail.

30

36

40

f

f f

9

ff

f

ff

9

mp

6

mp

96

Example 11 continued



28

I’m also seeing i I can learn to play harmonics on the ten-string with just my le hand le

thumb plucks, 3 or 4 touches string. Perhaps I shouldn’t let you in on these ideas, as they are

just experiments, and I think it might be good to have some tricks up my sleeve. Everything is

harder than it looks, and my very rst try out with ‘Orpheus’ was depressing and scary. But I’ve

cheered up now, and eel sure that we’ll have something beautiul next month. O course, in thelast resort there isn’t anything one can’t play on the ten-string alone, so there’s always that way

out in a dicult bar.

My biggest diculty was that in experimenting with this new medium I could not always tell

what could be achieved with practice over time. I spent some time on the middle episodes in par-

ticular, with uncertain results. Eventually I noticed that the third episode in bars 15–22 tted the

range o the six-string guitar very well, and wondered i this might be the key to developing an

exciting choreography. Nowhere else in the work did I have to lean orward and play an extended

passage with retted notes on the six-string guitar and to do so now would not be merely a visual

efect: with the capo setting its pitch a whole perect h higher, the six-string guitar takes on adistinctive timbre. One can hear that the passage is composed (accidentally, it is true) within the

limitations imposed by the capo. Te ollowing scheme emerged:

Episode 1 1–7 Interplay o two guitars

Episode 2 8–14 en-string alone (aer rst bar)

Episode 3 15–22 Six-string alone

Episode 4 23–30 Aer some initial combining, six-string alone

Episode 5 31–44 Very close interplay, including alternating semiquavers and a

nal sweep exchanged between the two instruments

Tis is the scheme adopted in the nal version, shown in the lower system o the example. Te

pivot notes are notated with their own stem. In the nal episode, I wanted to preserve the cross-

guitar pattern beginning in bar 33 and so I proposed the ten-string glissandi to make it possible

to get to the rst note on string ten without any pause.

Even with this scheme, it was impossible or me, in the passages combining the two guitars, to

approach Stephen’s original metronome marking ( = 148–160), because the guitars have to be at

least a little distance away rom one another and I could not move my hands between guitars ast

enough. Eventually I asked Stephen to sanction a lower value to the quaver, about 126, which dou-

bles the tempo o the previous movement, ‘Orpheus’.

It is in an account such as this that the anxiety o the dedicatee emerges: the anxiety o being

the rst one to play the work and the one who asks the composer to approve changes in the score.

Like many perormers o my generation, I have been raised to ascribe a kind o divine status to

the composer. What i my limitations and idiosyncrasies have tainted his creation (Britten’s and

Goss’s)? Te nished score now has a new tempo or others to ollow, and the aster tempo has

been suppressed. Te ten-string glissandi are just one o a number o ‘ashy’ idiomatic eatures

that I added throughout Oxen. I sought the permission o the composer, certainly, but i another



29

perormer should nd them vulgar, that deence, I suspect, will be to little avail: we dedicatees

can be very persuasive, and we know how to give the composer little choice.

But this is the condition o collaboration. In this case, there is no original to return to, no

Urtext . Certainly, another perormer, suspicious o my manipulations, could unearth the rst

dra and reject every one o my decisions. Aer all, it would not be inconsistent with the psy-chology o many a specialist-interpreter to make a distinction between the composer’s ‘divine’

aspect, expressed here in the composer’s dra, and the earthly personality expressed in the same

person’s email, in which he gives me the reedom to devise a choreography or the movement

and discuss it with him. But since the sharing o the guration between the guitars is unrealis-

able in the composer’s dra, a diferent choreography would have to be devised, and the resulting

perormance would no more represent the ‘original’ than mine does. Nor would it represent a

collaboration.

An alternative: publish the rst dra with no indication o how to share the line between the

guitars and a tempo range. Ask the perormer to realise it on the medium ad libitum, and rel-egate my version to an appendix. But this movement marks an extreme in the collaborative proc-

ess: every movement contained problems or me to solve; every movement had its trail o emails.

o try to return the score to a pure, pre-collaborative state would be to create an indeterminate

piece.

Te Dedicatee as ranscriber

Setting aside or a moment the pitch lters, ‘Arethusa’ might be thought o as a transcription o

Britten’s original, a transcription in which I played an important role. As I tried out one option

aer another, looking or the most elegant way to let the ountain o notes ow between the twoguitars, my inability to achieve the suggested tempo the tempo an oboist might naturally take

in the original troubled me increasingly. ranscriptions or guitar that are much harder to play

than their originals are now a commonplace in the repertoire, as the ambitions o guitarists have

grown. A guitarist who chooses to play, or instance, Bach’s First Partita or keyboard, can play

every movement at a credible tempo, to be sure; but the sheer diculty o the transcription im-

poses severe limitations not just on the tempo but on the range o voicings and articulation in

short, on the perormer’s imagination.

Tere is a urther point: ease and diculty can be expressive aspects in themselves, requently

lost in transcription. A simple classical piano sonata can become an Everest on the guitar, and

thus afords a diferent kind o aesthetic experience rom the original. Similarly, when a com-

poser presents me with an extremely dicult passage, I ask mysel whether diculty is an expres-

sive aspect o the music. I not, then I suggest revisions. However virtuosic one’s technique is, the

sound o diculty is unmistakable.

In the case o ‘Arethusa’, though, an important distinction must be made. As much as

Stephen’s ‘Arethusa’ and Britten’s resemble one another on the page, the ormer is really an elab-

oration o the latter. It is true that the two-guitar ‘Arethusa’ does not introduce divisions into

the guration, except in the nal bars, but the constant switching between instruments creates



30

a ceaseless interplay o colours and sonorities that is not part o the oboe original: there are a

greater number o events in the music. On this view, a airer comparison may be not so much

with a transcription o a Bach keyboard partita as with Liszt’s piano transcriptions o Paganini.

In the case o a work such as Liszt’s version o La Campanella (141) the reduction in tempo is

well established in practice. A violinist playing the original (the last movement o Paganini’sConcerto no. 2, op. 7) might typically set the dotted crotchet at around 80; but Liszt’s piano

version has to accommodate such elaborate subdivisions that a tempo closer to 60 is typical

o today’s virtuosi. A similar reduction in tempo would very likely have been expected in the

intabulations o the 16th and 17th centuries, when lutenists realised the original vocal lines with

copious divisions.

All o these versions, including ‘Arethusa’, are elaborations because they are denser than the

originals. Te ratio about 3:4 by which I reduced the tempo corresponds closely with the ex-

pected reduction rom Paganini to Liszt, albeit or diferent specic reasons.

One eature o the transcription remains in ‘Arethusa’, in the choreography I devised or it, theperormer will need to take time to cover the space between the instruments and almost cer-

tainly, adopt a certain rubato to smooth over the bigger diculties. Te composer has to accept

a certain playing style; the perormer is restricted in the kind o perormance he or she can give.

Te lack o real choice in tempo and perorming style can be, in my experience, a source o anxi-

ety in the collaborative process. Can I perorm this piece as it should be perormed? Should I

have asked the composer to rewrite so extensively that I can decide tempo and timing on more

‘objective’, that is to say, imaginative grounds?

ransposition of opics

When conronted with an established classic, I become an interpreter. I assume that the notation

is there to convey a series o gestures which the composer vividly experienced. I have to discover,

i only or mysel, how the piece goes. Te approach o a Glenn Gould, which seems to treat a

work as a structure rom which many characters can emerge, is surely exceptional indeed, it is

or this disregard o character in avour o structure that Alred Brendel attacks Gould in a recent

interview:

[I]t seems to me that he has no interest at all in the character o the piece. He is not aware that it

exists…He does not consider that there might be a character which is indissolubly connected

with the piece, which one must nd and bring to lie. (Brendel 2002, 201)

Working with many composers on their own music has disabused me o the idea I took or

granted as a beginner: that in the process o creation the composer heard an ideal perormance.

Still, the idea remains that what is in the score is there because the composer wanted to express a

character, and that character must imply a certain range o tempi and articulations.

And yet in working on Oxen of the Sun I sometimes abandoned my interpretive ideals, dis-

carding character and gesture while preserving the notes. Te opening episode o ‘Aeolus’ in the

rst dra had the dotted crotchet set at 112–120, but I ound it quite impossible to jump rom one



31

harmonic to another at that tempo. As the recording and publication dates approached, I asked

Stephen i I could x the tempo at 60–66, adding an accelerando two bars beore the next section,

when the original metronome mark became possible. O course, halving the tempo in this way

destroyed the original character o the music. I I had taken that character as the essence o the

music o the composer’s inspiration than clearly I could not have made the suggestion I did.Rather, I would have had to work with Stephen on reworking the pitches to make the original

tempo possible.

Tis latitude is possible because in halving the tempo at the beginning o ‘Aeolus’, I changed

one topic into another, and both are typical o Stephen’s music. Te beginning now sounds lim-

pid, even, glacial, undisturbed: such passages occur in all o Stephen’s extended works.

Something similar happened in the new, semi-improvised ‘Narcissus’. When I started to work

on it, I assumed that the topic was in a sense, improvisation: the textures work within a large

range o possibilities and the tempo can be manipulated according to the physical demands o

the piece. It only has to ow. o learn the piece, I had to experiment with the extended techniquesto nd out what kinds o speeds were possible, how exible the rhythm could be, and how to

achieve a sense o virtuosity. I played all the written notes, but this process could scarcely be com-

pared to working out an interpretation o, say, a Bach lute suite.

Fixity and Fluidity

Like the artist’s sketch, the detail o a photograph, an unnished story, there is a particular

beauty to a piece o music that is not yet xed in its nal version. Improvisation played a distinct

role in the genesis o Oxen of the Sun ‘Narcissus’, or example, was to some extent improvised

gures worked into a coherent shape and in the published score some latitude in rhythm andthe realisation o extended techniques remains. But or me, all o the early perormances o Oxen

had an improvisatory element. I elt ree to play with the musical gestures in search o a viable

and efective work. I did not always ask the composer’s permission beore trying something out

in public: a sin o omission but not an unusual one. Julian Bream once told me that in his second

perormance o ippett’s Te Blue Guitar , he decided to try leaving a ew passages out o the last

movement. Having perormed it that way, he concluded that the movement was much more con-

vincing with the omissions. Only at that point did he phone the composer. Te published score

omits these passages.

Now that the piece has been published and recorded, I have made the crucial decisions based

on two years o perormance, discussing everything with the composer. When an improvisation

crystallises in this way, little is lost or the one doing the improvising: I am ready to ‘settle down’.

But what o other perormers? Oxen of the Sun is now no diferent rom other published works:

a score with more or less set tempi, dynamics and articulation. New perormers must master its

techniques and develop a aithul reading. Tis seems to me more dicult a process than the one

I underwent. It might result in successul perormances, even better ones, but there are perorm-

ances that may never be, because the piece had to assume a nal version. In my accompanying



32

notes to the score I tried to point to some o the places where the perormer can experiment with

the techniques, but ultimately the xity o the notation seems intractable.

Is this why we guitarists are so ond o looking at unedited dras o compositions decades

aer their production o looking or ways to orestall, in retrospect, the collaborative proc-

ess? Perhaps, by placing ourselves in a one-sided conversation with a composer who may not bearound to respond, and supplying the answers we want to hear, we hope to create or ourselves

that sense o improvisatory reedom that might enhance the nal perormance to recreate or

ourselves that blessed, improvisatory state that the collaborator enjoyed. In that case, by leaving

traces o the process, in manuscripts, letters even writings such as this composer and col-

laborator can help to make that process more meaningul, even more honest. So oen, it seems

to me, this essentially creative, deamiliarising process o subverting historical collaborations is

conducted by stealth: it is advertised as a return to the original, to the Urtext , even though it may

entail placing an idealised composer in place o the human being who wrote the piece with a

player in mind and let him or her be part o its creation. Working as a collaborator mysel hasmade me not so much protective o the version or which I acted as midwie as sympathetic to

those who would seek a version o their own.

Can one analyse a composer-perormer collaboration with any rigour? As a reective per-

ormer, I am surprised to discover that or me, the collaborative process is the last bastion o the

purely intuitive. Some things grow best in the dark. And yet some kind o reection is necessary.

At least, by working with composers, I know better what the collaborative process is not . It is not

tampering with a pristine original, or there never was one. It is not transcription in the conven-

tional sense, because that is all too aithul, too anxious to leave the character o the music un-

touched. Is it composing? Tat is to claim too much, but many o the best collaborative perorm-ers are composers manqués. It may well be that any notated score is not only a poor translation

o a composer’s inner imaginings, but also something incomplete. Tose inner imaginings may

not take the orm o an imaginary perormance but something slightly more abstract: something

not quite in time, ready to explode into perormance. In that case, the task o any interpretation

might be not so much to go back, to recover the composer’s imperectly notated intentions, as to

go on: to put onesel honestly at the service o the energy contained in the score, and by supply-

ing one’s own intentions, to nish the work and to accept the double image composer and per-

ormer that inevitably results.



33



2. ‘Unguarded Moments’: A Conversation with

Chris Malloy about his Millions o Mischies (2004)

for ten-string guitar

Jonathan Leathwood, Friday 16 November, 2007

JL Chris, I would like to start by asking you about your experience o the process o

composition o Millions of Mischiefs. From my point o view it was a surprising one. We met

regularly, and or some time you showed me very small ragments o music just a bar or two, as

a rule. I was unable to see much connection between these ragments, and I assumed at that time

that you were trying out diferent techniques and sonorities, perhaps in the orm o tiny studies

that typied your style in some way. Ten, to my amazement, the movements started to emerge,more or less nished, with a number o these tiny sketches incorporated. Can you describe this

rom your point o view? Did you know how these ragments were likely to be used and ordered,

and i not, how did you come up with them?

CM I was writing ragments and there were only two ways in which they were related, or the

most part. One was that they were all designed specically or the ten-string guitar; the other was

that they all used a single set complex. Aside rom that, they were not related in any way and were

not intended to progress rom one to another in any way: a ree kind o experimentation without

regard to where these things would occur in time, i they did at all. As I think you may havenoticed, the majority o the material I sketched in that initial phase did not actually make its way

into the piece. Most o it ended up on the editing room oor, as they would say.

JL But some o it got transormed or led to another little sketch.

CM Yes.

JL I remember that aer you had listened to a good amount o modern guitar music, you

shared your impression o it: that much o it is, perhaps unavoidably, a bit ragmented and a bit

discontinuous.

CM Yes.

JL And you were intending to write something much more continuous. So it seems paradoxical

at rst that you went about it by writing ragments, although they did end up generating some

very continuous passages o music. How did you eventually decide which idea would spring out

o which, and how to order these ideas?

CM It was very arbitrary and a number o the pieces that I’ve written are like that, in that sense.

I have some ambivalence about that kind o process. I think I was able to construct something

34



35

that comes across as having a kind o architecture at times, or a kind o discourse at other times.

But it’s hard to know how other people will hear it when I know that really, what happened was

that I culled together a kind o highlight reel, in a way the things that I thought worked best

when you played them back or me and arranged them into orms that I thought made sense.

But it depends on the movement…JL Well, although the second movement was the rst one I saw completed, my memory is that

many o the ideas that I saw the ones that were apparently just experiments ended up in the

rst movement. Now, this movement, ‘Julia Sets’, does have a very clear architecture because it

always seems to be about the way ideas spread out over the guitar rom low to high, rom the

middle outwards, or rom high to low. It’s one o the things I’ve suggested an audience should

listen or, i I have to say one sentence about the rst movement. Te whole idea o ‘Julia sets’ in

ractal geometry is o course very sophisticated. But I imagine something like the videos you can

nd o, say, the Mandelbrot set, owering out: that’s the image I have or the piece.

CM Good! Well, o the three movements, ‘Julia Sets’ was the one that was the most thoroughly

planned, which is a reection I think o multi-movement orm dating back to the generation

o Haydn, in a way. Very oen we’ve got the most I don’t want to say elaborate but the most

intricate sort o design in the rst movement o a multi-movement orm.

JL Te most argumentative.

CM Yes the most dicult to explain to students! It’s a way o keeping that tradition, that the

most complex orm is the rst one: the exposition o the basic materials and o the discourse o

the piece. So with the exception o the middle section, the rst movement wasn’t really composed,I believe, with that kind o culling rom the sketches. As I recall, the composition o roughly the

opening 50 per cent o the rst movement and the closing 20 per cent or so all that was done

aer the sketching and with just a blank piece o staf paper in ront o me.

JL It’s quite true that we didn’t look at sketches o the opening, at least not until the exciting

passage that begins rom the low C. But there were a number o sketches or the middle part,

weren’t there? I’m thinking, or example, o the big sweeps o harmonics combined with

tremolandos, and then some o the tiny passages o guration, one leading to another. Te

middle part o the movement is much more episodic.

CM Right, and it’s not only episodic, it’s drawing on this tradition that goes back at least as

ar as Baroque da capo aria, perhaps: where the middle section is where we get urthest away

rom the origin. And by the time we’re hearing development sections in sonata-allegro orm,

we’re not just moving ar rom the origin, we’re getting a sense o distortion or disorientation.

And so the episodic eel that comes rom culling ragments into something that seems to have

discontinuity but without any interruption seems compatible with the expectations o the

middle section o a rst movement…i that makes any sense at all.



36

Table 1 Below are all the natural harmonics available on the ten-string guitar, assuming the use o

the ‘modern tuning’ (line 1) deployed in Millions of Mischiefs. The numbering convention sets the

undamental as the frst partial, so that the harmonic an octave above is reerred to as the ‘second

harmonic’ in the table and the text.

Open strings (frequency of fundamental ∞ 1)

p o i u y t r e w q

2nd harmonic, fret 12 (frequency of fundamental ∞ 2)

p o i u y t r e w q

3rd harmonic, frets 7, 19 (frequency of fundamental ∞ 3)

p o i u y t r e w q

4th harmonic, fret 5 (frequency of fundamental ∞ 4)

p o i u y t r e w q

5th harmonic, frets 4, 9, 16 (frequency of fundamental ∞ 5)

p o i u y t r e w

q

6th harmonic, fret 3 (frequency of fundamental ∞ 6; notes in brackets are not clear enough to be useful)

p o i u y t r e w

q

Harmonics in ascending order

u y p

continuously chromatic area

u o t i y u p r o t

y

u

i p e

u

y

o

r

t

i

p

w

y

o t

p

e

r

i

o q

t

i w

r

e r q

w

e

e w q w q q



37

JL Yes it does. I remember that in the early stages o our work on this piece, you described to me

the relationship between theory and creative composition as being symbiotic, or you. How does

that maniest in this particular piece? A ew moments ago, you mentioned a set complex that

binds together the various ideas.

CM By symbiotic, are we talking about the historical tendency o theory to emerge rompractice and vice versa?

JL I think that’s what you meant. Well, it’s or you to say what you meant, but I think that

there is a cra that goes into each piece that you write, that must come partly through thinking

imaginatively about theoretical relationships that haven’t occurred to you beore.

CM Yes I guess so. Some o this is hard to discuss in the same way it’s hard to explain the

elements o grammar unless you teach grammar. You know i you’re talking about a language

that you speak as a native speaker, there are things about vocabulary and syntax that you don’t

oen think about, and when someone who speaks English as a second language asks you how these things work, you may stammer because you’ve never had to articulate them beore. My

harmonic language is something that I’ve developed or decades now and it eels that way to

me. But with the ten-string guitar o course, there were some peculiar relationships between

collections in adjacent strings. At the time I was very excited about them, and I’m embarrassed to

say that I’ve orgotten what some o them were since then.

JL As I understand it, there is the nine-note set that is produced by strings ten to two, without

the repetition o the E given by the rst string. And there is a natural way o completing the

chromatic collection by using harmonics on adjacent strings.[See table 1 for a list of all natural harmonics available on the ten-string guitar ]

CM Yes, the nine-note set that is the complement o the (024) set. Strings 10 through 8 are an

(024) set and there are complementary relationships between the harmonics at the twelh ret

1 Troughout this paper, wherever integer notation is used, = 0, # = 1… = 11. Set classes are given in

prime orm and notated in parentheses with no commas, substituting or 10 and or 11: (02468). Pitch-

class sets are given in normal orm and notated with square brackets and commas: [6,7,8,9,10,11,0,2,4].

Example 1 The complementary relationship between the ten open strings o the guitar, or their frst or

third harmonics, and the second harmonics o strings 8–10.

1. Nine-note set [6,7,8,9,10,11,0,2,4] formed by the open strings (pitch class e isduplicated on strings 6 and 1). These same pitches are available as natural har-

monics an octave higher (2nd harmonic) and two octaves higher (4th harmonic)

p o i u y t r e w q

2. Complementary trichord[1,3,5] formed by 3rd

harmonics of strings 8–10

p o i



38

and the harmonics at the seventh ret [example 1]. Tat was intriguing and there is a spot in the

rst movement where I actually make it explicit.

JL In bar 59 o ‘Julia Sets’ you sound the nine open strings rom the tenth to the second as

natural harmonics an octave above, and again in bar 64 as natural harmonics two octaves

above. Te harp-like sweep and the harmonics, which have a wonderul resonance on the ten-string guitar, are the most natural, seductive gesture imaginable on this instrument, and must

be one o the rst things I played or you when I was trying to interest you in investing so much

energy and time into such an of-beat instrument. Tese sweeps o harmonics give us a nine-

58

63

octave harmonics, strings 2 to 10[6,7,8,9,10,11,0,2,4]

w

f

complementary trichord [1,3,5]

p sub.

w q

f

w q

octave and two-octaveharmonics strings 2 to 10[6,7,8,9,10,11,0,2,4]

p f p sub.

w

complementary trichord [1,3,5] and open b string

q

f

w q 0

Example 2a ‘Julia Sets’, bars 58–66, illustrating the complementary relationships shown in example 1,

though the complementary trichord [1,3,5] is not yet played as harmonics.

Example 2b ‘Julia Sets’, bars 75–6. The trichord [1,3,5] is now realised as natural harmonics. #, # and

are third harmonics on strings 10, 9 and 8. The remaining harmonics are identical in pitch to the open

strings 1, 2 and 3.

75

t o p i y u

3 3

77

pp l.v.

p o i e w t q

l.v.

r t y u i p o poco rit.

33

Example 3 The fnal bars o ‘Unguarded Moments’ realise the complementary relationships o

example 1 entirely as harmonics (c. table 1). Bar 77 begins (ater the tied ) with the third harmonics (a

perect twelth above the open strings) o strings 10, 9 and 8. Second harmonics (sounding an octave

above the open strings) eature to the end o bar 78, and thereater, ourth harmonics (two octaves

above).



39

note set. And then in the tremolando gestures immediately ollowing the sweeps you supply the

complementary trichord: Db, Eb and F [example 2a]. Tese are the complementary harmonics

you were speaking about the third harmonics o strings 10, 9 and 8. In act, at this point they

are not played as harmonics, but they are shortly aer, in bar 75, where they sound an octave

lower than the tremolando gestures [example 2b].CM Yes, and here, at the end o ‘Unguarded Moments’, all o the aggregate-orming harmonics

are heard together [example 3]. I made the complementary relationship explicit in this places,

but or the most part I was just aware o it. I guess this is what intrigued me about the ten-string

guitar as well, that it seemed more conducive to writing chromatic music.

Now, my use o these sets that we’ve been talking about to write the Mischiefs compelled me to

write with an intervallic content that is mostly unamiliar to me as a composer not as a listener

but as a composer. Te sets were basically either whole-tone subsets or corrupted whole-tone sets,

which lent a kind o sameness to the harmonic abric o the piece that is unusual or me. I I had it

to do over again let’s say, i I wrote a second piece or set o pieces or the instrument, I would getmore chromatic. I would do something with more intervallic richness.

JL Well, obviously the whole-tone collection doesn’t yield very diferentiated sets. You can draw

subtle distinctions among, say, whole-tone trichords, but as you say, they tend to sound rather

alike. On the other hand, there are many sets or chords in the piece where one or more notes

don’t belong: what you are calling corrupted whole-tone sets. Was this simple distinction enough

or you to build a vocabulary or the whole piece?

CM I you’re asking whether I depart rom the set complex at some point…?

JL For example, you could take all the whole-tone sets with three notes, our notes, and so on,

and then, working by ear, add oreign notes to those sets or chromatically alter them to give a

large lexicon o sets to work with, all quite closely related. I can imagine a composer saying, Here

are the rules or inventing sets, now I can invent as I like. How systematic were you in developing

these extra harmonies?

CM It was completely systematic. I developed a set complex that you can nd in the sketches…

this one, rom April 2005.

[We examine the set complex, table 2

]

Every musical group in the piece whether vertical or horizontal, or some kind o combination

thereo is drawn rom one o these horizontal groups, as a menu. First in the set complex, right

at the top, you can see the nine-note set that is simply nine open strings o the ten-string gui-

tar not ten because there are two strings tuned to E in the modern tuning, giving us only nine

diferent pitch classes.

JL What are the notes in boxes?



40

- (T) - ()

6 7 8 9 10 11 0 2 4 1 3 5

7 8 9 10 11 0 1 3 5 2 4 6

8 9 10 11 0 1 2 4 6 3 5 7

9 10 11 0 1 2 3 5 7 4 6 8

10 11 0 1 2 3 4 6 8 5 7 9

11 0 1 2 3 4 5 7 9 6 8 10

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 8 10 7 9 11

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 11 8 10 0

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 0 9 11 1

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 11 1 10 0 2

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 0 2 11 1 3

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 1 3 0 2 4

- (T) - ()

6 7 8 9 10 0 2 4 11 1 3 5

7 8 9 10 11 1 3 5 0 2 4 6

8 9 10 11 0 2 4 6 1 3 5 7

9 10 11 0 1 3 5 7 2 4 6 8

10 11 0 1 2 4 6 8 3 5 7 9

11 0 1 2 3 5 7 9 4 6 8 10

0 1 2 3 4 6 8 10 5 7 9 11

1 2 3 4 5 7 9 11 6 8 10 0

2 3 4 5 6 8 10 0 7 9 11 1

3 4 5 6 7 9 11 1 8 10 0 2

4 5 6 7 8 10 0 2 9 11 1 3

5 6 7 8 9 11 1 3 10 0 2 4

- (T) - ()

8 9 10 0 2 4 6 11 1 3 5 7

9 10 11 1 3 5 7 0 2 4 6 8

10 11 0 2 4 6 8 1 3 5 7 9

11 0 1 3 5 7 9 2 4 6 8 10

0 1 2 4 6 8 10 3 5 7 9 11

1 2 3 5 7 9 11 4 6 8 10 0

2 3 4 6 8 10 0 5 7 9 11 1

3 4 5 7 9 11 1 6 8 10 0 2

4 5 6 8 10 0 2 7 9 11 1 3

5 6 7 9 11 1 3 8 10 0 2 4

6 7 8 10 0 2 4 9 11 1 3 5

7 8 9 11 1 3 5 10 0 2 4 6

- () - ()

4 6 8 9 10 0 11 1 2 3 5 7

5 7 9 10 11 1 0 2 3 4 6 8

6 8 10 11 0 2 1 3 4 5 7 9

7 9 11 0 1 3 2 4 5 6 8 10

8 10 0 1 2 4 3 5 6 7 9 11

9 11 1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8 10 0

10 0 2 3 4 6 5 7 8 9 11 1

11 1 3 4 5 7 6 8 9 10 0 2

0 2 4 5 6 8 7 9 10 11 1 3

1 3 5 6 7 9 8 10 11 0 2 4

2 4 6 7 8 10 9 11 0 1 3 5

3 5 7 8 9 11 10 0 1 2 4 6

Table 2 Millions of Mischiefs, set complex. Pitch classes in bold ace correspond to open strings o the

guitar. Boxed pitch classes lie outside the whole-tone collection prevailing in the given set. All sets are

given in normal order. Complementary sets are listed across rom one another.



41

CM Tey mark the wrong notes, the anomalous tones: the ones that don’t belong to the

prevailing whole-tone collection in the given set. Te open strings o the guitar include a

complete whole-tone collection [0,2,4,6,8,10]: six tones, so there have to be three oreign notes

in this nine-note set (G, A and B). With the nine-note set, then, the extra notes are not so

anomalous; in the case o the hexachords, they stand out much more.JL Does the use o the open strings go beyond the generation o the rst nine-note set?

CM You can see that in the list o transpositions or each set, there is always one that consists

only o open strings. Tat’s the one shown in bold ace in each list.

JL So the rst nine-note set is open strings 10 to 2. o get the rst eight-note set you’ve removed

the second string B, leaving us with open strings 10 to 3. Te seven-note set is open strings 10 to 4,

and so on.

CMYes, it’s a systematic subtraction o each highest open string in turn, all the way down tothe (024) trichord in open strings 10 to 8. What’s unusual about this system is that the sets happen

to be complementary. As I mentioned earlier, i you compare the three-note set rom open strings

10 to 8 to the nine-note set rom open strings 10 to 2, transposing one produces the complement

to the other. Te same is true o strings 10 to 7 and 10 to 3, and o 10 to 6 and 10 to 4. Te only

complement that is not directly produced by adjacent open strings is that o the hexachord rom

open strings 10 to 5. Tat’s because the hexachord ormed by the open strings, [4,6,8,9,10,0], is

complemented by its inversion, and the inverse orm o the set happens not to yield purely open

strings at any level o transposition.

JL Te act that you notated all twelve levels o transposition or each open-string set indicatesthat this is much more than open-string music, but perhaps there is a tendency or open-strings,

especially harmonics o the open strings, to come out at key moments. We’ve already discussed

some examples. Still, this set complex describes some striking limitations. o take the trichords,

it seems that the only trichord you’re interested in or the piece is (024).

CM Tat’s correct.

JL So throughout Mischiefs, there are no isolated instances o (026) or the augmented triad? I

don’t recall any.

CM Tat’s right: those would not occur without being closely juxtaposed to other things that

create a larger set.

JL What is interesting about this menu o sets is that although, rom one point o view, there

are a large number o collections to choose rom, rom another point o view it is severely limited.

Te transpositions aside, there is only one o each set size: one nonachord, one octachord and so

on, all grouped in complementary pairs and related to the open strings o the instrument.

2 Te open-string hexachord [4,6,8,9,10,0] orms its complement [11,1,2,3,5,7] at . [JL]



42

CM Starting with nine open strings and subtracting each highest string in turn might sound

somewhat arbitrary, but part o the rationale behind all this is that the interval vector or each o

these seven sets, while not identical, is similar. It’s actually algorithmic: i you graphed each o

these values you’d see a similar contour at six diferent vertical levels [table 3]. It is a rather limited

and small set-complex or me in recent years this is the least amount o paper I’ve used or a

piece.

I’m glad you think it’s interesting. Most people, I think, don’t. I’ve learned not to talk aboutthis stuf when I present my music. For one thing, it’s not very cutting edge. In the case o the

ten-string guitar sets I think there is some interest there, because o this strange property

demonstrated by the open strings. But or the most part, unordered sets as a compositional

technique interested people twenty or thirty years ago, and maybe not so much now. Not a reason

not to use it, though.

JL No, o course. You mentioned that moment in the rst movement where there is

that harmonic sweep pitted against a tremolando gure, and those two gestures express

complementary nine-note and three-note sets rom the very rst row o the set complex. Is

that an example o the symbiotic relationship we were talking about, in that there’s a rhetoriccoming rom saying, Look, here’s this apparently rather abstract idea, and I’m going to present it

in a theatrical way in a rhetorical way? Do you eel that the theoretical underpinnings o your

pieces simply work quietly away under the surace or do they tend to spawn gestures like that?

CM I don’t know about that. At the point you are talking about I was interested in a kind o

maximal density, again being compatible with the nature o a development section in sonata-

allegro orm, as an element o tension. I you are looking or an example o spiralling out rom a

Forte no. prime orm interval- class vector

9-6 (01234568T) 6 8 6 7 6 3

8-21 (0123468T) 4 7 4 6 4 3

7-33 (012468T) 2 6 2 6 2 3

6-21 (023468) 2 4 2 4 1 2

5-33 (02468) 0 4 0 4 0 2

4-21 (0246) 0 3 0 3 0 1

3-6 (024) 0 2 0 1 0 0

The order o the set classes above is the same as the

order o the contours on the graph, rom top to bottom.

7

8

6

5

4

3

2

1

0

1 2 3 4 5 6

interval class

n o . o f o c c u r r e n c e s

i n

s e t c l a s s

Table 3 At let, the interval-class vector or each set class in the complex. At right, the same vectors

displayed as contours on a graph, revealing the similarities between each set class.



43

kind o gestalt , or even a grundgestalt i you will, I would say you might go to the very opening o

the rst movement.

JL Te trichord?

CMRight, the trichord another (024) which is the seed o everything in that complex, in a

sense. And it does expand rom there.

Te outer notes o this trichord are also involved in establishing what we might call a kind

o tonal centre or each o the movements. Te diferent centres are a reection o the rst two

notes o the piece, E and G#. We start with that major third and complete a movement that has,

as its tonal centre, E with a kind o major key scenario or the most part. Te second movement

emphasises Ab with a secondary priority o C: the rst and last notes are Ab. What that has done

is to divide the octave into three equal segments, and to complete that cycle the next logical

thing is or a movement with the priority o C with E. We don’t get that immediately in the third

movement, but eventually it emerges. So there are three movements, three divisions o the octave,each a major third.

JL Te last chord is a low C with an E at the top [example 4].

CM Exactly. So that’s one instance o a relationship between a set that comes rom the tuning

o the instrument and how the whole piece works.

JL Although in this case it’s not the trichord (024), which you were talking about earlier, but the

trichord (048).

CMWell, as I said, it’s the outer notes o the trichord that establish the major third, but it’s alsoa simple multiplicative operation to go rom (024) to (048). Tere’s a relationship there, but yes,

it’s not the same thing.

JL Going back to the last chord o the piece, it’s striking that here at this very moment that you

complete this large-scale plan, achieving the C–E relationship, you do in act depart rom the set

complex. Te hexachord gives six notes o the diatonic scale.

CM Tat’s true.

JL But the chord is another implementation o the logic that produced the set complex in the

rst place adjacent open strings. Te space between the low C and high E is lled in with all theopen strings in between (apart rom the redundant six-string E). And the act that you present

111

fff

Example 4 ‘Primitive Contraptions’, ending



44

the chord as natural harmonics takes us back to the sweep o natural harmonics that brought out

the nine-note set in the rst movement, one o the gestures that makes the set complex so vivid.

It seems to me that there’s an irony here: you’ve described a process that reaches completion on

the last attack o the piece. But at the same time, since it’s based on a whole-tone collection, which

as we’ve said doesn’t on its own yield sets that are strongly diferentiated, the sense o drivingorward to the goal is perhaps not very strong. I you’d remained within the set complex at the

end o the piece the ending would not be nearly so efective. But at the very moment the process

reaches its completion, you depart rom the principle o the set complex, only to reveal the

principle that is really at the basis o it all: these adjacent open strings. It’s only at the very end that

we realise what your real starting point was.

CM We’re rapidly getting into very subjective terrain, but remember that some o my initial

musical training was in jazz. Tat’s why I tend to think o the whole-tone collection as having a

kind o dominant quality: the crucial notes o the dominant seventh belong to the whole-tone

collection, to which you can add a ninth, a at h, and so on. So part o the way I think aboutthe last movement is, i you like, as an extended dominant prolongation that is resolved with

the arrival o the nal chord and the C and E that rame it. Because o its spacing, the last chord

sounds like a C major chord with various added notes.

JL I’ll have to go through the piece again with that in mind, but one sees that idea summarised

at the end o the piece, since you precede that last chord with a ull whole-tone collection

including G, which could be heard as a kind o dominant to that added-note C major chord. For

what it’s worth, it feels that way under the ngers as I play it.

You once described your music to me, at least the music you wrote beore moving to Denver,as an analogue o some o your avourite postmodern buildings, such as the Sony Building on

Madison Avenue by Johnson and Burgee, with its ‘Chippendale roo’, or the Wells Fargo Center

in Denver, with its curved crown. You told me that what attracted you to buildings like that is the

humour o these juxtapositions. Tis nal C major chord seems like that to me not that the rest

o the movement isn’t unny, but the last chord is like a punch line, very bright and a sound that

somehow wrenches one away rom the sound world o the rest o the piece.

CM Yes, it’s another case o that kind o analogy I was trying to draw.

JL So this last chord brings us back to the instrument and its native pitch structures. But the

correspondence between the instrument as a source o compositional primitives and your way o

building up a language or a composition – that’s not necessarily an experience that underlies all

your pieces.

CM It’s not, no.

JL You see, as a perormer I’m very interested in the natural relationship between the pitch

argument o the piece, and the guitaristic eatures that inspired it. Te ending o the whole work,

this added-note C major chord we’ve been taking about, is something quite primitive, as the



45

title promises: just the open strings, played as harmonics. As I said earlier, it might be the rst

thing a guitarist would do on picking up a ten-string guitar. Now composers who write or the

guitar oen eel limited by the sound o the open strings, with its tonal avour. Just to sound

them as a chord, as a grand gesture, can sound quite anticlimactic, all too obvious. But at the end

o ‘Primitive Contraptions’ it sounds as though you wrote this chord, not the guitar, i I can putit like that. Te most striking example I know o this phenomenon is Britten’s Nocturnal , which

sounds the open strings as either stand-alone chords or accompaniment in many passages;

and yet every note sounds like Britten. When there is this, so to speak, generative relationship

between the guitar and the pitch materials, we’re speaking about more than idiomatic writing, it

seems to me.

CM I appreciate that, but I do wonder whether a second solo work by Britten would have been

less tied to those open-string sonorities.

JLSome o the things that we are talking about in the Mischiefs wouldn’t come up in a secondpiece by you?

CM Probably not, no. I always eel, when writing or a less amiliar instrument or combination

o instruments, that I have to go through a long pre-compositional phase o studying the

literature, cataloguing ideas that I nd there and sketching my own ideas in response. I have to

do a lot o that, but not generally as much as I did in this particular piece. And so I think with

this piece, in a way I was just trying to latch on to something rational, you know, given this rather

large, chaotic instrument.

I would say there are a lot o things unusual about composing the Mischiefs. Te most obvious,

on the surace, is that it’s in multiple movements. I think the last time I wrote a multi-movementpiece was in ’91 or something and that was songs. Oh, and a piano concerto that I wrote in ’98

but has not yet been perormed!

JL Are the Mischiefs in three movements because they are written or the guitar, which tends to

attract more episodic music, more pieces made up o short sections?

CM Not necessarily. With many o my recent pieces, I didn’t know what orm they would take

until aer an initial phase o experimentation. I would play with the initial ideas o the piece

and try to see what kind o ormal dramatic contour I could make out o them. And having done

that or quite some time with the ten-string guitar piece, I just realised: You know, I’ve got threediscrete shapes here to work on.

JL Your very next piece aer Millions of Mischiefs was Strange Attractors, Indeed or piano and

percussion, which is an extended single-movement work. Now you’re going to write a piece or

cello and guitar. So do you sit down and contemplate the open strings o both instruments and

see i anything interesting emerges rom them, or…?

CM Well, you know it is in progress and I did think about the open strings, but I chose not to

do anything with them. I chose just to write the piece. It has its own logic but…



46

JL …it’s less tied to something very peculiar to the instruments.

CM Right. I hope that the writing is idiomatic to the instruments, but the structure o the piece

is not related to that; in act, it has a lot in common with the piano and percussion piece.

JLWhy were you so keen to accede to the request or a ten-string piece, rather than sticking

with the saer choice o six strings?

CM I guess or the same reason that mountain climbers say they climb mountains: because

it’s there. It was a challenge. And also because when someone expresses interest in playing a

new piece, whether it’s unded by a commission or a grant or whatever, I eel a responsibility

not only to be true to my own artistic vision, but also to respond to what seems to interest them.

Clearly you wanted to submit something that would expand the literature or this instrument;

clearly you are passionate about the instrument. And as soon as you gave me kind o a tour o the

instrument, my curiosity was really piqued. Just hearing the resonance o a single-line melody

being played on that instrument was something new.

JL And it led to the opening o the second movement!

CM Yes, and its title, ‘Unguarded Moments’, reers in part to the ragility o that kind o single

line. Ten there was the unction o the our additional strings as bass notes that are very close in

proximity…it’s all so diferent. I just wanted to take a stab at it.

JL We’ve already mentioned your perception o much recent guitar music, that it has this

tendency to stop and start. o what extent did you eel you were reacting to your own music, and

to what extent to the ten-string guitar music o other composers in the way you went about thispiece? Because you’ve mentioned to me in the past that the way you approach a composition

is strongly afected by what you did in the pieces you have written immediately beore it. But

at the same time you had to come up with a response and I think it was quite a distinctive

response to the music that you looked at.

CM I’d say that at some point in about ’96, I started one kind o phase that maybe culminated

in this piece. And that phase was not so much a reaction against a previous piece as against a

previous phase: my training really ocused, it seems to me, on harmony, counterpoint, analysis

and very little on instrumentation. I’ve got no regrets about that but or me it was kind o a gap,

when I nished my ormal studies. I responded to that gap in part by developing this habit o starting each piece by exploring as much literature as I could get my hands on and really being

very systematic about it. I developed a method or this.

JL Will you say more about your method?

CM Well, I don’t know i it would interest anyone. But the method is, when I’m writing or

either a less amiliar instrument or combination o instruments, to nd out rom perormers

names o composers and works they nd are rewarding to perorm. We did that. Ten I go and

listen to recordings with the score in hand, multiple times, with a stack o little sticky notes on



47

the side. And whenever something strongly appeals to me more or less arbitrarily I stick a

note there. Usually I mark the time on the recording and I do some copying. I make a le o these

passages that I then draw on or my own sketching, and by the time I’ve got a piece, I think most

o the time you don’t really hear an echo o, let’s say, Maurice Ohana. I think the Mischiefs don’t

sound like Ohana.JL No, not in the least.

CM But Ohana’s ten-string guitar works cast a very long shadow over that compositional

process. A lot o these sketches, a lot o the ideas in the pieces, start rom Ohana. So there’s a

transormation that goes on, but it starts with this method. So I’ve got archived les o all these

diferent instrumental combinations things like this.

JL Do you eel that when that activity o responding and transorming is in ull swing, it eels

more like an aggressive process o reacting to what you like but eel could have been done better?

Or is it more reverential, even afectionate than that?

CM It eels like a traditional process. It eels no diferent rom what C.P.E. Bach would have

done, or J.S. Bach. Tis is the way that composers move orward, and by orward I’m not talking

about some sort o hierarchical evolutionary ladder. I just mean…moving on to something new.

JL I’ll admit that I had my own plan when I began to work with you on this ten-string piece,

and that was to eed you with as many o my own thoughts about what Ohana, whose music I eel

a strong anity or, all the same didn’t take advantage o when writing or the ten-string guitar.

In particular, he loves the extra strings or what they can do in creating the clusters that are so

characteristic o his music, but he doesn’t exploit the clashes you can get by actually retting noteson those strings or playing notes close to those strings chromatically, or or that matter, seeing

what it sounds like when you try extended guitar techniques on those extra strings. Obviously,

you got very much into the spirit o that inquiry, even when you were only using a six-string

guitar to experiment on.

CM Which I tuned as strings ten to ve, much o the time!

JL So it seems as though i I put together my intentions with yours, there is not at all a conict.

For example, I remember giving you a very specic request: could you nd a way o writing

guration specically on strings ten to eight? Something that wouldn’t be more easily done onthe bass strings o the six-string guitar, which is what happens nearly always when you write or

those strings.

CM Yes, I learned that the hard way.

JL But you did nd a way, perhaps uniquely in the ten-string guitar’s repertoire, o writing

guration genuinely idiomatic only to the extra strings, or example in the middle o the rst

movement. When I asked you i you could come up with something along those lines, you

said, ‘Consider it done!’ At the time, I imagined that this was part o the sporting element, the



48

playulness o composing, to incorporate a request like that. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t as

extraneous to the compositional process as I was imagining?

CM We have been talking about the ragments that I wrote at the start o the process; I think

there were something like eighty o them. O the eighty, I don’t know what percentage came

rom existing guitar literature and what percentage rom our conversations, and what came justrom my asking, ‘What would happen i we did this?’ So there’s a mix there. But in the next stage

I treated those ragments equally, regardless o what their origin was. I didn’t make a distinction

between those rom literature and those rom anywhere else.

JL o some extent when you were writing the piece you almost orgot what came rom where.

CM Yes.

JL Did the many unusual sounds and techniques in the piece reect your experience with

electronic music?CM I don’t know. It seems like an important topic or composers generally; a lot could be

written about it. Tis may be another kind o symbiotic relationship: you know, when I write

electronic music I come up with sounds that I hadn’t expected. By trying this process or that, or

combining the two, or by repeating the process there’s a lot o trial and error involved. Actually,

that spirit o trial and error, rom writing electronic music, may have afected the way we worked

together exploring the instrument.

JL I recall that you asked me i I would like a piece or ten-string guitar alone, or or ten-string

guitar and electronics. Although I opted or just the ten-string guitar, the palette o sounds youuse in the rst and third movements strongly suggest, to me at least, the transormations o your

pieces or live instrument and electronics. When I play this work in concerts, I sometimes tell

audiences it’s a work or ten-string guitar and electronics without the electronics.

CM Tere was a good deal o that ree experimentation that I described earlier in working

with electronics. You and I spent many hours experimenting with extended techniques or the

ten-string guitar. I think most o them ound their way into the third movement, ‘Primitive

Contraptions’.

JL Not just the various percussion sounds, but more subtle discoveries involving the ten-

string’s unusual sustaining possibilities.

CM Tere was one discovery which took us both by surprise: sometimes harmonics seem to

grow in volume, long aer they have been plucked. We were listening to various combinations o

harmonics and chords when suddenly that efect came out. I incorporated the efect into this last

movement, rom bar 20 onwards.

JL Let’s talk about the status o all the diferent versions and the process o arriving at the last

one. I think the rst perormance was at the end o 2005.



49

CM Yes, in North Carolina.

JL And I played all three movements, naturally. But we revisited the piece in depth at least

twice more. Recording the piece elt like a landmark, a moment to try to discuss every last little

thing. Is the piece nished?

CM Yes. What do you think?

JL I hope so! Now supposing another guitarist had access to earlier versions o the piece in

act, I did send what I thought was the nal version to another ten-string player, but later you

made a cut in the rst movement. What i he didn’t like the cut and elt strongly that the piece

really was better with the extra passage in it? How would you eel about that?

CM Well, I would want to insist on making the nal decision, but diferent guitarists might

come up with diferent ways to play the same thing; I would want to audition the idea. Unless I’m

writing or solo piano I can never be sure what’s going to come out.JL I elt that it was a great advantage or me to discuss with you the kind o efect you were

looking or, and then sometimes to nd that I, or whatever reason, wasn’t able to achieve it in the

way you had suggested. So in a couple o places I suggested substituting a diferent way o doing it,

or we experimented until we ound a comortable way or me. Well, at some stage that all gets set

in notation, and some poor soul has to take it as a nished piece and learn it. With these pieces

where there has been a lot o trial and error, a lot o experimentation, like your piece or the piece

that Stephen Goss wrote or me, I’ve wondered whether the act o xing what I do in notation

does a disservice to the next person to play it, because they don’t have the advantage o being able

to experiment in the same way and perhaps come up with equally valid solutions that work betteror them.

CM Well, I eel the same way about the Beethoven sonatas or solo piano. He apparently had

these hands that were congured in these odd ways that are very uncomortable or the rest

o us. And somehow we try to do them justice. In a sense, even in modernism, a score is an

opening negotiating position: Here’s what I propose that we do. And I hope that we get as close

as we can. Every score is going to be like that, except maybe or some o the preludes o Te Well-

empered Clavier or something that transcends categorisation; every score is going to have its

idiosyncrasies.

JL For me there is a good deal o doubt involved in the process. It’s great un, certainly, but

I worry about the awesome responsibility, or that’s how it can eel, o getting to decide quite

delicate matters. Do you go through anything similar in the nal revisions?

CM It’s part o being a composer, isn’t it? It’s an intrinsically arrogant proession in which

you are paid to make decisions that other people are expected to live with and an audience is

expected to sit silently and listen. Composers are decision makers, and i you agonise over every

decision then you won’t get very ar. It’s actually the subject o another piece, which I’ll mention



50

without discussing: Why Are Tings So Quiet? is about making administrative decisions o great

import while being detached rom them at the same time. In act, these are not decisions o great

import, but you’re right, they do afect people. Tey require a kind o thoughtul detachment.

JL I elt that I had a certain latitude with the piece between the end o 2005 and the middle o

2007. I I really elt that I couldn’t realise an idea very well then I could come to you and ask i there was anything we could do about it. And so during that whole process, the sense o there

being this piece called Millions of Mischiefs, which I perormed a number o times, had a certain

uzziness about it. Tere were even one or two times when I tried something in live perormance

without rst clearing it with you I think I already conessed that to you! But it made the music

making eel especially alive. o some extent, I eel slightly sorry that other people can’t have it the

same way.

CM Well, then they should commission another piece! Te dedicatee has this privilege. Where

we really see this is in voice in vocal music, including opera.JL Mozart writes to his ather, Tis soprano has a particular ability and I exploited it to great

efect in her aria. And then that becomes a canonical aria or every soprano to master and

perorm, with no opportunity to ask Mozart to adapt it to suit her strengths.

CM Or in another letter he will say, I had to cheat and keep the tenor range low so that this note

would appear to be a high note, even though it wasn’t very high. And that will become canonical.

Even the greatest music may have imperect origins.

JL I we hadn’t had a recording, maybe this piece would have continued to get changed a little

bit every six months, with some new idea being incorporated it might still be changing. Itseemed as though there was a nal crunch: we talked about whether to switch the order o the

rst two movements, whether to make a cut in the rst movement. In particular, the decision

to reorganise the tempi in the second movement was made very quickly, spontaneously in one

o our sessions, just a couple o days beore the recording and without any time to try it out in

several perormances. Now it’s xed like that. Do you eel that recording the piece has drawn a

line under it in that way?

CM Yes, because it’s intended or publication. It doesn’t mean it’s set in stone but it does mean

there is a kind o permanence.

JL A guitarist asked me i I could send him the original…!

CM Was there ever an original? It’s like asking at what point does lie begin.

JL I think there is this idea that the dedicatee corrupts the original, based on their particular

strengths and weaknesses as a perormer, and the best thing the next perormer can do is

get hold o this putative original and not mess with it prove that in act, they are a better

musician because they don’t have to interere; they can do it just the way you wrote it. Tat is my



51

impression o how much traditional guitar repertoire is viewed nowadays that it needs rescuing

rom the dedicatee.

CM I imagine especially music or the ten-string guitar, because it is so special.

JLActually, I’m thinking particularly o the repertoire commissioned by Segovia in the early

twentieth century. He afectionately dressed up the music written or him so as to incorporate

various idiomatic techniques, perhaps more idiomatic than the composers non-guitarists

all o them elt condent o handling. Now I’m not denying that in doing so, he undoubtedly

introduced a number o his own idiosyncrasies. But on the other hand, it seems perhaps a little

perverse that some guitarists remove those idiomatic elements, in order to be more true to the

composer’s ‘intentions’. O course, I may be caricaturing what some o my colleagues are doing,

and making straw men by saying why I think they are doing it, but it seems to me that what can’t

be denied is that the original, i there is one, is no more perect or nished than Segovia’s version.

And having the experience mysel o having to make some tough decisions, based sometimes onmy technical limitations, with your piece, not letting you keep an idea but saying, No, we have to

do something else instead: I suppose I elt worried that one day I’ll be ound out!

CM We’re talking about imposing some kind o limitation on composing and it reminds me o

Stravinsky’s paradox, ‘Te more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is ree.’ Even

though this is the most methodical I’ve been about exploring the possibilities o the instrument

beore writing the piece, still, even though I’m not doing that so much now, everything I write

is collaborative and I think all good composition is collaborative, unless the composer is

prepared to present a solo perormance o his or her own work.

In act, the very next piece I wrote, and the pieces I’ve written since then, ollowed a very diferent path, and a very diferent process, one that began with sketches that were not

ragmentary beginning with the large picture and then zooming in. Still, the revisions

continued up to the recording, and cuts and even transpositions were made. I think that

collaborative process is necessary. And i we could collaborate with every practitioner on an

instrument and get a consensus, that could be interesting…but I don’t really want to!

JL Tat would be the only solution to the problem I’ve been talking about.

CM A bulletin board on line or something! I don’t want to do that. I think the ten-string piece

works. I think other people will be able to make it work.

JL We were alluding to the cello and guitar piece that you are currently sketching, and which I

commissioned rom you with Richard vonFoerster. Up till now we haven’t been collaborating on

it.

CM Not as much, no.

JL We’ve talked only very generally about a couple o possibilities that I’m not sure you’re going

to use in the end.



52

CM Yes, we’ve talked about detuning the guitar to a lower pitch, and we’ve talked about using

beaters on the two instruments. Detuning I’m not doing, and beaters I’ve been thinking about

chopsticks lately…

JL So do you eel as though you’ve gained the experience you need in writing or the guitar, so

that now you’re writing a piece in which you’re not going to get so much into the minutiae…

CM Tis piece will use the six-string guitar, which is a less exotic instrument. And I did

study quite a bit o literature and try to respond to some o that study. Te Brouwer Etudes are

very valuable, I think, or a composer learning more about the instrument. But you’re right, the

pieces I’ve written since Mischiefs have been less collaborative in this way. Still, when we start

to rehearse, I’ll probably ask or one-on-one meetings where we work and continue to rework

things, a process that will continue when we meet two-on-one, and I hear the balance.

JL Are there going to be gurations or textures that are inspired by Mischiefs?

CM No, I don’t think so: inspired by the existing literature or cello and guitar, and the

Brouwer Etudes or guitar and the Popper Etudes or cello, along with some other music. I

think it will be a total departure, though you may look at it and say, It’s Mischiefs or six strings.

Actually it’s ten strings with guitar and cello added together!

JL Te ten-string guitar piece represents an extreme in many ways, doesn’t it?

CM Not in my electronic music but in all o the acoustic pieces I’ve written since Mischiefs, the

process has been very diferent. So one thing I hope will not come out o this discussion is the

impression that every piece that I write starts with voluminous sketches exploring the nature o the instruments, and culling that into a orm. I did that or a while and may do it again, but or

now I’ve moved on to something diferent.



53

Epilogue: The Collaborative Space

It seems almost contradictory to reect on my collaboration with Chris Malloy in the orm o a

conversation with him. Reection implies what an interview seems to preclude: distance, objec-tivity, independence. Yet it is that sense o living inside the collaborative space that I am so reluc-

tant to relinquish even now, aer editing Millions of Mischiefs or publication and recording it

some time ago.

Te collaborative space and the interpretive space overlap considerably, but they difer in the

sense o liberty ofered to the perormer. Te interpreter (as opposed to the collaborator) is sub-

ject to a hallowed, i rarely articulated hierarchy o liberties that allows the most reedom in treat-

ment o expressive indications and least to the notated pitches. Charles Rosen is critical but apt

when he describes

the widespread belie that we ought not to change the actual pitches the composer hasprovided, but that we may eel ourselves less constrained by the indicated dynamics, or

the phrasing or the pedalling: only pitch is conceived as primary, rhythm as slightly less

undamental, while dynamics, phrasing and tempo are demoted almost to the level o

merely helpul suggestions by the composer, who may have miscalculated the dynamics

or misjudged the efectiveness o a tempo, it is oen elt. (Rosen 1998, 66)

Rosen punctures this scale o values when he asks, ‘But why could not lack o judgement a-

ect the pitches as well?’ A close collaborative relationship between composer and perormer, o

course, subverts such a hierarchy rom the very beginning. As emerges rom the conversation on Millions of Mischiefs, the perormer can do much more than rene or limit the composer’s ideas,

to act as a guide in realising a sound world: the perormer can issue the composer with a chal-

lenge. As with other composers whom I have asked to write or the ten-string guitar, I told Chris

rankly what sonorities or textures I had never seen in the ten-string literature and asked him

at the outset i he could incorporate them into the piece. Te passagework on the bass strings in

‘Julia Sets’, bars 78–80; the rapid alternation o right and le hands on diferent strings in ‘Primi-

tive Contraptions’, bars 40–44; the sliding between nodal points in ‘Primitive Contraptions’, bars

64f: these and other textures are in the piece at least partly because I requested them. And other

ideas, such as thecrescendo

in harmonics heard in ‘Primitive Contraptions’ rom bar 20, were

discovered by accident as we tested the sketches at the instrument.

Tis same improvisatory spirit pervaded our meetings even aer the piece was substantially

complete. In the rst dra o ‘Julia Sets’, or example, the return to the opening arpeggios in the

nal section was preceded by a passage that Chris pronounced himsel unhappy with (exam-

ple 5): under bar 97 in his sketches he has written in red biro: ‘Sounds great but undermines [bar

102].’ With the thought o challenging the whole-tone sets to the maximum right beore the re-

3 Te note reads ‘m. 111’ in place o bar 102. Tis is because this dra contained nine extra bars just beore

the passage in question. Similarly the location o the note is really bar 106 in the dra.



54

prise and with the sound o Chris’s electronic music in my ears I responded by improvising a

urry o harmonics that ended in multiphonics in bar 99. Tis is what appears in the nal version,

down to the details o the broken-chord pattern.

In my discussion above o Stephen Goss’sOxen of the Sun

, I suggested that one o the most

interesting ways in which collaboration difers rom interpretation is that the character o the

music the sense o what the music conveys can change radically once it has been tested in

perormance. Tis is not quite the same thing as Rosen describes in his gradations o interpre-

tive liberty: most perormers, as he says, consider it legitimate to adjust the notated expression in

varying degrees o subtlety; but to set out to alter the afect o the music is a ar more contentious

strategy. In the dra o ‘Unguarded Moments’ that I used or the rst perormance, Chris asked

in bars 40–44 or an accelerando to ‘the astest tempo that can be maintained through m. 70’,

which is marked molto rit . It was not until we came to record the piece that Chris asked me to

97

p

94

f

p

poco rit.98

poco rit.

100 a tempo

p

Draft version, August 28, 2005

ord.y

‘sounds great but undermines [bar 102]’

0 0 t

Published version, 2008

0w

e

sul pont.

pp rt 0 0

sul tasto

0

ord.y 0 0 t r

r 0

III

pp

ir t y u i o

p ua m

ii

o

IV

pp

sim.

VI r t

6 66 3

Both versions

f

3

Example 5 ‘Julia Sets’, bars 96–103, with an earlier version o bars 97–99 rom August 28, 2005



55

play it or him without the acceleration, leaving the tempo unchanged throughout bars 40–70,

and decided that he preerred it this way. Tis might seem a trivial enough change, but it goes

against the intuition that a rapid acceleration to virtuosic guration is the indelible ‘inspiration’

o the passage, and that i anything should be changed to make it more efective on the guitar, it

should be the guration. Moreover, i there had been no recording, and hence no more meetingson the piece, this change might never have been made, suggesting that or all its practical sense,

there is a certain allacy in assuming that above all, an interpreter’s task is to intuit the essential

character o a passage o music and put all interpretive decisions at the service o that character,

as implied by Brendel when he invokes the ‘character which is indissolubly connected with the

piece’ (see p.30).

I the collaborative process mitigates the boundaries between composition and interpretation,

it is not only or the obvious reason that it puts the composer and perormer into conversation;

it is also because it osters the coincidence o compositional idea and instrumental idiom that I

explore to some extent in my discussion with Chris. I cited Britten’s Nocturnal , op. 70, as a work that uses chords on the open strings o the guitar without ever leaving Britten’s sound world, but

I could equally have mentioned Carter’s Changes (1983) or Ginastera’s Sonata, op. 47, among oth-

ers. Tis kind o coincidence built into the set complex o Millions of Mischiefs, just as in the

patterns o harmonics shown in example 5 plays with the tension between the autonomy o the

composer’s musical thought and the everyday idiom o the instrument: not just the instrument’s

characteristic sounds but also the most natural congurations o the player’s ngers. Tis is, in

other words, one o many ways in which composers can make convention sound unconventional,

and working it out on the instrument is one o the great pleasures o the collaborative process,

one that is easily transmitted in perormance.And yet in the last resort, Chris was anxious not to exaggerate the role o the instrument (and

by extension the collaborator) in shaping the music. Our discussion o the ending is typical. I

suggested that with the last chord o the work, he had departed or the rst time rom the gov-

erning set complex to reveal its underlying, purely guitaristic idea: the harmonics on the open

strings (see our discussion o example 4). In this way, as it seems to me, sonority overrides the

set complex, and idiom trumps idea. But Chris never explicitly assented to this line o reasoning,

and I had the impression when talking to him that even i he did not contradict me, looking at

the ending in this way had less meaning or him than or me. Instead, Chris spoke about his cor-

rupted whole-tone sets (generated by the set complex) as having a dominant-seventh kind o sig-

nicance, implying that or him, the nal chord’s main signicance was as a tonic that ‘resolves’

the set complex: aer that nal chord has sounded, the characteristic chords o the set complex

cannot be heard again. But this way o looking at the ending would obtain no matter what instru-

ment the music was written or, even i it has a very particular application in Millions of Mischiefs.

I continue to nd signicance in my own perspective because in perormance it strikes me as

more than idea, but rather as a tactile experience. Because this nal chord is the key that discloses

the hierarchy o instrument and set complex, I have all the more motivation to make it as reso-

nant as I can.



56

Tere is a reticence, too, in the way Chris realises his discovery o the complementary rela-

tionship between two sets o harmonics on the ten-string guitar, explored in our conversation

and examples 1–3. In act this relationship is never made completely explicit in gesture, never ex-

pressed in raw orm either in the nished work or in a sketch. As we saw in example 2a, bar 59

o ‘Julia Sets’ presents the nonachord [6,7,8,9,10,11,0,2,4] as a sweep in harmonics across thestrings o the guitar, but the complementary [1,3,5] trichord is sounded as retted notes, not har-

monics. When the trichord [1,3,5] does occur as harmonics, they are absorbed into a larger set o

harmonics (example 2b). In this way, although the idiomatic relationship, this accident o the ten-

string guitar’s tuning, motivates the pitch organisation and generates compositional inventions,

the guitarist never quite gets to experience it under the ngers.

None o this is enough to undermine the implication that the collaborative process will tend

to push composers towards a very physical realisation o their sound world towards a usion o

instrument and compositional design. My claim is that the perormer’s immersion in the compo-

sitional process naturally leads to a subtly altered perormance practice: the afect o what I havecalled the collaborative space. As we have seen, early perormances o a work tend themselves

to become part o the compositional process. Te work has not yet completely crystallised. Te

perormer has been ofered the rare opportunity to contribute to the developing composition. In

the rst perormances, one is still engaged in that development: do these ideas, aer all, work? As

long as this question retains its urgency, one must try to answer it by exploring everything that

relates to the perormance: not only agogics, nuance, colour, but even the shape o the work or

details o voicing and other matters o pitch the very aspects that as Rosen has suggested, per-

ormers tend to suppose they are disallowed rom tampering with.

How, then, might subsequent perormers approach music that is the outcome o a close col-laboration? What o the uture lie o the piece? I I am reluctant to leave the collaborative space,

am I equally reluctant to allow the piece to leave it, to be taken up by other perormers as a xed

text? Tis is the subject o the last part o my exchange with Chris Malloy, and it is hard to gain-

say Chris’s opinion that the dedicatee has or a time a unique privilege that cannot last orever or

be easily conerred on another. Tis, however, is not to say that one cannot extrapolate rom the

collaborative space and reconsider where one places the boundaries o perormance practice: in

other words, to engage critically with all aspects o a composition, even one written in another

era, or a diferent perormer and audience.

Tis imaginative leap is clearly indispensable when one considers the increasing importance

o guitar works that did not progress ar beyond what Chris calls in our discussion an ‘open-

ing negotiating position’. Te manuscript o Cyril Scott’s Sonatina (1927), or instance, recently

rediscovered by Angelo Gilardino in Segovia’s archives, bears a note in the composer’s writing

implying that he was not happy with the ending opening the door, surely, to some kind o ne-

gotiation with Segovia or a potential publisher. Te piece developed no urther, however, because

Segovia (aer expressing doubts about the work in a letter to his riend Manuel Ponce) tried out

only the rst movement a couple o times in concert beore giving up on it entirely (Gilardino

2001a, 5). In the rst perormance o the complete Sonatina in 2001 (on November 26 in the



57

Wigmore Hall), Julian Bream took Scott at his word, rounding out the orm o the Finale with a

recapitulation o previous stated material, along with sundry modications to the guitar writing

throughout. Te accompanying programme notes by Graham Wade (2001) tried to justiy the

redesign by speaking misleadingly o missing pages in the manuscript, prompting a vigorous re-

buttal rom Gilardino (2001b). And indeed, this was something quite diferent rom nishing anincomplete work, or the Sonatina has since been recorded several times with the ending as Scott

wrote it (Hoppstock 2002, or example). Rather, it was a critical response to the manuscript by the

most prominent collaborative guitarist o the latter part o the twentieth century, one that took

the undamental instability o the text as a given.

But the guitar’s major repertoire o the last hundred years is dominated by unstable texts, as

more and more manuscripts are coming to light that show works in various stages o revision. It

is a problem that some guitarists have tried to solve by privileging versions that appear to precede

any intervention by the dedicatee, particularly in works dedicated to Segovia: I reerred above

to Hoppstock’s edition o Ponce’s works (2006), but there are also new older versions o major works by such composers as Mompou, Castelnuovo-edesco and urina available under the

Bèrben imprint. O course, these editions with their acsimile reprints are ascinating and it is

not my intention to prejudge one or another version. But it is worth underscoring the danger that

such editions hold to perormers looking or a denitive text. By attempting to write the collabo-

rator and dedicatee out o the history o a major work, we risk only reinorcing the idealistic hier-

archy o composer and perormer that Richard aruskin skewers in a Wagnerian satire:

Te producers o timeless works are the gods, exulting in their liberation rom the social

(‘extramusical’) obligation and issuing peremptory commands. Te recipients o the

commands are the Nibelungs, bound scrupulously to carry out the masters’ intentionsor the sake o their glory, their own lives pledged to a sterile humdrum o preservation

and handing-on. Tat is the mythology o our concert lie. (aruskin 1995, 10–11)

Te genesis o the guitar’s major modern repertory in collaboration and its consequent inveter-

ate instability suggests that there is nothing denitive to preserve or hand on, unless by taking

the shortcut o accepting one or another text without question. Instead, guitarists may have to

become used to placing themselves into something resembling the collaborative space in order to

engage critically with their repertoire. At present, we are only just beginning to gather materials.

Understanding them may soon become the most urgent question in guitar scholarship.



Abbate, C. (1991) Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century .

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Brendel, A. (2002) Te Veil of Order: Conversations with Martin Meyer . ransl. R. Stokes. London:Faber.

Galbraith, P. (2004) ‘Impressionism on Eight Strings.’ Available: <http://www.paul-galbraith.

com/engl/bio.htm>, menu-item 2 [accessed August 12, 2009].

Gilardino, A. (2001a) ‘Te Composition.’ In the Foreword to Scott, C., Sonatina for Guitar , ed. A.

Gilardino & L. Biscaldi. Ancona: Bèrben: 5–6.

—. (2001b) [Open letter posted on various Internet messageboards to ‘riends and colleagues’

responding to Wade 2001.] Available: <http://www.ga-usa.com/classical-guitar/projects/andres-segovia-gilardino.htm#Subject:%20Cyril%20Scott%2011/2001> [accessed March 29,

2010].

Goss, S. (2001) ‘“Come Heavy Sleep”: Motive and Metaphor in Britten’s Nocturnal or Guitar,

Opus 70.’ Guitar Forum 1.

Hoppstock, . (2002) [Sound recording] Memories of the Alhambra. Perivale, Middlesex: Signum

( 122-00)

Kozinn, A. (1981) ‘Narciso Yepes and his 10-String Guitar.’Te New York imes, November 22:

21–22.

Ponce, M. (2006) Guitar Works: Urtext , ed. . Hoppstock. London: Schott

Rosen, C. (1998) ‘Freedom o Interpretation in wentieth-century Music.’ In Composition–

Performance–Reception, ed. W. Tomas. Aldershot ()/Brookeld (): Ashgate: 66–73.

aruskin, R. (1995). ext and Act . Oxord: Oxord University Press.

Wade, G. (1986) Maestro Segovia. London: Robson.

—. (2001) [Program notes to Julian Bream’s Anniversary Recital at the Wigmore Hall, November

26, 2001.]

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