Thing is, it's going to be tough to play for me. I know at least on or two guitarists who could tackle it but they're professionals and probably too busy with their own careers to play the piece for me. :) So I figure I ought to tackle it myself.
I think I have overestimated the damage that happened to my hands when I got a repetitive stress injury ten years ago. It was considered tendonitis bad enough to be treated like it was carpal tunnel syndrome and ever since then I have had to be cautious about extended sessions of typing or repeating actions. Then again, given how weak my hands can feel playing barre chords I used to strum for minutes on end without tiring .. .maybe I haven't overestimated the damage that RSIs can have. A six minute song in F major on a classical guitar should NOT be tiresome to play! Same song on a high action steel-stringed Martin on the other hand ... .
Now I imagine you're possibly reading this blog and asking how it is that I write posts of this or that length. I type fast. Unlike some folks I have met I am willing to say that I think faster than I type so that when you see a long blog entry from me it means that I'm actually thinking this through. Some blog entries I have read over the years lead me to wonder if some people type far faster than they think, I mean actually think, not the curious flaspoints that register emotion that passes as a substitute for actual thought. But I digress ... .
Anyway, injuring your wrists and hands makes guitar-playing a more careful enterprise. So I have finished a couple of preludes and fugues for solo guitar this year and the plan is to rehearse them to the point where I could play them somewhere.
To be honest, I'm not that inspired to do it. I don't think there's much of an audience in Seattle waiting for preludes and fugues for solo guitar. On the one hand the concept of a prelude and fugue for guitar is pretty esoteric and it may not inspire listeners to sit around and, you know listen. On the other hand, guitarists are apt to look at a fugue for solo guitar, politely smile, and never think of the thing again. I have run a few pieces by guitarists in Seattle and one of them was pretty straightforward about not making any promises to play the piece. I know. I have talked with alumni from my alma mater who work as professional musicians who have made the rather grim yet matter-of-fact observation that guitarists in Seattle are flaky. I must count myself, probably, as one such flaky guitarist. Leaning more toward composer than guitarist because it is easier for me to conceptually work out that a fugue in C sharp minor can be composed for a single guitar than to, say, play the piece.
And I have had people tell me that my music can be technically demanding, possibly more demanding than the musical material warrants. This would give me pause were it not for the fact that many guitarists can play stuff that I struggle with, so it seems that at some level what a classical guitarist once wrote me in a bit of pique may be true. He told me that the dirty secret about most professional guitarists is that they're pussies who won't tackle the really difficult repertoire because it's easier to stick with the stuff that sells and he named names, which I won't do, not least because it wouldn't be polite and also because I haven't heard these guitarists.
See, I have come to classical music roundaboutly by way of Pinkfloyd, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, and U2 and got into it regressively in terms of chronology. I worked back to Dylan's influences and then, to put it far too broadly, just fanned out in my examination of musica history and stopped somewhere around Mauchaut and tenative investigation of Greek modes (no, not the dorian mode you're probably thinking of, the few scholars who have tackled Greek modes think the ecclesiastical modes or "Gregorian" modes are probably backwards or upside down variations of the actual Greek modes, and the modes have changed or varied depending on millenia and location ... but I'm not going to get into that just now).
What I DIDN'T do along the way is really give much thought to classical guitar. Most of the famous works for the guitar that are popular now weren't even written for the guitar. Any given Albeniz work like "Asturias" is a piano work transcribed for guitar. Rodrigo never played two notes on the guitar with any success. While it is not unheard of to say Bach wrote the best music for the guitar he didn't (though he wrote a good chunk of the best music ever written in the history of the world, there, I've said it). He wrote for things that could be sort of kind of cousins to the guitar, or perhaps for an instrument was the guitar's fathers cousin's former roommate. Most of the works that are popular on the guitar I've heard played are really adaptations of works for violin or cello. The violin sonatas and paritatas are great because the violin is a treble clef instrument, and the guitar has the transposing treble clef where everything is played an octave lower.
Meh, too tired to care about wrapping this up in some literary way.
