# Guitar Duo



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

Hi,

I'm sharing with you my new guitar duo, which I composed late 2019 and early 2020 for a contemporary guitar music festival held annually here in Helsinki. Unfortunately due to covid, that festival was postponed for a later date. Luckily I managed to get the guitarists record the piece already now.

The work relies heavily on the usage of natural harmonics. They enable large sustained chords in high registers that would be otherwise hard or impossible to do with the guitar. They also give the guitar a nice bell-like sound. The passages that don't use natural harmonics, are also built on the idea of letting the guitar vibrate as much as possible, although occasionally I depart from this altogether for more stormy sounds.

I've notated the harmonics as follows: the guitarist plays the harmonics from the correct string and position (they are notated above their stems with a number which resembles the string and a roman number which resembles the correct position). For quickness of reading the sheet music, the actual notes are marked according to the sounds they would produce if one would press them normally. The actual sounding pitch is marked on the upper stem. The sounding pitches are notated only in the "study score" which I've posted on youtube. The players played the piece from a performance score, where this information was omitted in order to save space on the music sheet. I might change this approach later on. I hope you enjoy it, I'm quite happy with their performance!


----------



## Guest (Jul 25, 2020)

I'm a classical guitarist and liked it very much. You write well for the instrument--do you play it? Your music sounds challenging but idiomatic.


----------



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

Thanks Fugal! I am originally a classical guitarist, although I don't really play anymore actively. However, for this project I picked up the instrument to search for the most idiomatic way to write my ideas down.


----------



## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

..this ex jazz guitarist enjoyed it too. Can you give us an insight into your process?


----------



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

Thanks Mike! About the process of composing this piece: I had been noodling around the opening e, g#,g, a-motive with my guitar already since probably 2014 or 2015. It was originally intended for a collective composition we were planning with my fellow students at the Sibelius Academy. However, this project never proceeded any further so this idea was left unused. When I got commissioned this piece, I decided to use the idea again and build the piece from that. Originally I wanted to create the piece solely from natural harmonics, like Fernando Sor did in some of his guitar etudes but I felt it was too limiting.

In the beginning of the composition process, I mapped out all the possibilities with the natural harmonics and pretty much just started improvising with them and wrote the ideas down as they came to me. Little by little, I had the initial skeleton of the opening of the piece and and an idea of the general form. I usually start all of my compositions by improvising ideas like this. Usually I use the piano, but since I have a past as a guitarist, I felt it was easier to work with it on this one.

I had originally planned on having all the non-natural harmonic materials to be very contrasting to the dreamy natural harmonic parts, but pretty soon decided that an overarching dreamy quality fits this piece better, hence I continued the idea of sustaining as many notes as possible and dividing the melodic lines into the two instruments as often as possible.

While composing this, I didn't listen to much of other guitar music. However, I can see in retrospect that certain guitar pieces that I love, such as Henze's Royal Winter Music, Tippet's Blue Guitar, Britten's Nocturnal after John Dowland and Walton's Bagatelles have to some extend influenced this piece.


----------



## TalkingPie (May 15, 2020)

I love how crazy it becomes from the 5:15-ish mark onward


----------



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

Thanks TalkingPie! I often try to raise the intensity-level of the piece towards the end. That 5:15 onwards part is quite hard to perform effectively but I think the guitarists did a great job!


----------



## Guest (Aug 8, 2020)

While watching this again on YT instead of the embedded version, I discovered another of your guitar works--very impressive--and also very demanding! Have you published it?


----------



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

Fugal said:


> While watching this again on YT instead of the embedded version, I discovered another of your guitar works--very impressive--and also very demanding! Have you published it?


Thanks! It's not published yet. However, it will be available via Music Finland's sheet music archive later this autumn as pdf (free) and as a printed score (the price is based on the amount of paper used for a score + postage or something like that). Music Finland is a non-profit organisation that promotes Finnish composers and composers residing in Finland. They are not a publisher per se, but give composers an ability to share their music in electronic or printed format via their web service. I can let you know when it becomes available over there. I'm also considering uploading the score to nkoda or some another similar monthly subscription-based sheet music service.


----------



## Guest (Aug 9, 2020)

Thank you, that would be great.


----------



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

Here's a live performance of the piece, performed by the same guitarists who recorded the piece. The sound quality is not superb but I think their performance is:


----------



## waldhoerer (Oct 12, 2020)

This is very good music, a personal style and lot of tension! Fast notes in both guitars after 5:48 are extreme cool!
Perfect played performance, too!


----------



## pkoi (Jun 10, 2017)

thanks for listening waldhoerer!


----------

