I’ve taken a short break to consider a lot of things in my work on Moon Songs, and during this time managed to write a guitar prelude. It’s totally unmeasured, which is a first for me. There’s a way that I play it, but I’m literally curious to see what other rhythms other guitarists will come up with, and what sorts of pitch collections will be created by using different durations.

I kind of came up with the idea while playing Villa-Lobos Estudio No. 1 as a student. My teacher would have me play through the piece numerous times, each time accenting a different beat or finger, and taking note of how drastically different the same notes could sound. It was a real eye opener.

When it came time to print the score I came to the issue of spacing, or how far apart the black dots are on the staves. In one printout I had them quite close together, until I realized that this might encourage a player to race through the piece. I reprinted it with a lot more space, and I think it may cause players to take their time with it. Ultimately I’d like them to do whatever they want, but my own preference is to play it relatively slow, with a good bit of tempo variation, and so I settled on the version with the wider spacing. So you know what I’m talking about, here are both versions as .pdfs:

Wide spacing      Narrow Spacing

With that, it’s back to work on Moon Songs.