Sonata for solo guitar

I wrote Sonata for solo guitar after discovering the music of Arthur Kampela, which led me to develop a technique for improvising percussively on the guitar. This ultimately gave me material for what would become the finale of the Sonata. I extrapolated core pieces of material from this improvisation and built out the two sections which precede it.

1 — mundos vacios (“empty worlds”)
2 — polifonía infantil (“childish polyphony”)
3 — locutorio percusivo (“percussive phonebooth”)

The second movement is my favorite. I wanted to perforate seriousness in a way a little a chance to be a little cheeky with an austere piece in the guitar repertoire: J. S. Bach's Fugue in G Minor. Scioglimento il tempo means "melting/dissolving the tempo."

Program Note

The work takes inspiration from the paintings of Remedios Varo, finding the only portal through which to access the worlds she creates in the theoretical paradigm of imaginary time:

“One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real, as what we call real time... Imaginary time is indistinguishable from directions in space. If one can go north, one can turn around and head south; equally, if one can go forward in imaginary time, one ought to be able to turn round and go backward... In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary of space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.”

— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time