Incantations for solo guitar

The 5 brief miniatures that make up “Incantations” were originally composed as solo guitar pieces in the collection of guitar works entitled Once Around the Sun. They came about during my reading of a biography of Pablo Picasso who thought magically about art both in making and partaking.

Picasso had a conviction that art had magical powers. Perhaps this was not definitively in the thought that it exercised influence over material events, but his feeling for and conceptual use of supernatural themes, evident in his exploration of African sculpture and the like, empowered him to see the other-worldliness of things and paint them with resolute purposefulness. This reimagining art-making enabled novel expressions through a broader, more fecund source of new ideas, techniques and strategies. This is my aim with these pieces.

I mostly see art and music particularly, as evidence of humans being “supernatural”. This is not only because of the creative act itself, but also in the reception of the created thing by its audience as individuals and audiences may very well respond as if the artistic work has become part of their own world.

In thinking about this, I decided to write some pieces that were expressed as if they might be some sort of gestural spell.Form and structure are extemporaneous with momentary melodic mumblings, chants and perhaps shrieks, along with rhythmic gesturing, fluctuating dynamics and a spirited use and reuse of materials.

The approach is often episodic, abrupt and riddled with sparse outbursts of idea or emotion. Perhaps one can imagine the musician as magician who, in their musical “spell- making", coax some magical presence to emerge. These musical apparitions are ephemeral in nature - here, and then gone, leaving behind haunted traces of their passing.