A diverse collection of miniature works for intermediate to professional guitarists, each volume of Once Around the Sun offers a rich blend of styles, techniques, and musical characters for performance and study.
Additional Details:
Once Around the Sun is a collection of 365 miniature guitar pieces of mostly 1.5 – 4 minutes duration, offering a genuine musical diversity in style and genre across a range of technical requirements and compositional strategies.
Each is idea-based with development taking various shapes and trajectories. Form and development are usually imminently identifiable as using traditional approaches with others having an improvisatory or through-composed nature.
The majority of the pieces are suited to professional and intermediate guitarists. It is recommended that the pieces be sampled according to the users interest rather than in the presented order.
The collection presents a stylistic range across the musical spectrum including:
The collection is valuable to both performers and teachers as every piece explores an identifiable technique, style or aesthetic.
For performers, the works provide a wealth of material to meet almost any occasion or audience with modernist colours and gestures, minimalist canvases, traditional character pieces and stylistic diversity.
They can serve as encores, focused interest pieces, virtuosic displays and stylistic forays. There are also many instances in the collection where pieces can be garnered into suites of the performer’s choice. Latin American forms, Jazz balled pieces, exotic gestural works, and others are presented with thematic or style-based development and treatments.
For teachers the collection is an in-depth resource of technique and musical stylistic embodiment providing challenges and new learning experiences which can then be applied in other instances both within and outside the collection.
The pieces are grouped in 4 volumes composed from late 2016 through early 2022. My purpose was to produce new work as a daily artistic exercise with the works being of use to intermediate and advanced learners and professional concert guitarists.
The planned output and approach called for a commitment to invention, creative and craft-based development, aesthetic exploration and problem solving as required in any art form. As such, the collection can be seen as one of musical inventions.
Almost all of the pieces occur in the collection chronologically, in the order they were composed. It is recommended, however, that the user ought to browse for pieces that attract interest according to one’s needs and interests.
Universities, academies and conservatories may obtain the scores by paying an institutional license fee for a 3 year license to reproduce in house for student use only.
Performance note: Unless otherwise indicated in the score, all Da Capo or Dal Segno repeats are to be made.
The compositions in Once Around the Sun are licensed for personal and individual professional use only. Unauthorized distribution, resale, or sharing is prohibited. Arrangements require prior written consent from the composer.
