New Music Upload! (Classical Guitar Edition)

Greetings, friends!

I have uploaded another new piece of music called Amaryllis. This piece is written for classical guitar. It is dedicated to my Great Aunt Sue Curtis on her recent birthday. Happy birthday Aunt Sue!

You can listen to Amaryllis here.

Amaryllis is comprised of three movements: Dawn to Dark, Effloresce, and Autumn Chill. Each movement is based off of the opening four note motive introduced in Dawn to Dark: E, D#, C#, D. In this first movement, the motive is played over top of quick arpeggios in 13/8 time (broken into alternating measures of 7/8 and 6/8 so as not to drive the performer crazy). In Effloresce, the motive is still in the upper voice, but it is played an octave lower and over top of some functionally and harmonically ambiguous chords. Finally, in Autumn Chill, the motive is transposed down a perfect 4th from the original and the second note is changed from a half step to a perfect 5th. Most of this movement is based around 15/8 time (broken into 7/8 and 8/8 for readability).

Amaryllis is full of rich harmonic textures, due partially to the use of open strings in many chords. For example, in the Dawn to Dark, chords are constructed by sliding a power chord (perfect 5th diad) around the neck of the guitar while leaving the high B string open. This results in a full, open sound. A similar technique is used in Autumn Chill. In Effloresce, I focused on using chords that were either harmonically ambiguous (such as an F, Bb, E triad), constructed off of scales like the whole-tone scale, or by keeping chords out of root position. This creates a good amount of harmonic tension and a very satisfying relief when more conventional chords appear.

The artwork I created for Amaryllis was made in the program Silk (check out http://weavesilk.com/ by Yuri Vishnevsky). I based it somewhat loosely off of an amaryllis bloom. I'm sure that they don't actually grow the way I have depicted, but it looked cool. After creating the blooms in Silk, I imported them into MS Word to create the rest of the title. Thanks again as usual to my wife Jessica for helping me figure out how to force Word to do my bidding, (she is truly the all-powerful master of MS Word) and for being a super sharp proof-reading / formatting genius.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! I hope you enjoy listening to Amaryllis as much as I enjoyed composing it!

You can listen to Amaryllis here.

Best,

Nathan C. Curtis

#NewMusic #NathanCurtis