Friends, ten meditations for solo guitar published by Gyre

NOW PUBLISHED BY GYRE MUSIC

Friends

by Frank A. Wallace

ten meditations for solo guitar dedicated to those who dare to love

Preview: download two free sample scores from Friends

Click here or on image to purchase complete score at Gyre Music

Duration: 16 minutes; 10 pages

Difficulty level: Moderate, full range of guitar, a variety of textures and dissonant chords, few extreme stretches, but no virtuosic chords or fast scales

Written: August, 2018

Friends are those…

…who support, love, and stay by your side. Friends are those you have fun with, a great dinner, the movies, a ball game or a hike. Friends are not acquaintances on Facebook, in general. But I have made wonderful friends in far flung places through Facebook. Friends are sometimes a surprise, sometimes a disappointment. Friends don’t live on a TV show.

Writing Friends

I started Friends in December 2017 at the same time as Cyrcles, my Sonata # 3. One night, our young friends Aki and Ben came over for dinner. After they went home, I sat down to begin a short song for Aki, an inspirational young woman from Japan. It was tuneful, a little quirky, and featured a five note phrase in 5/8 derived from her full name – Akiko. But I was in the middle of a big project, and so didn’t have time to finish the piece.

I returned to Aki’s piece in early July. Soon other friends had their names on the top of a page of music. ‘Ben’ appeared, and ‘Nina’, and ‘Aaron.’ I realized these were people who dared to say a little extra, to call or write to see how I was doing after several surgeries and a bout with ocular melanoma – a rare form of eye cancer that still threatens my life and my vision in one eye. I jotted down the names of others who put out a little extra for me and ended up with ten people. It’s not everyone who helped or sympathized, so don’t feel bad if you are not on the list!

I must put in a disclaimer: each musical work does not attempt to portray the individual. Lord, some of you might be very confused if that were the case. Some of the pieces are tuneful, but most are quirky and enigmatic, tiny composition exercises to keep me occupied and free of worry. They emerged directly from my soul with little interference from the head – contemplative, but emotional meditations.

The Music – Meditations

My original intent was not to create a unified extended work. It was simply to craft meditations for my soul, ones that express in pure sound what I am feeling. However, after the fifth piece I began to repeat small motives in the rest of the works. ‘Sandy’, #7, is the only piece that I wrote for the dedicatee in the sense of being descriptive. Sandy stopped by to show me his latest set of jazz chords he had been studying and mentioned that he and his teacher were exploring possibilities with Eb tuning of the sixth string. So I used the Eb sixth and made my humble attempt at sounding ‘jazzy’.

For any geeks in the crowd, I will note that one sleepless night, I imagined chords and melodies based on expanding or contracting intervals. And so #5, ‘Aaron,’ begins with a rising series of intervals that each contract by a half step, resulting in perfect fifth, diminished fifth, perfect fourth, major third, etc. down to a half step. The next phrase reverses the sequence and subsequent phrases borrow from the resulting sonorities. Nadene, #7, returns to this basic concept starting 1/2 step, whole step, minor third, etc.

Thank you all for your help, support and inspiration.

Read more about Frank Wallace on the About page.

All Gyre compositions are ASCAP
Copyright ©2018 Frank A. Wallace
Cover photography and design by Nancy Knowles
All rights reserved.
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