Although I’ve written quite a lot of easy guitar pieces for sight-reading practise, Attitudes is my only professional-standard guitar piece – it was commissioned by the guitarist Martin Plackett in 1991 and it gave me a real opportunity to explore guitar sonority and colour.
It’s in three movements, and I took the standard guitar tuning of EADGBE (going upwards) as a way of making decisions about the melodic and harmonic content of the piece. It’s possible to use those tuning pitches to create a kind of mode by placing the same pattern of intervals above each one. Sadly I can’t find, and probably haven’t kept, the original sketches for the piece (which would have been interesting, for me, at any rate), but, as far as I can remember, I created motivic cells which were then transposed to begin on each of the open strings. So, there is something there for the musical analyst, perhaps – but, for the listener and player, what I hope is more interesting is the range of colour that the guitar can produce and which I aimed to utilise.
The first movement, ‘Dramatic’ begins with an improvisatory rising melodic line. I’m particularly fond of using the guitar as a melody instrument, as this gives the player optimum opportunity to colour and vary the sound. Then, later, contrast is provided by using the guitar chordally, and also a section with harmonics. Finally, the opening melody descends to where it started.
The second movement ‘Capricious’ is very fast, in strict time but with no clear time signature, and apart from a few contrasting chords played on the lowest two open strings, and a central pesante section, the melody is played in high position on the upper strings, giving a fleeting and evanescent atmosphere.
The final movement, ‘Pensive’, begins in what is perhaps a more traditional way – melody in the upper strings while the thumb picks out isolated bass notes or chords. Within that texture there is a big range of colour, though, and gradually the melody takes over and develops into a dramatic unaccompanied section moving across all the strings, returning, in the final section, to the opening texture, and moving to a coda which emphasises the pull between major and minor third which characterises the motivic units used in all three movements.
For me it’s been really interesting to revisit a piece that I wrote more than 25 years ago, and I hope you enjoy it too!
You can hear it, played by its dedicatee, on YouTube. The work isn’t published (or even computer-set) but you can get very legible hand-written copies from me, and I’d be happy to send a pdf to any guitarists interested in playing it.