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.
Free samples to download:
Form and development are often easily identifiable as using traditional approaches or having an improvisatory or through-composed nature. The majority of the pieces are suited to professional and intermediate guitarists. The collection presents a stylistic range across the musical spectrum including the following:
- Contemporary art music approaches
- Traditionally styled guitar pieces
- Spanish and Latin American character pieces, including Flamenco
- Popular styles including Jazz, Blues and Fusion music
- Culturally derived/inspired music
- Works requiring a reverberant performance space
- Character music of broader use in such as film or meditative ambiences
- Studies of varied interests and technical challenge
- Music in the “Guitar Chant” style
This 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, stylistic forays and pieces to be played for sheer enjoyment.
There are also many instances in the collection where pieces can be garnered into suites of the performer’s choice. Latin American styles, Jazz ballad pieces, exotic gestural works, popular forms and others are presented with thematic, aesthetic 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 that can then be applied in other instances both within and outside the collection.
The pieces are grouped in four volumes composed from late 2016 through early 2022. My purpose was to produce new work as a steady and often daily artistic exercise with the music being of use to intermediate and advanced learners and professional concert guitarists. My hope is that the collection will be useful and engaging. 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 for the guitar. Almost all of the pieces occur in the collection chronologically, in the order they were composed.
All four volumes are available for purchase via the shop page.
Universities, academies and conservatories may obtain the scores by paying an institutional license fee per annum and will receive licensing for open usage within their institution for three years. The works can then be printed for in-house use by students and staff. The composer may be contacted here.
Bergmann Editions is planning to publish Once Around the Sun in its entirety as PDF or hardcopy scores in numerically smaller, easier-to-use volumes with page turns incorporated into the design.
Please note: Do not share your copy with others as this deprives the author of rightful remuneration for his work.
Performance note: Unless otherwise indicated in the score, all Da Capo or Dal Segno repeats are to be made.