There is a personal story to this piece, which I thought I’d share, as it captures the initial bit of chance that pointed me in this direction. Back in the early 90s, I was a boy of less than 10, and was just starting out on the guitar. At the time, my grandmother, who was among other things a Carnatic musician, lived with us. She used to sing, and play the veena. One afternoon, I came home from school and walked into the room we shared, and found her picking out a tune on my first guitar (sweet little 3/4 a luthier in Calcutta ran up for me for a song). I was intrigued of course, but my grandmother was bashful, and as soon as she became aware of my presence, she put down the guitar, and I never managed to get her to repeat what she had been playing. Some years later, other early musical influences in my life led me to learn that the tune was a song from the Carnatic tradition – a fact that I processed, and then put away. The ABRSM arbitrated the music in my life back then, and I suppose I lacked the development to define – or even to want to define, or know that I could define – my own path, even for a project. Now, as I have been in India for a little over a year, perhaps the music of this country is finding its way into my head by osmosis – I definitely can’t claim to have sought it out, and I can’t point to what it was that led me to dig back through my memories to this tune. Consciously at least, the past year has seen me focus on building a program almost exclusively based on late Romantic and early Modern music… Nonetheless, it came back to me, and as a classical guitarist firmly rooted within my own technical tradition, I felt the need to make sense of it. So here’s the original score…performance notes and a cleaner manuscript will follow soon, of course, sometime between now and publication, but I thought I’d share the basic tremolo study. The covetous ways of our times require me to swear to conjure up much misery and unpleasantness in the event that I suffer infringement or plagiarism, but playing it is another story – if you play it, I hope you enjoy it.
Kamala’s Song or Vara Veena
Kamala’s Song or Vara Veena
Kamala’s Song or Vara Veena
Kamala’s Song or Vara Veena
The project I mentioned earlier, as I see it, will involve my traveling to the heartland of Carnatic music, discovering the melodies of that tradition, and in an exercise that I hope will patently not result in ‘fusion’ music, bringing those beautiful melodies back to the world of the guitar in a manner that is at once guitaristic and faithful to the spirit of the Carnatic original. ‘Keep you posted on that as it develops. Meanwhile, here’s offering up the first iteration of what I hope will become a new song cycle for the guitar.
The Well-Tempered Guitar 