Homages (work in progress 2008-)

for guitar quartet

Homage To Federico Mompou [download zip file of score/part PDFs] 

Homage To Django Reinhardt  [download zip file of score/part PDFs]

Homage To Elliott Smith ("Snapshot")  [download zip file of score/part PDFs]
            

First Performances: Sarajevo Guitar Quartet (Django Reinhardt and Elliott Smith) 

Additional Performances: Illinois State University Guitar Ensemble

Demo recordings (sampled MIDI)...

This is an ongoing set of pieces for guitar quartet which pay homage to some of my musical heroes.

Programme Notes

Homage to Elliott Smith: The title of this nostalgic little song ("Snapshot") refers to the now outdated term for a hastily taken photograph, and in writing it I had in mind the mixture of fleeting memories and bittersweet emotions that surely I am not alone in feeling in response to an old yellowing photo of a family scene, time-frozen face of a lost love, etc. Elliott Smith is one of my favourite singer-songwriters, and was himself very fond of wistful waltzes, releasing several on record before his tragic suicide in 2003.

Homage to Radiohead: The subtitle of my Homage to Radiohead (“featuring favourite chord and wrongly placed things”) hints at two noteworthy aspects of the work. The first is that the piece draws on the Radiohead song “Everything in its Right Place” for its musical material, admittedly in a quite abstracted and “wrongly placed” way. The “favourite chord” in question is made up of that song’s first four electric piano notes, and is a sonority that has fascinated and delighted me for many years.