Trombone and percussion
Acoustic Composition 27
Guitar Piece One
Coming Home (2023)
For classical guitar
Coming Home (December 2025)
Coming Home (December 2025)
Ihave been a dedicated musician all my adult life and was writing and recording songs on the guitar as soon as I knew three chords in my teenage years. My stylistic range has naturally evolved (with age and the experience of formal education) from writing songs with blues-folk- rock influences, through composing instrumental jazz arrangements and the classical technique required for ABRSM grades. I have had a career teaching creative music technology and contemporary composition yet I had never gotten around to composing any pieces for classical guitar or even notating any of the improvisational ideas I have been playing (and entertaining myself) with for years.
I thought this would be an easy task, but it has proven to be slow-going. I find whenever I am composing and stop to check the rhythms of a bar, or the voicing of a chord, I become far too easily distracted by the instrument. Hours later it would be time for a break (sometimes sleep), but I had not really done any work. However, it has proved (and it is proving) to be an enjoyable task, and at times a welcome distraction from the near monastic diligence one often has to adopt to complete larger works.
The initial concept was to compose a series of three collections, each with thirteen pieces (there is a logic behind this choice, but an explanation seems surplus here). Thirty-nine pieces in total, all following a connective thread of related modality. An admirable goal, but at this time, I have one completed score, another almost complete, a handful of half-developed ideas and a couple of skeletal sketches. There are a few ensemble pieces in various stages of progression and a near complete orchestral work also fighting for my limited attention. I realised it would be quite some time before I could actually let any guitar pieces free into the world if I waited until one of the collections was complete, and so changed my approach. I decided to simply number the pieces for the guitar concurrently and release the scores as and when they are finished. The preface can always outline any theoretical connections in the series.
Guitar Piece One - Coming Home is a highly idiomatic work which sits comfortably under the fingers and utilises the drones of the open strings to enrich the sonorities of the passing textures. I am fond of drone music, and tonally static works for that matter, and these influences are clearly audible in the textures of this score. Although passing through elements of E Phrygian/A minor, E Locrian/F Major, and (briefly) E Mixolydian/A Major, Coming Home is firmly in E major (Ionian Mode).
The music holds a tangible sense of positivity tinged with hints of the poignant nostalgia that the journey stated by the title can often evoke. Home is where the heart is, it is a complex blend of places and people. It contains good and bad memories, grounds us in our own history and can hold the promises of a future to come. Be that whatever it may be ...
For Mum
“We didn’t win, but we had a laugh.”
The Recording
The recording of Coming Home was performed by the composer and produced in his home studio in December 2025. The more observant reader may notice that it only took two years after completing the score to do so! You would be forgiven for thinking the composer was slack, but perhaps it is the opposite? Regardless of how diligent, disciplined, or devoted we may be, we can only ever actually complete one thing at a time ...!
The recording is in two versions, one is polished (produced) and the other is raw (the sound captured directly from the microphones). Neither is better or worse, just different: a simple (or is that complex) matter of individual taste.
