My composition “Remember” was written in 2016. It was among my first pieces for classical guitar. It appears on Aleksandr Loginov’s album “Quiet Music” (details of the album are in another of my blog posts). His is, in my opinion, the definitive interpretation. You can find a great video of it here.
Aleksandr's playing is all the more impressive because this is a very difficult piece, technically – because of one particular feature which you will see if you read on. Please, guitarists, pick up your guitar and try the short extracts.
The piece came about, like almost all my pieces, from an initial figure on the guitar. I don’t set out to write something on a particular theme – my music isn’t in that sense ‘programmatic’. But if I stumble on something when improvising, it will sometimes spark something off, and I will follow a trail, trying to preserve the mood or feel created by the initial phrases (I could be kinder to myself and refer to it as inspiration). In this case, all I was trying to do at first was stretch out my left hand. But in doing that, I stumbled on a phrase that produced a cross-stringing ‘harp’ effect, where open and stopped strings ring out against each other creating a sort of rolling sound. Here is that first phrase.
What you can see from it is that the stretches are fearsome. You have to hold the stopped strings down for as long as you can to achieve the ringing harp effect I have mentioned, and that results in some very long spacings.
That phrase, with its simple bass line, gave me a bedrock on which to build the piece. I saw it as the ‘backing track’ over which a solo melody line would be superimposed. The problem – how to do this when the left hand is so occupied. My solution in this case was to find a melody that is picked out of a combination of stopped and open strings while the flowing movement of the backing is maintained.
Here's where the melody comes in. To achieve the effect, you have to follow the string markings and fingerings given. You can see that the second chord shape (third bar of this extract) is if anything even more demanding than the first. I don’t think you will have encountered this shape in any other piece you have played.
Overall, the emerging mood was dark and turbulent. The image it conjured in my mind was of a deep fast-flowing river at night. There is something devastating about the melody, but at the same time it carries a feeling of nostalgia. I find something filmic about it, in a noir kind of way. When I hear it, in my mind it is accompanied by the sound of heavy rainfall.
After a repeat of this first melody I felt, when I was writing it, that it was beginning to feel oppressive. It needed change and contrast. When the second subject emerges, it starts in a major key – however, no-one could describe it as happy. I have a love of vintage European art cinema, and this section felt very much like a theme that might crop up in such a film from perhaps the 60s or 70s. It is pure nostalgia, but in a very different way from the first subject – fond remembrance of something happy, perhaps.
The requirement for ‘harp effect’ remains in this part. If anything the stretches are even more challenging in this section than in the first. At one point you are stopping the first and fourth strings at the seventh fret with fingers 4 and 3, while holding a bass G at the third fret for the whole bar. The next bar gets even tougher. Here’s the extract from the score.
I suspect that most guitarists are going to find this too much for them, and it’s likely that the piece won’t be widely played for this reason. All the more credit to Aleksandr for making it look effortless, and for injecting so much passion and expression into his performance regardless of the technical difficulty.
As you will have realised from the description above, the theme that most came to mind, listening to the piece after it was completed, was memory and reminiscence. I never have a title for my pieces before they are written, and often for me finding a title is the hardest part of all. (I have a whole set of rules about titles, which I will write about in another blog). In this case, though, the title came easily, and it still seems to me exactly right for the piece.
I hope you enjoy it. If you want to challenge yourself to some gargantuan stretches, you can buy the sheet music here (as a stand-alone piece); or in this collection (where I hope you’ll find plenty of others of interest); or, finally, in the album of sheet music that relates to the “Quiet Music” CD, here.