I've always written music in one way or another. When I got back into playing classical guitar after a long hiatus (30-odd years) I picked up a lot of the stuff I had learned when I was a kid. I just didn't really enjoy most of it. There are a handful of things, but for the most part the classical guitar repertoire doesn't excite me much. Every time I look at classical guitar clips on Instagram, YouTube etc, everyone is playing the same old things, and although I can understand why people like, say, Capricho Arabe or Asturias, I never want to hear either of them again.
I went to a few concerts when I picked the instrument up again, and realised that everyone in the audience was a classical guitarist - suggesting that this music is just not really reaching wider audiences and that without new repertoire of a different sort it will eventually be just a rabbit-hole.
And yet, and yet...there are thousands of immensely talented guitarists out there, the technical standard is incredible. And more and more beautiful instruments being made by amazing luthiers.
I'm cranky about this stuff. I think the guitar is an instrument with a very special quality and voice all of its own, and the music it deserves is music specially written for guitar. I don't like arrangements and transcriptions from piano and other instruments - they are so reduced when transferred to six strings. I am a devotee of JS Bach, but I never want to hear his music played on guitar rather than on the instruments they were written for. Just as I wouldn't listen to Bach transcriptions on the concertina. Sorry concertina-ists. Classical guitarists play Bach to impress other classical guitarists. Nobody who doesn't play guitar is going to listen.
I also don't feel the guitar, solo, is the instrument for extended works. Sonata form just isn't for me. Nor do experiments in post Schoenbergian modernism on guitar ever seem to me to work - the guitar is a small canvas. Might as well try it on a banjo.
And I can't stand the sort of pieces classical guitarists play for competitions - show-off virtuosity, speed for the sake of speed, silly effects....
So there in a nutshell is my motivation for trying to write things of my own. These are all personal preferences - I am not stating some undeniable truth. To each his or her own, and I don't look down on anyone for having different musical tastes. Or only secretly.
To my mind the guitar is an instrument for short(ish), concentrated, tonal, melodic, intimate and immediate music that touches the listener emotionally. There is actually a lot of great music of this sort, but generally not coming from 'classical' composers. That's what I try to write. Whether I succeed or not, it seemed to me a good thing to attempt anyway; and...well, I really can't help myself.
I realise of course that I have sounded a bit grandiose in this post, as if single-handedly I am going to save the classical guitar from ruin. Of course I don't think that, and don't regard my own music as having any importance or significance or even great merit. But I'd rather write something new than hear Lagrima again.