Early Music on Guitar by Jon Sayles

Occidental classical music begins with Early Music which spans from 500 AD to the mid-eighteenth century. This starts with Medieval (500-1400) and flows into Renaissance (1400-1600) before it concludes with Baroque (1600-1760).

Jon Sayles, a software developer for IBM, was introduced to Early Music when he was at college. For pleasure and to share this rare music with the world, Sayles has recorded many performances and hosts them on his website at Early Music: Classical Guitar Ensemble.

Music License: © Terms read like Creative Commons BY-NC-ND, but see site for exact terms

Image: detail from 14th century medieval tapestry Geflügelte Hirsche (Winged Deer) housed at the Musée Départemental des Antiquités de Rouen

Baroque Classical Guitar

The Bach Guitar Duo (Florindo Baldissera and Victorinus Nalato) has a gorgeous album of baroque works, Obstinatum: Chaconnes e Passacalles, on the AlchEmistica netlabel.

The chaconne and passacaglia are types of musical composition first found in the early 1600s in the baroque era in Spain. They were vehicles for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression. Both usually had a bass-line serving a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and melodic invention. The bass-line typically descend stepwise from the tonic to the dominant pitch of the scale while the harmonies emphasize the circle of fifths. The passacaglia is typically based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple meter.

This anthology of passacaglia and chaconnes presented by Bach Guitar Duo features compositions of Germanic nations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The composers include Friedrich Christian Witt (c1660 - 1716), Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (1665-1746), Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), and Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706).

Florindo Baldissera plays guitar on higher fourth by Loris Colladon, 2008. Victorinus Nalato plays on guitar by Masaru Kohno, 1981. Recorded in Belluno, Municipal Auditorium, on June 2010.



Location: Venice, Italy
Image: The first page of the autographed manuscript of the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, by Johann Sebastian Bach
Music License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

Acoustic Work from Sergi Boal of Barcelona

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Sergi Boal of Barcelona studied classical guitar studies, flamenco guitar, and oud with masters. In his work Silenci, he composed for trumpet, cello, oud, and voice with the guitar as the central instrument.

Boal writes that Silenci "reflects a mood, a declaration of intentions, in this convulsed times. The first notes the work, an Oud solo..., it is a metaphorical way to say that the music is a spiritual thing, and you have to sit down, cease your minds, and only listen to. i think you will need to listen this work during a Sunday evening, in the dawn, during a raining day or just when the house is almost in silence. Like the last word in the David Linch’s film Muholland Drive:.. 'silence'…. My intention is summarized in the words written on the back cover (translation from the Catalan language)."

The silence is the origin
The absence of sounds
The silence is the utopia
listen to the silence, not to the noise.

Silenci was released yesterday on Acustronica and is available for download.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives