Turquoise
Guitar Editions (ASCAP)
La
Guitarra for soprano, guitar, and percussion (on poetry by Federico
García Lorca)
by Robert Strizich
Written for and Edited by Mesut Özgen
TGE 018
ISBN: 978-1-934361-17-7
16 pages
I first encountered Federico García Lorca's evocative poem La guitarra when I was an undergraduate music student at the University of California at Berkeley. The poem was displayed in a coffee and sandwich shop I used to frequent on the north side of the Berkeley campus, elegantly inscribed on the stucco wall in the original Spanish. In the course of my regular visits to this coffee shop, I became intimately familiar with the poem, and resolved that some day I would set it to music.
However, the idea for this project lay dormant for many years. But for some reason, when invited by guitarist Mesut Özgen to write some music for a series of new works he was planning to perform, it seemed -- finally -- like just the right time to set Lorca's poem to music.
La guitarra appeared originally as one section of a longer poem entitled "Poema de la siguiriya gitana," which appeared in 1921 in a collection of Lorca's poetry entitled Poema del Cante Jondo. All the works in this collection were inspired by flamenco music and dance, subjects about which Lorca was extremely knowledgeable and which influenced much of his creative output.
In my setting
of the poem for soprano and guitar, I have tried to combine some of my current
compositional interests with references to the flamenco styles that inspired
Lorca's poetry. In fact, the piece is cast in the form of a seguiriya,
which -- with its regular alternation between 3/4 and 6/8 meter -- is one
of the most venerable and profound forms of cante jondo.
The inclusion of wine glasses -- to be played as a percussion instrument by
the soprano -- seemed like an obvious, but nevertheless necessary and inevitable,
contribution to the setting.
Robert Strizich
Duration: ca. 7:35 min
First Performance: March 5, 2004 by Lauren Rasmussen and Mesut Özgen, "New Dimensions in Classical Guitar" multimedia concert at UCSC. The recording of this performance is available on DVD TGE015.
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