Thank you, Harry (postscript)

As I was working through the above (or rather, below on your screen), it dawned on me that although this scheme leaves room at any time for either or both of the other instruments to articulate a contrasting idea, it doesn't leave room for anyone to play a long phrase. To borrow Stravinsky's remark about the organ, "the monster never breathes."

So, two modifications:

1) A fourth "instrument" joins the mix, viz., a rest (at least, in this strand of the composite texture).

2) Every instrument acquires "scare quotes." That is, rather than literally assign a given phraselet to the violin, that phrase is assigned to the violin's transposition ... and then, depending on the register, could be performed by the violin, or by the guitar, or by 'cello.

Thank you, Harry

I'm starting a new piece, picking up on ideas I abandoned almost a decade ago.

When my mentor Steven Stucky (1949–2016) died, I had recently purchased a resonator guitar (National M1, with a squareneck wooden body and "biscuit" resonators). My immediate response was to start sketching a memorial piece that would adapt Josquin des Prez's Nymphes des bois (a.k.a. Déploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem) for solo slide guitar ... or maybe slide guitar and voice, with the text adapted to a more modern, bluesy idiom? Alas, I felt creatively boxed in by the challenges of maintaining good voice-leading on slide guitar. 

This coming June, there will be a concert at Cornell to mark the 10-year anniversary of Steve's death, with works by some of his students from the 1990s. Because I've worked so slowly (and scarcely composed at all in recent years), my works list is small, with no works fitting the available instrumentation. So, I was inspired to revisit the Josquin-via-slide-guitar nexus, but as a trio with violin and 'cello. Voice-leading obstacles magically evaporate!

Full disclosure: I haven't actually found those sketches from 2016; I think I may have sent them along to my archive at Old Dominion University. But I remembered clearly that I'd settled on exploring a hexatonic open tuning < E2, A2, C3, F3, Ab3, Db4 >, and that I could achieve a nice paraphrase of the Nymphes de Bois roster of composers ("Josquin, Brumel, Pirchon, Compere") by moving the slide stepwise down strings 3 and 4 for the lower voices, with the upper voice alternating between strings 1 and 2.

The reason for the title is that before last week, I had a plan to write the piece in seven movements, with each movement paraphrasing a different detail of the Josquin. The plan called for paraphrasing the opening phrase "Nymphes des bois, déesses des fontaines" (shown below) and the guitar's open tuning above nudged me toward how to warp (ever-so-gently) Josquin's melody and transpose it ... starting in the 'cello, answered in the guitar, answered in the violin ... but that would last about 12 seconds, and then ... what?!?!?

The "?!?!?" denotes mild panic over the fact that my more detailed plan requires this music to span 144 seconds. I'm in a good mood today because while I was waiting during a service appointment for our car, I began to implement another detail of the current plan, which is to present that melodic material in the form of "interlocking mobiles, legato." (Interlocking mobiles was a central technique in the late Sir Harrison Birtwistle's (1934–2022) output. Mind you, I had no specific idea what that would mean when I decided that; it was just a necessary contrast to other textures in other movements. 

So, it turns out that if you subdivide those two opening phrases from Josquin in to four phraselets ("Nym-phes," "des bois," "dé-es-ses," and "des fontaines") and then allow them to occur in any sequence, that gives 24 permutations ... and because "interlocking" among the three instruments, then each complete set comprises 12 phraselets ... and to cut to the chase, by assigning each phraselet three possible duration segments (one of which corresponds to Josquin's original, with the other two as variations), at the tempo of 72 bpm (also arbitrarily decided in the detailed plan), each complete statement in only one instrument lasts between 14.167 and 18.333 seconds ... and so, each complete statement with all three instruments lasts between 42.5 and 55 seconds. So, I just need around two-and-a-half statements (which, thanks to the various degrees of variation, will sound very similar, but not identical) to fill those 144 seconds.

Yes, I knew perfectly well that I was aping Birtwistle ... and when I realized that I had gone from "?!?!?" to "!!!!!" in one sitting, I recalled his remark to the effect that "ideas are ten a penny," but then you need a method for proliferating them. After I visit random.org to permute the orderings along the various dimensions above, it'll be a straightforward matter to transcribe the results, and then figure out how other elements (from other movements) interact with them.

[please excuse the lack of illustrations; I'll add them later] 

 

Guitar quest (1b) -- My ES-335 era -- Postscript: Photographic evidence

After posting yesterday, I remembered that the second photo below was squirreled away in our basement; the first one also turned up in the same box. Both are from the summer of 1995.

Exhibit A: Avant Garage performing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY. 

The photo is poorly lit, which accurately reflects conditions on the ground. (I'm in the shadows at far left, with the Gibson ES-335.)

The glaring inaccuracy of this image is the impression that lots of young people are having a good time while we play; the photo must've been snapped very early in the evening, before our audience figured out that they would better enjoy hanging around outdoors in the sweltering heat, rather than staying inside and enduring our music in air-conditioned comfort.

 

Exhibit B: Avant Garage performing at New Paltz, NY.

This was a wedding celebration for the families of our lead-singer/accordionist's brother and his bride, who had tied the knot earlier that year in the Caribbean. We were one of numerous bands that performed throughout the afternoon and evening.

When I first saw this image, I thought, how charming that those two little girls are sitting there listening to us play. Then I realized that my only turn on lead vocals at that gig was my "Body-Piercing Blues," in which the narrator is trying to bed "the sweetest hippie chick that you ever seen / A tie-dye shirt and peasant skirt and Birkenstock queen," who insists that he's too vanilla and really ought to get a body piercing. Subsequent verses work their way down from eyebrow to nostril to lip to nipple, culminating at the groin. (Our shocked protagonist cowardly refuses all.) Yes, that's what those two little girls are sitting there listening to.

[title revised Feb 20, 2026] 

Once more, yadda yadda redux: Guitar quest (1a) -- My ES-335 era

 Yow! Six years? Six years?!?

As the kids say today, it's been a minute.

And I'm in much the same sitch as back then, viz., needing to get back in the saddle of stringing words together in meaningful (and, if the stars align, occasionally elegant?) ways.

No, I'm not even going to try to recap everything going back six years (?!?). Rather, I'm going to go back almost half a century, because I've spent the past three months obsessing about six-string electric guitars, and my better half suggested that I really ought to share my observations in blog posts. (Of course, this is her tactful way of telling me that she'd rather not hear all the gory details of my current journey.)

So, here begins a series of posts, in which I try 1) to get my prose-mojo groove back, and 2) survey my personal guitar odyssey, culminating in my current psychodrama (spoiler alert: I want something so niche that Guitar Center stores prefer not to stock it).

1970s

I don't recall when, exactly, I first felt a yen to play guitar, but it was sometime in the mid-1970s. I made my parents aware, but they were slightly older than most of my peers' parents — and crucially, my father didn't much care for any musical styles that used the electric guitar. So, for my first 16 years (give or take) as a guitarist, the only guitar I played was a classical guitar.

(Okay, that's not counting the electric bass I played as a teenager, but again, I'm trying to stick to the six-string plotline.) 

 1990

At the end of my first year of grad school, I decided to take the plunge and buy myself an electric guitar. Most of my favorite guitarists (Steve Howe, John McLaughlin, Jimmy Page) played Gibson guitars, and on the occasions in my youth that I'd picked up a Fender guitar, the spacing of strings and frets always felt alien to me.

So, my choice at the Ithaca Guitar Works in (April? May?) of 1990 boiled down to two instruments in my price range, both Gibsons, and both previously owned: an ES-335 and a Les Paul Studio. Mind you, at this point I knew very, very little about electric guitars and their components, so my decision hinged on how the instrument felt in my hands ... and after a decade-and-a-half of playing classical guitar, the Les Paul body felt too small, but the larger ES-335 body felt more comfortable ... so, that's what I bought.

I played that guitar for a decade or so. (If you saw me perform in the band Avant Garage in 1995, that's what I played.) It mostly suited me; my only complaints were 1) it wasn't much to look at (plain top with a dark brown finish ... so dark that it looked black under ordinary lighting conditions), but more importantly, 2) it had a trapeze tailpiece, and in my search for maximum sustain I learned that I really wanted a stopbar tailpiece. And weirdly, sometime around the turn of the century, I realized that it was starting to feel awkward, and that maybe I should switch to an instrument with a smaller body.

So, right around the time I moved from Ithaca, NY to Cambridge, MA, I sold it ...

 2002

... and replaced it with an Epiphone Les Paul, thus ending my initial Semi-Hollow chapter and kicking off my Solidbody Era.

(per the parenthetical numeral in this post's title, there's more to come ... SO. MUCH. MORE.)

[title revised Feb 20, 2026]
 

Once more unto the breach

In 2003 and 2004, I struggled to hammer out a libretto for a music-theater piece. The experience was so nerve-wracking (because every additional day that I spent flailing with words meant one less day to compose the music under and around them) that I swore never again to play wordsmith.
Last year or so, I started hatching an idea for a new music-theater piece. Per the above, I resolved not to take it beyond possibly sketching a synopsis until I could find a proper poet to flesh it out in verse, and it's only last month that I started doing the barest of research to generate an outline, much less a complete synopsis.
Somehow, enough time has passed since my prior trauma that, instead of systematically completing that outline, and then a synopsis ... over the past few days, I started drafting the actual texts for an opening chorus and aria. I'm not sure what, exactly, nudged me over the edge. It might have been the realization a couple of weeks ago that the piece ought not to take the form of an opera, but rather, an oratorio. Or it might have been the realization that the poetry ought not rise to too high a standard (i.e., it will be much funnier as pure kitsch). And, weirdly enough, it might have arisen from volunteering to write music (not words) for someone else who previously has written about opera, and is now thinking of writing her first libretto.
But there you have it: words, words, words (well, 82 of them, anyway), in various degrees of rhyme & meter, at a level suitable to start creating music along the way, instead of waiting for a complete libretto. Here's hoping I can keep this rolling in the weeks and months ahead.

Bedated uplate

... wait ... strike that, reverse it ... or then again, maybe stet?

Long story short, the extremely low action of a tapping instrument renders it particularly susceptible to any change in the system ... like, f'rinstance, different gauges of strings. Yes, when I changed the strings, the difference in string tension requiree a slight truss rod adjustment (as in, just a 60° turn for both rods). Which reminds me ...

I didn't approach this as a professional research project, so I didn't take notes on where I read what. But somewhere along the way during my online research about Krappy Guitars, I encountered a complaint from someone who said he couldn't adjust the action on his instrument, blaming Kevin's "proprietary" hardware. For all I know, this might be true of that person's instrument, but it's certainly not true of mine. Here are some photos of the bridge:

Yes, the height of each string's saddle is adjustable (with a simple flat-head screwdriver), and each string is fully intonatable (with a hex wrench inserted into the end of the bridge screw that determines the horizontal position of its saddle). Best of all, when I removed the truss rod cavity cover, I discovered that adjusting the truss rods doesn't involve a hex wrench (as I've used on Les Paul copies by Epiphone and ESP), but rather, a crescent wrench (so, it's much easier to apply torque without slipping).

This should be all the functional changes for now, other than experimenting with different ways to damp the strings at the nut. I'm not convinced that simply stuffing felt under them is the best practice (and I see in at least one video that Trey Gunn has augmented the felt by wrapping something around the lowest bass string). And okay, I might need to adjust the intonation on a few of the strings (most likely the low G, which represents the single greatest change in string diameter: from .075 to .065, which is literally an order of magnitude greater than the changes on the other strings, all measured in thousandths of an inch).

On the fingerboard, I applied faux-abalone faux-inlay decals that are 3mm wide, thinking that 5mm strips would be too much. I was wrong, so 5mm decals are on the way. If I feel really ambitious, then I'll re-do the faux-abalone bulldog face on the headstock, but first I would need to figure out the genuinely best way to do it. (For now, my first attempt is adequate, especially when partially obscured by the strings that pass over it.)

So, bottom line ... the Krappy Touchstyle Guitar is not, in fact, a crappy touchstyle guitar. I take it for granted that yes, a Chapman Stick or a Warr Guitar provides a superior instrument, but for three figures instead of four, Kevin has made a thoroughly functional instrument.

Next step: learning to play the thing ...

Vertical, or horizontal?

I was alarmed to see that the marvelous touchstyle guitarist Trey Gunn (formerly of King Crimson) has suffered repetitive-stress injuries in his left wrist, such that his default position for playing his Warr Guitar is now horizontal, across his lap, rather than in a traditional guitar position. This leaves me wondering how much I should try to find a comfortable vertical playing position ... that is, maybe I should skip directly to the lap position.

The immediate hardware implication is that I might need to move the strap buttons (or simply add new ones) to facilitate using a Dobro-style guitar strap to secure the instrument while I play. The immediate software implication is that as I work through preparatory exercises in Emmett Chapman's Free Hands and Greg Howard's Stick Book, vol. 1, I will need to revise Every. Single. Left-hand. Fingering.

So, my initial progress might prove very slow indeed as I experiment with both positions, and especially as I try to find the optimal placement along four dimensions to minimize strain on my left wrist, as helpfully spelled out in a post on a Stickist discussion board: 1) how close to one's left shoulder the headstock is held; 2) the rotational angle of the fretboard relative to its long axis; 3) the fretboard's angle from the vertical; and 4) the elevation of the instrument relative to the player's body. Wish me luck!