very creative and engaging composition/journey. Feels epic and imaginative and assured. Nice work!

This is a demo recording of the third in a suite of three pieces for classical guitar that I composed for Philip Lawson in 2012. 

Philip Lawson is the guitarist here (twitter.com/PLawsonGuitar).

It’s a composer’s cliché that the classical guitar is amongst the hardest instruments to write well for. But clichés are clichés because they’re true. Like the orchestra (also an instrument), you want to forget it’s there and just write your music. But you can’t. The guitar is it’s music and vice versa.

In writing these interludes, I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to my own tactile experience of the instrument. To what Feldman called the ‘reality’ of the sound. And to my affection for the clear-voiced beauty of its timbre.

More info on the piece here: garrettsholdice.ie/three-interludes

/////////////////////

www.garrettsholdice.ie

Three Interludes 3 - Ketawang  [demo]

This is a demo recording of the first in a suite of three pieces for classical guitar that I composed for Philip Lawson in 2012. 

Philip Lawson is the guitarist here (twitter.com/PLawsonGuitar).

It’s a composer’s cliché that the classical guitar is amongst the hardest instruments to write well for. But clichés are clichés because they’re true. Like the orchestra (also an instrument), you want to forget it’s there and just write your music. But you can’t. The guitar is it’s music and vice versa.

In writing these interludes, I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to my own tactile experience of the instrument. To what Feldman called the ‘reality’ of the sound. And to my affection for the clear-voiced beauty of its timbre.

More info on the piece here: garrettsholdice.ie/three-interludes

/////////////////////

www.garrettsholdice.ie

Three Interludes 1 - Tanka  [demo]

This is a demo recording of a the second in a suite of three pieces for classical guitar that I composed for Philip Lawson in 2012. 

Philip Lawson is the guitarist here (twitter.com/PLawsonGuitar).

It’s a composer’s cliché that the classical guitar is amongst the hardest instruments to write well for. But clichés are clichés because they’re true. Like the orchestra (also an instrument), you want to forget it’s there and just write your music. But you can’t. The guitar is it’s music and vice versa.

In writing these interludes, I’ve tried to stay as close as possible to my own tactile experience of the instrument. To what Feldman called the ‘reality’ of the sound. And to my affection for the clear-voiced beauty of its timbre.

More info on the piece here: garrettsholdice.ie/three-interludes

/////////////////////

www.garrettsholdice.ie

Three Interludes 2 - Organum  [demo]

From the album "Winter" by Ficino Ensemble.
https://ergodos.bandcamp.com/album/winter

Winter

Improvisation - brass quintet, 2023

Bernhard Plagg - trumpet 1
Stephan Stadtfeld - trumpet 2
Lionel Speciale - horn
Vladimir Vereś - trombone
Fabian Neckermann - tuba

Sound recording in the studio of the Landesmusikakademie Berlin, July 2023
Sound engineer: Benjamin Ostarek

Pastorale - brass quintet

If you like the song, please follow me on Social Media:

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Forget Me Not

Rain of the Past

Live in October 2023 at the VIII Festival de Jóvenes Guitarristas José Luis Rodrigo in Madrid. 
Audio by RCSMM sound design students.

The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar - M. Feldman (live) [version 2]

Diego Tedesco: De los Sos Ojos
Natalia Cappa, soprano

From FCR391 Natalia Cappa: Una
Coming out March 8th, links to pre-order/buy below!

Apple Music: https://nataliacappa.bandcamp.com/album/una
Presto Music: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9591805--una

Diego Tedesco: De los Sos Ojos (Natalia Cappa, soprano)

The many violent foldings of the Tertiary era took place at the expense of this very ancient Mediterranean, much larger than the present one. All the mountains, from the Baetic Cordillera to the Rif, the Atlas, the Alps and the Apennines, the Balkans, the Taurus and the Caucasus, were heaved up out of the ancient sea. They reduced its area, raising from the great sea bed not only sedimentary rocks-sands, clays, sandstones, thick layers of limestone-but also deeply buried primitive rocks. The mountains surrounding, strangling, barricading and compartmentalizing the long Mediterranean coastline are the flesh and bones of the ancestral Tethys. Everywhere the sea water has left traces of its slow labour. The sedimentary limestones outside Cairo, "so fine-grained and of such milky whiteness that they allow the sculptor's chisel to give the sensation of volume by working to a depth of only a few millimetres"; the great slabs of coraline limestone from which the megalithic temples in Malta were built; the stone of Segovia which is easier to work when wet; the limestone of the Latomies (the huge quarries of Syracuse); the Istrian stones of Venice and many other rock formations in Greece, Italy and Sicily-all these came from the sea bed.
Fernand Braudel
"Memory and The Mediterranean"




-=- )( -=-=- )( -=- )( -=-=- )( -=-




"Statues so thoroughly shattered that out of the debris a new work of art is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the footrace; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it ...a profile in which beauty survives with a complete absence of human or divine anecdote"
Margerite Yourcenar, 
"That mighty sculptor, time"

-=- )( -=-=- )( -=- )( -=-=- )( -=-

Tethys is a peculiar mythic figure; sister and consort of Oceanus, her position in the mythic structure of ancient Greece and Rome assigns her tremendous power, reordering the stars and constellations, and giving birth to rivers and lakes as well  as the sea nymphs.  And yet, she never inspired the development of any cult in the ancient world, or any trace of worship.  A forgotten member of the elder divinities, she remains as an often invisible yet extraordinarily powerful presence– like the forces of deep time, she is slippery, omnipresent and often invisible within the human time frame. In the modern, she presides over new matters and regions while maintaining the link to deep time and the transcendent; she is the metonymic (and matronymic) of one of Saturn's moons and is the name given to the sea which existed between the continents of Gondwana and Laurasia during much of the Mesozoic era (25 to 65 million years ago).


It is this later trajectory which interested me while look for a framework for composing a concertino for violin and ensemble. The Tethys Sea, over its aeons years of existence was site of both the constructive and ruinous forces of nature and time; it was the site of the evolution of the whale, and the origin of the modern Mediterranean, and its destruction and fragmentation can be found in the floors of the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Aral seas.  Geologic time is always undermining the order of the present, but it is also the means by which new orders are composed.


This resonates with my interest in the special role that a soloist can have on the unfolding of a piece; transforming material, but also the relationships between performers, and the sense of the performance space experienced by the audience.  In Tethys the soloist couples and decouples from three distinct groupings of instruments, pushing and pulling harmonies and motives, but also forming connections which pull the music across the space of the performance.  

The work was written for violinist Miranda Cuckson, and counter)induction. (DB)

Tethys for violin and ensemble

"Path to the Serene" for solo flute and chamber ensemble (violin, viola, cello, harp, piano) with Max(2003)
Premiered at Merkin Concert Hall, New York. Commissioned and performed by the Azure Ensemble, with solo flute by Susan Glaser.

Path to the Serene

Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that draws on Medieval and Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity.  His approach is deeply historical and broadly philosophical.  Many of his works have an direct historical touchstone, such as his  Etude on 'Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit' (A Book of Etudes, Quire 4, No. 1) which features quotations of and elaborations on music from 15th century Cyprus, or La Deploration for clarinet, violin, and cello, which couples Josquin's lament on the death of Ockeghem with works of his own teacher Robert Suderburg, synthesizing jazz and Renaissance approaches. Other works draw on sources from antiquity, such as the string quartet Alcyone, a partially spoken setting of a tale of Ovid's Metamorphoses, or Tethys, a violin concerto which links the sea-goddess to geological time and tectonic change.
Literature and philosophy are also significant points of articulation: The Winter Journey, a current project commissioned from the ensemble Yarn|wire, is based on a short story by George Perec; the story itself  takes the form of a 19th century fairytale of memory and loss, and so the new composition will involve transformation of the French and German art-song tradition of the 19th and early 20th century. A song cycle focused on settings of American poets (Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens) entwines with the poems fragments from philosophers (James, Aristotle, Husserl, Bergson). The piano trio 'Fortuitous Variations' draws upon the language of William James and C.S. Peirce in inspiration, organization, character markings, and movement titles. This approach and the works themselves connect to many aspects of the scholarship in the humanities, including history, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy. 
His works have been praised many times in the press.  Regarding his Quintet “l’homme armé”, Allan Kozinn wrote “he couches [the medieval melody] in such thoroughly modern scoring that the ear is lured to other things, including the juxtaposition of eerie string writing with playful material for the clarinet and piano, or the lively interplay among all five instruments.” (The New York Times March 12, 2005.) Regarding A Book of Songs (2006), the Stephen Brookes wrote “[they] can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well written and insightful.” (The Washington Post May 23, 2006)  Regarding La Déploration, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that "...the violinist, cellist... and clarinetist... spread out throughout the crypt. Against vaporous harmonics and ghostly fragments of Renaissance music played by the strings, [a] warm, clear clarinet announced itself as very much alive as it sashayed in and out of blues territory and laughed in the face of their mournful keening." (The New York Times May 17, 2015.)
He has been awarded the League of Composers ISCM Composers Award (2005), the Salvatore Martirano Prize (2006), and the Robert Avalon Prize (2010), and a Fromm Commission (2012). He is a MacDowell Fellow in Winter 2017, and an Avaloch Music Farm Fellow in Fall 2017. His music has been performed by  counter)induction, Aeolus Quartet, Inscape Chamber Orchestra, Redlight Music, Dan Lippel, Robert Baker, Trio Cavatina, Edge Ensemble/Contemporary Music Forum (DC), pianists Ieva Jokubaviciute (Shenandoah University), Alice Belem (State University of Minas Gerais), and Ning Yu; cellists Elise Pittenger (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and Schuyler Slack (Richmond Symphony) and Lori Barnett (George Washington University); and clarinetists David Jones (Washington National Opera), Benjamin Fingland (Dorian Winds).
He is a founding member, curator, and composer-in-residence of counter)induction, a composer/performer collective active in the New York region (www.counterinduction.com).

Tethys for violin and ensemble

douglasboyce

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