The Partitas
The Partitas are a collection of four works for solo guitar, each exploring the formal possibilities of the multi-movement genre of the Baroque. In addition to the entailed hermeneutics of the genre-based title, each carries relationships back to historical precedents, implied in their subtitles, but, I think, less overtly manifest in the mood and affect than in my works specifically exploring Gleichzeitigkeit der Ungleichzeitigkeit. The works will be featured on a forthcoming album on New Focus Recordings.
Partita No. 2: An Deilf (2020): Subtitled "the dolphin" in Irish, this piece draws its title and central imagery from Derek Mahon’s poem "Achill," which meditates on a poet's separation from his family. Formally, it exploits the Baroque device of "doubling" in an origamic architecture, where movements III and IV are entwined intensifications of movements I and II. The work shifts from the "Fripperies" of childhood—referencing Robert Fripp and King Crimson—to an increasingly virtuosic development of harmonies from my earlier work Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind, culminating in a ferocious fugal finale.
Partita No. 3: La Comète (2021): Emerging from conversations with scholar Claire Goldstein, this five-movement ekphrasis explores the cultural responses to comets at the court of Louis XIV. The movements move from an "off-kilter" royal dance and a meteor-interrupted nocturnal stroll to the "anxious Brownian motion" of the courtiers and a delicate soggetto cavato based on Claire’s name. In the final movement emerges Jacques Gallot's "La Comete," heard as if returning along a great parabola after centuries.
Partita No. 4: The Duchess (2025): This piece is inspired by the 14th-century composer Guillaume de Machaut and his patron, Bonne of Luxembourg. It uses an unset Machaut poem about four hunting birds as an ekphrastic point of departure. The movements draw heavily from the Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, with titles named after medieval coloring materials (such as "goldleaf" and "grisaille") or reframing specific miniatures, such as the image of the "Three Living and the Three Dead."
Partita No. 1: Il Cortegiano (2019): This is an ekphrasis of Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 book The Courtier, mirroring its dialogues through distinct sections that address different aspects of courtly life—from the cloud-like sprezzatura of Cumuliform and the elegant Galante dance to the private echos of Empfindsamer and the "broken" textures of Brisé. Together, they offer structured elegance and intellectual dexterity, as manifest by the work's dedicatee, Dan Lippel