Dusan Bogdanovic
Doberman – Yppan: 6 pages
It is obvious that Yugoslavian – born Bogdanovic, has many followers. One only has to look at the YouTube performance of this latest work by guitarist Jelica Mijanovic , a fine one indeed, and then read the comments below to see how much respect this writer has. The words evocative, haunting, beautiful, and lovely and the telling phrase, the ‘master of polyphony’ are there for all to see.
Indeed this latest piece is very much a piece full of the most complex polyphony with the greatest majority of this writing involving passages, harmonies and complex rhythms hardly ever seen previously by most players. There is no key signature and as with many of his works, the time signatures are many and frequent, from 4/4 to 3 / 4, to 7/8, to 2/4, to 7/16, to 12/16, to 6/8, to 6/16, to 5/8, and that is only the first 13 bars of the piece. Not only that the cross rhythms from one voice to another with many combinations that will task a lot of players. Finally towards the end the piece splits into two staves for the last 12 bars giving the reader an idea of just how tricky some of this writing is. Then if you factor in the very complex harmony work one finds in this piece, you may now realise that this man’s music goes places that you never find elsewhere.
But, as I already said , many people love this man’s guitar pieces, and he is certainly one of the most heavily published by this company, and therefore I can only say that if you like this guitarist’s unique style and have the necessary technique to cope with it, then you may want to give it a try!
Chris Dumigan
Comments