Eugenio Catina
Da Vinci Publishing: Score and separate parts: (5, 3, and 3 pages respectively)
The title of this piece by Catina, an Italian composer whose music I have seen a number of times before, gives the style of this piece away.
Marked Giocoso, this piece, a G Major 2/4, and with guitar 2 having a 6th string to D, spends a few bars where it jumps between both guitars, one bar at a time until the eighteenth bar where both players are together. The next thing you spot is how the harmonies also jump around, so that quite soon we are miles away from G Major, if only for a few beats, before then leaping somewhere else equally far away from our home key. This is obviously part of the ‘Clownerie’ and is meant to be amusing for players and listeners alike. It doesn’t make the piece easy to play however as for a little time you are not sure exactly whether you are playing the notes correctly or not, which is what happened to me with my duet partner, when we played it recently. After the initial 17 bars, the piece momentarily returns to G Major before then turning into G Minor for a while before moving on through some quite high position work on the first guitar , through a number of keys , constantly moving quickly through a number of different positions , and continuing that way for the great majority of the rest of the piece, before the coda where alternating chords of Bb Major, and Gm reach a fortissimo climax, and then finishing, after two beats of silence on an E Major 9th chord!
The piece is definitely quite unusual, with harmonies that are in themselves completely melodic, but placed next to one another in a very surprising way that makes this piece very individual in style, and one which any interested players might like to investigate for themselves.
Chris Dumigan
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