April 13, 2025

Back in 2017 on April 12, I got 11 guitarists together to play my piece Mandalas. Like I said yesterday, the piece was simple on paper: Tempo was 60 bpm, most of the notes marked we whole notes tied together across bars, sometimes 30 seconds to a minute long before changing notes. This created some anticipation to get the note change right. With 11 guitarists you could hear that anticipation. Here's a section where we switched to ebows and made one unified quick crescendo to maximum loudness, then drop to a low dynamic. I always loved this little part. It was fun during rehearsal when someone got there early, even though the player would be a little sheepish afterwards. Those problems corrected themselves without needing a lot of words. Link to the post.