I Felt Unfettered and Alive - Classical Guitar

Last year I wrote a piece for the wonderful Libby Myers, a Brisbane classical guitar legend. It’s my first work for solo guitar despite guitar being my main performance instrument since I was a teenager, so the opportunity to write something for such an exceptional player was a real treat. It was part of a larger project in which Libby also commissioned pieces from some really great composers - Helen Svoboda, Amy Brandon, Connor D’Netto, and Caleb Colledge - with a brief to respond to stimulus from Libby’s life story. The project has now grown into an album and has been released by Made Now Music.

In her work, Libby is exploring notions of musical identity. So this project began with Libby sharing a sort of digital scrapbook of her life with her collaborating composers. Leafing through these autobiographical snapshots and stories, the composers could allow bits of Libby’s life to infiltrate the creative process. I have always felt much more passionate about writing for a human being than an instrument, so this really resonated with me. Instead of writing a piece for guitar, I was writing a piece for Libby.

In the end there were two things from Libby’s reflections that I latched onto that inspired the piece - the experience of traveling alone, and Joni Mitchell. In her writings Libby shared stories of solo travel in Spain. The experience of travelling alone in an unfamiliar place is such a surreal and uncanny one, and it recalled for me some of my own experiences travelling in Japan, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. When traveling alone you are really alive - the alertness and slight undercurrent of fear serves to make every moment more vivid - You own your experience more fully and courageously than otherwise.

Libby mentioned the song “Free Man in Paris” by Joni Mitchell, which is about the liberating nature of being away from home, and this triggered an interesting musical connection. I am a guitarist myself, but mainly with a rock background, and a fondness for math-rock fiddlyness - I’m big on open strings, hammers and pulls, and actually quite useless at playing anything vaguely classical. So I sometimes felt unsure how I would approach writing for Libby, as we play the instrument quite differently. But Joni fandom was clearly something we shared, and that kind of sent me down the path of creating a piece that was not really classical, nor folk or rock, or anything else really.

Part of Joni Mitchell’s uniqueness is the way she tunes her guitar. Using non-standard open tunings, she’s able to play certain chords very easily and move them about more readily than standard tuning would allow. In our early conversations, Libby and I bonded over this shared journey of growing past guitar elitism to embrace this kind of thing; you can get indoctrinated into a sort of snobbery towards open tunings, capos, and anything else that was perceived as perhaps “cheating” by making the guitar easier to play. We spoke about getting beyond that into an attitude of “why not?”… Looking back on my own attitudes as a young guitarist, it seems totally surreal that I was happy to augment the guitar with all sorts of pedals, do a hundred takes when recording, and write all my songs in guitar-friendly keys, but open tunings were a bridge too far! If you can’t play it in standard you need to work harder! What a weird way to think.

So in this piece I had the wonderful and liberating experience of leaning into Joni tuning. Especially her most common tuning, Open D (D,A,D,F#,A,D). Sitting and just playing in this tuning was really enjoyable, there is so much sympathetic resonance, and if you’re playing in the right keys, you’ve got such a lovely set of open strings to fall back on. So, while some of my compositions emerge from an architectural, analytical sort of place, this one grew from the joy of playing the guitar, freely - unfettered, if you will.

As a result of that, creeping heavily into this is my own style of playing, which in the last decade or so has been influenced by Kinsella-esque math-rock (American Football, This Town Needs Guns, toe, etc). Being decidedly un-classical, it was very interesting working together with Libby on this. Classical guitar technique seems to aim to smooth out timbral differences between the strings, to execute melodic lines with maximum fluidity. Math-rock playing, in contrast, leans into the timbral variations between open strings and fretted notes, between plucked and slurred notes. Fortunately Libby is not only a monster player but open-minded and broadly-skilled, so the end result has been like the best of both worlds - timbrally dynamic but effortlessly precise and beautifully suited to her classical instrument.

There is also a bit of a quote in the piece from one of my favourite Joni Mitchell songs, but I won’t spoil it for you.

Libby’s playing is exquisitely captured by Dan Kassulke’s recording - both warm and shimmering, every nuance of Libby’s performance has been captured, it’s a delight to listen to. The whole record is a great experience, with each composer offering something quite different, but somehow retaining a sense of unity. Libby’s process of providing composers with autobiographical stimulus worked really well, and the album is a lovely artwork that is both cohesive and personal. A big congrats to Libby and to Made Now Music for bringing it into the world!