0:00 Chance Flight 4:15 Percussion Piece 7:00 To John Cage

This work is from Smith Brindle's Guitarcosmos (1978). Like Bartok's Mikrokosmos for piano, it is a world of music in miniature. The work explores a range of styles, from medieval to very modern (though almost entirely skipping over classical/romantic). Book I begins with very simple studies for beginner guitarists, and by the third and final book (from which Three Inventions is taken) the pieces are mostly full-scale concert works that explore a range of modern forms and techniques. I reversed the original order of the pieces in Three Inventions. I like how, this way, the music moves from chaos to quasi-order to increasing silence. The first movement, "Chance Flight", is aleatoric. There are a dozen musical fragments presented on the page. Some are notated fairly conventionally. But some are just notes without rhythms, rather like chant. Others are purely rhythmic effects where one strikes the body of the instrument in a certain way. The player is instructed to "play these fragments freely, in any order, altering, repeating, slow, fast, improvising, ad. lib, for any duration." I made a point of not practising this piece so the performance would be spontaneous. The second movement, "Percussion Piece", uses a range of percussive motifs such as scraping the string and tapping the body of the guitar. Unlike the previous piece it has a kind of order, with the music ending where it began. The motifs respond to one another; one motif is played, interrupted by another, then reasserts itself. The third movement, "To John Cage", is less abrasive and even hints at conventional tonality. There is a lot of space and silence written into the music. To me it is a reflective and loving piece.