Reggae Fusion

It's funny how the title of a work fires the imagination with how it's going to sound. I opened the edition expecting 4/4 time, deep bass, off-beat chords and a bluesy melody, and was greeted by one guitar in 12/8 playing a few natural harmonics. The music slowly creaks into life with some decoration that has beat two missing, and then a bass line with beat three absent, and finally those chords, albeit very consonant ones. Now that the piece is moving, we can see Guitar 4 usually plays bass but has a phrase or two in arpeggios. Guitar 3 usually plays chords but also has a few arpeggios. Guitar 2 is frequently playing countermelody to Guitar 1. The music is structured in four-bar phrases that are repeated almost everywhere, so the work is getting on for double the 82 bars of print, and the part-scores are just a little bit too dense on the page, in the push, I surmise, to save a page turn. Musically the piece is lyrical, with straightforward syncopation that's not hard to get precise. The harmonies tended to be a little more jolly than I was expecting, though there are some sophisticated chords worked into the piece, together with a rather unexpected key change from G to Eb close to the end of the piece which comes back to the home key with some cunningly concealed triplets. The piece concludes with harmonics in much the way that it began. Before the piece concludes, Guitar 3 plays the last half of Big Ben's chimes, though a little quieter and higher in pitch. So, despite what its title might suggest, this is a piece that begins quietly, ends quietly; it spends its entirety between pp and mj. Fingering is sparse, but welcome in understanding where best to play some of the phrases. The music isn't hard, but there are one or two chords where the little finger needs more dexterity than a learner might yet have, and so I'll veer on side of caution and say that this would suit Grade Five players, though a less-skilled team could conquer the piece with practice and perhaps thinning out any chords that refuse to sing out cleanly.

Derek Hasted (Classical Guitar Magazine)