John Croft wrote Felix Namque (after Tallis) for me in 2021 as a response to my 'Felix Namque' project.

for me in 2021 as a response to my 'Felix Namque' project.

Live world premiere at City University, London, Feb 2023

The life of this intriguing and beautiful piece began when I asked John to write a solo piece based on the plainchant 

. Interestingly, John initially found this idea challenging as his music is not often contrapuntal nor does it often use 'found materials'. 

John's typically intricate and highly original response to this 'brief' hinges on a section from Thomas Tallis' second Felix Namque for keyboard containing a passage of overlapping descents based on the 'Virgo Maria' section of the original chant.

I encouraged John to pursue his idea of microtonally compressing and manipulating these descending phrases and finding a way of fitting the result onto the guitar fingerboard. It struck me as fertile ground given the dichotomy inherently present when combining microtonally retuned strings with a 12-EDO fingerboard. Regardless of the pitch of the open string, any interval between two notes fretted on the same string would be equally tempered in 12-EDO. This unalterable fact combined with the non-12-EDO intervals and pitches available when moving from one string to the next provides the kind of 'fecund-restriction' that often leads to good things in collaborations between composers and performers. 

Once John's vision for these descending phrases had coalesced around third- and sixth-tones he made a 'template document' which functioned as a kind of 'dream scenario'. It was not playable in its entirety in any one tuning but John selected passages from it that he felt had potential and then attempted to find tunings that would allow these selected passages to plot onto the guitar fingerboard. I would then try them out and send feedback. After this process John settled on the following '2-up, 2-down, 2-normal' sixth-tone tuning:

In this diagram the arrowed accidentals represent sixth-tone (33.33333... cents) alterations. 

This tuning compresses the range of the open strings to a Major 9th+1/6th and therefore gives the guitar a special resonance, a compressed intricacy and a 'jangling' darkness. On a practical front this tuning represents a challenge to realise on the guitar and requires restringing. After some experimentation I settled on the following:

Once this tuning was settled on John found an ingenious way to ensure the theoretical playability of the rest of the piece. He designed a perspex replica of a guitar fingerboard and wrote the pitches of each fret onto this fingerboard with a whiteboard marker. This allowed him to judge the size of stretches and leaps and thereby asses the practical implications of the music he was writing. A successful solo guitar performance lives or dies by minutiae in a way that many other solo instrumental performances do not. Because of its physical difficulty, quieter volume, and limited sustain, all of the tiny details of a performance must be working in perfect balance to ensure the music really communicates with an audience. A large leap or chord that is too thick in texture can, when deployed in the wrong way, have a disproportionately large detrimental effect on the ability of the player to effectively communicate the music to their audience. In thoroughly checking these things against his makeshift fingerboard John was able to make very accurate educated guesses as regards the physical demands his music was making on me at any moment in the piece. As a result there were almost no edits that needed to be made for physical reasons. 

John very thoughtfully provided two staves in the score, one for the sounding pitch and one for the fingered pitch as if in standard tuning, so there is no problem or difficulty finding fingerings. However, there are significant physical challenges inherent in such a radical restringing. Even though our proprioception is unchanged and functioning as normal, and in many cases the size of our movements remains the same, what our hands feel when we arrive at a position on the strings is vastly different for both right and left hands because of two main factors.

The first of these factors can lead to disorientation and needs careful practice to overcome and ensure accurate performance. The second factor is subtler because even if the string is the usual thickness (as in the case of the first (E) string), its tension may be different, and in some cases radically so, from the norm. This is a particular challenge for the right hand as the force required to pluck a string of familiar thickness but altered tension and retain sonic balance with the other parts of the texture is very challenging and in many cases circumvent right hand instinct and ingrained technique. Making use of right hand studies (such as Mauro Giuliani's 120 arpeggio studies), or adapting well-known pieces to be right hand studies (such as Heitor Villa-Lobos' First etude), proved useful. Ultimately though, one has to be guided by the harmonic flow of the work in question and rely on one's ears and reviewing recordings of practice sessions to achieve the desired result. In the case of several strings factors 1. and 2. exist in combination, making this a challenging work indeed.

The performance of this piece, then, hinges on hyper-sensitive touch to the altered tension and thickness of the strings of the guitar, an acute awareness of the counterpoint and microtonal voiceleading employed in John's descents, and an intricate spinning of obsidian threads at dynamic levels ranging from the quietest, most intricate sounds, to the wildest free-wheeling rasgueados.