Contemporary guitar music from French-speaking Switzerland

The lively piece One minute by the flutist, conductor and composer Caroline Charrière, born in 1960, is a miniature over the note d. Written mainly for one voice, it is technically easy to master. The first half is a great crescendo, also in terms of movement and rhythm. The soft percussive elements that gently introduce the second part are followed by faster and louder notes that lead to a violent conclusion. A piece that is well suited to practicing authentic contemporary music with pupils.

Caroline Charrière, Une minute, for guitar solo, GUI11, Fr. 9.00, Edition Bim, Vuarmarens 2012

Six times longer Livia by Julien-François Zbinden. The now very old pianist and composer wrote it in 1999 at the age of 82 for Maria Livia São Marcos, who taught guitar at the Geneva Conservatory for decades. Zbinden's compositional style is classically modern, free in harmony and melody, but also interspersed with individual serial elements. The piece consists of a single movement, which is divided into a solemn beginning and a rapid second part, only to return to the beginning in a kind of short recapitulation at the end. Some passages are not really playable, so that certain long notes in the melody are only given their full note value in thought. The notated low C in bars 129 and 130 should probably be an E.

Livia is a composition in the tradition of "classical" music. There is little evidence that the composer was also a gifted jazz pianist and that the dedicatee is originally from Brazil. And yet: the Latin American temperament of a Leo Brouwer, for example, resonates from afar, and alongside selective inversions in the melodic line or short crab chord sequences, rhythm is an important element of the composition, even in the fast perpetuum mobile passages. Zbinden does not skimp on accents and sforzati; the quiet last chord is only an echo ...

Julien-François Zbinden, Livia, for guitar solo, GUI 7, Fr. 15.00, Editions Bim, Vuarmarens 2012