for solo guitar

“In music, as in life, expectations are often postponed.”

–Allen Cadwallader and David Gagné, Analysis of Tonal Music

            This piece is a lighthearted musing on that serious truism, inspired by one of the many moments in my life when things did not turn out as I had expected. At the time, I was playing Giulio Regondi’s “Etude No. 1” (the calm and amiable music heard at the beginning of the movement), and the “Puccini” movement from Dominick Argento’s Letters from Composers (the driving arpeggio pattern that interrupts it). After this introduction, the piece seems to follow a traditional rondo form, but keeps getting diverted to increasingly distant keys by whimsical modulations akin to those in Regondi’s “Etude No. 2,” until one starts to wonder whether the music will ever reach closure. Then, just when you think you can finally see a path to a satisfying conclusion which ties up all the loose ends…