Vernalis Breakdown (2019) for two guitars was commissioned by the Aros Guitar Duo with financial support from\u00a0the Danish Arts Foundation and KODA.<\/p>\n
When I retired as professor of electronic music in 2018 after having spent a lifetime studying, composing and teaching\u00a0electronic and contemporary music, I decided to buy myself a five-string banjo as a retirement present. I had never actually played the banjo. There was a\u00a0battered five-string banjo hanging on the wall in my childhood home, but\u00a0no-one in my family knew how to play it. I guess taking\u00a0up the banjo at the age of 65 was\u00a0an attempt to reach back through the years to my childhood.<\/p>\n
I decided to try to learn to play bluegrass banjo in the fast and furious style of the legendary Earl Scruggs, but just for fun and for my own amusement.\u00a0Bluegrass banjo players are few and far between in Denmark, so I found an on-line course and off I went, finding great joy in being a total amateur, after working as a professional\u00a0musician\u00a0for so many years. Soon I was playing bluegrass and country music on a regular basis with my family and friends, and having a hell of a lot of fun.<\/p>\n
About a year\u00a0after I took up the five-string, Mikkel and Simon of the Aros Guitar Duo asked\u00a0me to write a piece for them based on the\u00a0melody known as\u00a0In Vernalis Temporis<\/em> (In Springtime), composed around 1500. In Denmark, this old melody is well-known and cherished.<\/p>\n When I started composing the piece, I simply\u00a0couldn’t get all those bluegrass banjo licks out of my head. So I decided to succumb\u00a0and\u00a0incorporate bluegrass banjo licks into a\u00a0classical guitar duet.\u00a0In bluegrass, a breakdown<\/em> is a part of a song in which various instruments have solo parts (breaks). This may take the form of all instruments playing the verse together, and then several or all instruments individually repeating the verse as solo parts. In Vernalis Breakdown,<\/em>\u00a0a cherished sixteenth century Danish melody meets the unrestrained, unceremonious\u00a0world of American bluegrass.<\/p>\n Watch a performance of Vernalis Breakdown<\/em> with the Aros Guitar Duo<\/p>\n