8 Duets

Alessandro Spazzoli (a composer who is not a guitarist, but who by now boasts a considerable and very varied guitar production) provides here eight new Duets which certainly enrich the didactic duet repertoire in an original way.

From the point of view of the musical idiom used, the student is presented here with examples of modal, polytonal, polymodal, whole-tone and atonal music; these pieces therefore also offer a valuable possibility to the student to open up to idioms other than the tonal one, used in most of the didactic production for the first years of study. For the same reason, the rhythmic and metric innovations present in the pieces which make up this collection are noteworthy (compared to what can be found in the didactic production of the early nineteenth century).

The great inventiveness and communicative strength of these Duets, combined with a suitable instrumental difficulty, help the young musician to meet the new idioms in a non-traumatic way and immediately grasp their expressive possibilities (a very young student grappling with a chamber piece by Spazzoli said to a fellow student that this music had to be played properly, because “it’s out of tune, but in the right way”!).

Furthermore, thanks to the numerous echoes and cross-references present in each duet, these pieces can also provide a first introduction to the language of some most important composers of the twentieth century, from Sergei Prokofiev (nos. 1, 5 and 7), Igor Stravinsky (nos. 2 and 5) and Dmitry Shostakovich (no. 6) to Maurice Ravel (no. 8), Béla Bartók (nos. 1, 4 and 5), Francis Poulenc (no. 3), Aram Khachaturian (no. 6) and György Ligeti (no. 4).