Canadian guitarist Simon Farintosh performs Maцi by Canadian composer Liam Kuhn on an 8-string guitar. This comes via Simon’s YouTube channel (go subscribe). Nice performance by Farintosh with a great sense of space. I also really enjoy hearing the extended range from the 8 string. As he mentioned in the description:
‘Maцi’ by Canadian composer Liam Kuhn. Written for solo 8-string guitar, this piece was the 1st prize winner of the 2024 Twisted Spruce Composition Competition.
Composer’s note: “The composition in question, (Maцi: Mache), meaning mother is a piece that was inspired by Come and See, an anti-war soviet/Belarussian film from 1985 by Ales Adamovich and Elem Klimov. Essentially it is about an innocent boy, Flyora, who is in the middle of a war zone in 1943. He digs up a soldiers gun and it seems after that the enemy (Nazis) are after him from the sky and all around. He ends up losing everything that he loves in life including his innocence. Flyora becomes a soldier himself to help fight in the horrible war. The film is disturbing and is hard to watch but is a beautiful reminder to try and live in peace with each other. The Nazis in the my piece (Maцi) are represented as in E major and the soviets are represented as A major. Flyora is C# Aeolian but throughout the story grows and evolves in and out of a whole tone scale, as seen at the end of the composition. The whole tone row is B C# D# F G A. There are also messages about the story using A C# E G# B rows consecutively aligned with the alphabet. There are multiple references to music that was in the film, especially Lacrimosa, plus my own addition of Für Alina.”
