Guitar Sonata in F minor

http://www.periferiamusic.com/en/shop/detail/product/742-guitar-sonata-in-f-minor

Time for another semi-scheduled self-promotional post. As of January 2012 my Guitar Sonata in F minor has been published by Periferia Sheet Music.  If you've been dying to play a roughly six minute long sonata allegro form in F minor this is the piece for you!

I wrote this sonata back in the year 2000 during a period where I was "between jobs" as the euphemism goes.  I don't know about the rest of the world but the dot com bubble had burst early in Seattle and people were just starting to get the idea that maybe there'd been a dot com bubble in some places. 

I had recently immersed myself in the late works of Beethoven and Shostakovich.  It seemed like a fun challenge to compose a sonata form in F minor because it struck me as something that Beethoven would have done if he had been a guitarist.  We guitarists know all too well there's never really been a Beethoven of the guitar but if there were a Beethoven for the guitar he or she wouldn't have let a key like F minor be an obstacle.  The very difficulty of the key would be a catalyst for inspiration.  That's how I like to think of things, anyway; that's how I did think of things when I wrote the sonata years ago.  I am planning to work out audio and video recordings of the sonata this year so if you can't just look at notes on the page and know what they sound like, fear not, I plan to have realizations of the score later this year.

So that's the general backstory of my writing a six minute long sonata allegro form in F minor for solo guitar.  it was very fun to write and it is fun to play when you have the chops to keep it in the zone of the ideal tempo.  160 is the ideal.  Anywhere between 152 and 168 bpm is still okay.  There's a tempo that seems awesome and practical when you're 27 that you realize, at 37, could stand to be toned down a bit.