Opening Some Scores

After the past month of listening to his music, never having heard it before, I'm looking at some of the scores to some of Dusan Bogdanovic's easier music, "7 Little Secrets" "7 Easier Polymetric Studies" and am impressed that he has written some of the most interesting student repertoire I've encountered.  Of course I'm reduced to reading it on piano, I'm not that much of a guitarist, though some of the "Little Secrets" don't look like they're that hard, merely that tricky.   Perhaps the easiest of them, #4 is quite elusively beautiful.

 #7 Is also beautiful and a bit harder, I guess.

These are definitely not on the same level of difficulty as even the "Easier Polymetric Studies" though they aren't musically lightweight.  There are polymetric and contrapuntal features in most of them.  #3 has a time signature 3/4/6/8 and it's not just an exercise in hemiola rhythms.  Most of them dispense with a time-signature, all together, which forces you to really think hard about how you're going to count the music, and, so, how you're going to think about it and even how you're going to hear it.  You couldn't play the 7 short pages of this without learning a lot about many aspects of music.  They are quite wonderful student pieces and quite listenable even if you haven't been a student for a long time.  It makes me wish he'd written about fifty or a hundred more of them. 

Among his few compositions for piano are the 6 Illuminations, also short pieces, though I'm having a harder time tracking down the score.  Though they are very good, the ones I've managed to hear seem a bit more conventional than the guitar music.   Here are #1 and 6.

In some way they remind me of the music that pianists have composed for guitar, though I can't say exactly why.  Maybe it's just feeling more at home on your own instrument, knowing where to stretch the technique and abilities of the player.  

Bogdanovic is one of the most important of living composers from what I've been able to hear and read through at the end of summer.   His music deserves to be more widely known.