Branimir Blogging

As a composer, and a guitarist performing mostly own works and arrangements, I have always had to deal with a very specific situation. I have often released recordings of works just finished. Oftentimes, there were no opportunities of performing these for a while, and then releasing. Surely, I would have preferred such routine, but in the less than a perfect world, I have developed a strategy which involves multiple steps, in order to polish and promote these same works. One of the discoveries every young composer will make, is that it will take some time for the audiences to get acquainted with new compositions, before the decisions regarding the work’s future are made (publish, popularize, reach smaller niche audiences, forget about etc.). Hence, in 2008 I decided to digitally release all of my guitar works to date. It was more of a composer’s than performer’s edition. The feedback has enabled me to better understand how these compositions fare within certain segments of musi...

Music is fun to write about, provided that precision of terms is evaded. It is normal that art based on non-verbal sounds doesn’t easily lend itself to verbal descriptions, hence too much precision can get in the way. A famous example is the term “atonal” for describing the music without tonal center. Its actual meaning is “toneless”, and many attempts have failed to replace the term “atonal” with something more defining . Furthermore, musicians seem to favor catchiness, and today, as another new term is about to become accepted, I believe it would stick as “irrational meters”, instead of “time signatures with denominators that are not powers of two”. G uitar can be played in many different ways, likely in more distinct ways than any other instrument. One can be foolish and argue the supremacy of one way of playing over an other, as has happened many times before . However, every style of guitar playing has a reason to exist In some unique dimension that takes true master y...