Benjamin Verdery : Now and Ever : Doberman –Yppan

Benjamin Verdery

Doberman – Yppan : 39 pages

This extensive piece is, on the face of it, in two movements but with a number of themes cropping up in both. Not only that there are a few features of this piece that set it apart from most other pieces I have seen, namely, the way you have to set your guitar up first.The open strings are, from bottom to top, D, G, D, A, Bb, and E, but with the added instruction to place a capo on strings 1 to 5, in the first movement, leaving the sixth untouched. As a result of this the music is printed in three parts, with the sounding score on the top, the tablature, next, and finally the playing score underneath. Further to this there are places in the end of movement one, where an x – notehead indicates that the player has to trill behind the capo as if trilling on between the 2^nd fret and the open 4^th string.

The opening movement, Now, is 111 bars long, and is full of the most unusual music I have ever come across. It is not atonal, but rather so different from anything else you, or i may have seen, or tried to play before, that it will be very difficult to get your hands around it for quite a while.

The last movement Ever has a speed of 160 crotchets a minute and uses many time signatures along the way including 6/8, 7/8, 5/8, 12/8, 11/8 and 9/8 on just the first two pages. The music , is very involved, and very modern , harmonically , and at 280 bars , quite a considerable length.

There is a full recoding of the whole 12 + minutes of this piece on YouTube, and I suggest that anyone who is fascinated by my description should check it out, because the unusual tunings, and the partial capo create all sort of playing problems that many players will not have come across before.

Chris Dumigan