for four guitars, duration c. 19′
The work is a joint commission by Hochschule für Musik Würzburg and Kekkonen quartet and the commission was supported by the Sibelius Fund. Finnish first performance of Shades was in Summer Sounds -festival in Porvoo 27.6.2026 by Kekkonen Quartet and German first performance in Hausen 20.09.2026 by Bibra Guitar Quartet. The work has four movements:
I Shades of Crystal
II Shades of Waves
III Shades of Bells
IV Shades of Memories (Epilogue)
Kekkonen Quartet: Petri Kumela, Ismo Eskelinen, Otto Tolonen and Jyrki Myllärinen, Summer Sounds -festival Porvoo 27.6.2026
The guitar and its sound world are deeply familiar and dear to me, as I played classical guitar throughout my childhood and youth. In this work, I wanted to explore the instrument’s delicate and richly nuanced colours with traditional and extended techniques. Writing for four guitars makes it possible to examine these sounds in different forms: at times as fragmentary musical events produced by a single guitar, at others as a slowly evolving texture created collectively by all four instruments.
Shades is structured so that the guitar’s resonance and sonority grow from movement to movement. The work begins at the threshold between noise and pitch (Shades of Crystal), then moves through a passage centred on a single tone, resonating with a cavern-like echo (Shades of Waves). The third movement focuses on the full, rich sonority of four guitars, ultimately evoking the polyphonic sound of church bells ringing from different directions (Shades of Bells). In the fourth movement, sonority is approached with a sense of nostalgia: we recall the past, sensitized to the inevitable passage of life (Shades of Memories, Epilogue).