I have often invited friends to listen to music I am working on and they enjoy it, so I am posting some samples of works in progress here for my loyal listeners. Some of the following pieces end abruptly (this means I haven’t written the ending yet) and, sometimes, the piece is itself nothing more than an ending, or a beginning. The point is, I welcome your comments and offer them in the spirit of sharing the deepest joy I know in my artistic life – composing music.
The first two pieces are short pieces for two archguitars which I have been working on casually over the past two or three years. I call them Little Preludes after Johann Sebastian Bach’s Kleine Praeludien, usually two-voice pieces in a consistent tempo that he wrote so many of – particularly for keyboard. By the way, if you saw any the Steamboat Bill, Jr. performances in 2009 and 2010, you may recognize the themes. My goal with the six preludes is to record them complete and release them on a full-length CD of my other compositions in 2011. The third piece is a fanciful carol that did not fit on the final Archguitar Christmas CD.
Enjoy,
Peter Blanchette
Northampton, Dec. 2010.
Little Prelude, Nr. 6 of 6 for Archguitar Duo
This is a rhapsodic attempt at marrying the spinning-wheel feel of François Couperin’s harpsichord pieces with the lovely and mysterious harmonies of b minor and d minor. The note d serves as an unlikely pivot between the two shades of harmonic darkness.
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Little Prelude, Nr. 1 of 6 for Archguitar Duo
This prelude will be the first in the set of six, unless I write an even simpler one. It is a tradition that the first of any set of preludes is very simple; think of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude I, which is basically a harmonic exercise in 16th notes.
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March of the Toys (from Victor Herbert’s operetta “Babes in Toyland.” arrangement for three archguitar. I always loved this one, and I am particularly proud of the imitation of the snare drum that I achieved by twisting two strings around each other in the left hand and “drumming” on them with my right hand thumb.
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Archguitar Christmas 
