The Guitar in Good Company: Music for More Than One Player

Most of what we publish is written for one player and six strings. The solo classical guitar is our home, and it is a world deep enough to spend a life in. But a guitar does not have to play alone, and some of the most rewarding editions in our catalogue ask for company: a second guitar, a third, and in one memorable case, a pair of accordions. Here is the music we publish for more than one.

Two guitars: Bluvenduo

Bluvenduo are a guitar duo with a transcriber's curiosity and a chamber player's ear. Their editions take music written for other forces and rework it for two guitars sitting knee to knee. Three Preludes for Two Guitars, drawn from Rachmaninoff's Opus 32, was their very first transcription project, born of a wish to play that lush piano writing on their own instruments. From there they have reached into Schubert's A major Sonata, D. 664, Schumann's complete Kinderszenen, and a single radiant Andante from a Haydn string quartet, splitting four voices cleanly between two players.

Duo playing teaches something solo playing cannot: how to breathe with another musician, how to hand a melody across the stand and take it back again. You can find all four editions in the Bluvenduo collection.

Three guitars: Ravel, by way of Florian Colombet

Add a third guitar and the palette widens again. Florian Colombet, a French guitarist, composer and arranger, transcribed Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye for three guitars, drawing on both the original piano four-hands version and Ravel's own orchestration to paint the suite's fairy-tale colours. Dedicated to the Lumen trio, it is a study in how three instruments can conjure textures a single guitar can only suggest. It sits alongside his other editions in the Florian Colombet collection.

Two accordions: a Palestrina surprise

And then there is the edition with no guitar in it at all. Harmonic Breath, by the Mysterium Duo of Antonio Peruch and Penny Sanborn, reimagines the sacred polyphony of the Renaissance master Palestrina for two free-bass accordions. The instruments' sustained breath lets the duo hold Palestrina's modal lines the way a choir would, and the nine adaptations are left unmarked, in keeping with how this music was read in its own time, with a full preface in English and Italian. It is the most unexpected thing in our catalogue, and one of the most beautiful. Find it in our Accordion collection.

The thread

Two guitars, three guitars, two accordions: on the surface these editions could not be more different. What they share is what every MusiCurate edition shares, a story worth telling and a score worth the work. The solo guitar will always be our centre of gravity, but it is good, now and then, to play in company. Browse the full sheet music library to see where the catalogue goes when one guitar steps aside.