Thea Musgrave

- Soliloquy I

for guitar and soundfile


Soliloquy I is one of the earliest works for guitar and tape, composed by Thea Musgrave for Siegfried Behrend in 1969. The tape part was produced in conjunction with Daphne Oram, composer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, using source material from Behrend himself, who premiered the piece in London in 1972.

Musgrave’s ‘unbarred concertante melodic style’ had first appeared in her Clarinet Concerto earlier in 1969. A review of the concerto explained that this style left the finer rhythmic details up to the individual players, with the orchestra only coming together when ‘necessitated by the harmonic flow’ to create ‘a texture of considerable rhythmic complexity while not inhibiting the players with distracting reading problems’.

As evident in the Soliloquy, tape provided Musgrave with another means with which to achieve this complexity. Soliloquy I was later rewritten twice in 1980, for guitar and chamber orchestra (Soliloquy II), and guitar and chamber ensemble (Soliloquy III) .