Discover Gulli Björnsson's Stunning Landslag 1 & 6 🎸

Here are two short selections from landslög by Gulli Björnsson. Gulli is a wonderful young Icelandic composer that is making waves in the guitar world. The score to these short pieces is offered for free on the ToneBase website - after hearing them for the first time I was immediately drawn to the beauty, simplicity, and effectiveness on the guitar of the works. These pieces are great for students, and as you can see, for teachers as well!

Here are some of the notes from the score:

Landslög (landscapes) is a set of 11 pieces for solo guitar drawing inspiration from Icelandic landscapes. The pieces are composed through repetitive patterns and get progressively more difficult.

The pieces aren’t really connected in any way, one advantage is that each one can stand on it’s own as a piece of music and the landscapes can also be played together in any fashion. I do believe however that when played together as a whole they compliment each other nicely, while still being unified through similar musical concepts and aesthetics.

Landslag 1 - Dark sand dunes with some moss - 0:00

The opening landscape is intended to get all the fingers moving, both of the right and left hands. The right hand arpeggios are repetitive ascending arpeggios in triplets while the left hand features different finger combinations for each chord.

Focus on making a good connection with the strings with the right hand and placing the various finger combinations of the left hand carefully so all the strings can resonate.

The repetitive triplets made me think of the black sand beaches and vistas in the south east of Iceland. There you can find ‘sandþúfur’ and ‘sandöldur’, which are these small sand dunes that sometimes have green moss and grass at their peaks, kind of like a green beanie.

Landslag 6 - Fallen rocks from a mountain - 1:31

Landslag VI is composed through three voiced diatonic counterpoint in the gloriously sad key of c-minor. The key of c-minor tends to make everything a bit more challenging to play on the guitar as 4 of the open strings (E,A,D and E) have been flattened... But if you have not played many pieces in c-minor I think you will really enjoy playing in this key.

The piece is more about harmony than melodic contour of the voices, but still the top and bottom voices are the more important voices of the three. It moves quite a lot around the fretboard and I am sure you will encounter some voicing of some chord that you might not have played before.

The tragic sentimental atmosphere of the piece is in my view perfectly captured by fallen rocks from a mountain, now sitting scattered over the grass overlooking their previous epic place where they were part of the mountain.

Adam Cicchillitti, guitar
Audio/video - Adam Cicchillitti
Augustine "Regal" Strings
Sergei de Jonge guitars

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