Alcohol and Algebra (2015)
for two steel-stringed guitars [11:00]

“The earliest Delta blues tradition had been as much about creating sounds as it was about playing notes.” — Ted Gioia, Delta Blues

The words of the title share Arabic roots, having wound their way into Western culture through an encounter with Islamic civilization. Roughly the same could be said about the guitar, the fretted ud that spread through Andalucia to Europe and the New World. 

Alcohol and Algebra invokes many of the far-flung stylistic associations of this now ubiquitous instrument, conjuring up the dreamy slides of the Mississippi Delta, as well as the portamento ud improvisations of Munir Bashir. Later passages recall the intricate geometrical interplay of Alhambra tiles, here transposed to a network of polyrhythms and metric modulations.

Alcohol and Algebra was premiered by the guitar duo Oh Mensch at the Der Sommer in Stuttgart Festival on 14 June, 2015 at the Theaterhaus in Stuttgart, Germany.