I decided to write a guitar duo simply because I’ve been composing for nearly two decades and I hadn’t yet composed one. The piece ended up being a prime exemplar of my current artistic goals: write music that sounds like it was composed by the living that would not be a total non-sequitir when programmed alongside the dead. I wanted to write a traditional fast-slow-fast sonata in a compact enough manner to not be overly cumbersome for guitar duos curating a program. For the opening Allegro movement, I embraced typical guitarristic idiomaticisms, specifically movable hand-shapes combined with open strings to achieve a transmogrifying harmonic substance. The initial phrases show the interruption and fragmentation of the accompaniment-melody dynamic between the two guitars that informs a lot of the frenetic character of the first movement (especially in the development section). These sorts of devices are reflected in different ways in the final movement. The slow movement, which I decided to title Memorial, ended up taking on a reflective and somewhat elegiac tone. A friend of mine, the great composer Robert Phillips, passed away suddenly while I was writing it—without any intentionality, that absolutely informed what I wrote on a subliminal level.