Remnants (2020) for solo guitar

It is characteristic of the human brain to compensate for missing information by “filling in blanks” or deducing details from the parts of a memory that are available. Though this ability seems to display our intelligence, our minds often fill in blanks with faulty material and struggle to come to conclusions. Remnants explores this concept by treating a melody as a memory of an old friend. The melody does not change throughout the piece but rather, undergoes a series of reharmonizations, alterations in texture, and timbral shifts. This reshaping represents a battle for dominance over the memory, pitting a predominately consonant, positive emotion against a dissonant, negative one. Ultimately, the work expresses that the mind cannot resolve the struggle, closing with the same ambiguous harmonics of the opening.