Isaan Music Composition for Classical Guitar

Abstract

Guitar is one of the most popular music instruments for more than 50 years. In the western, guitar was used to compose a various kind of music including blues, rock, blueglass and flamenco style. On the other hand, in the eastern, guitar also had its pattern of composition depended on social and cultural context. Guitar, in the contemporary music context, was developed in many aspects, however, there still lack of the musical composition which response to the change of contemporary cultures and also response to the guitarist context in the perspective of performance and education. Because of guitar’s exclusivity, it was difficult to create the music, moreover, the traditional classical western music culture needed to transform music from other musical instruments. Nowadays, there were many attempts to compose the music for guitar. There were increasing number of the successful music composers such as Leo Brouwer, a Cuban composer, who use the identities of local music to express his song efficiently, Sérgio and Odair Assad, Brazilian guitarist, and also a Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu. The researcher would like to compose a wide variety of songs for classical guitar to serve a contemporary taste based on Thai-Isaan culture of Ubon Ratchathani, as the hometown of researcher, and applied the composition and playing techniques of contemporary composers and guitarist to create the songs that had their own identity and artistic values.