Suite for guitar was written in Wiltshire in August 1976, during a break from working on my second orchestral piece Pentecost music. It was prompted by bumping into my neighbour, guitarist Julian Bream, on the platform of Tisbury railway station, where we were both seeing friends off on the same train. When I finished the piece, he agreed to edit it for publication, and I am enormously grateful for the invaluable technical and musical advice he gave me, then and at many other times. We became good friends, and I have missed him very much since his death in 2020.

The Suite is in five contrasted movements (Prelude, Balletto, Scherzo, Cantilena and Toccata) and the style is relaxed and light-hearted, and makes no attempt to push boundaries. There is a specific reason for this. Whilst I was working on Pentecost music I felt very much within the gravitational pull of the music of Olivier Messiaen (whose class at the Paris conservatoire I was visiting at that time). But when I broke off from Pentecost music  to write Suite for guitar (and whilst I was writing it) my mind was preoccupied by thoughts and memories of Benjamin Britten, who was seriously ill at the time, and who died four months later in December. In a small and humble way it is my homage to a composer whose music was an inspiring backdrop to my childhood and early life. As I developed my own musical voice, my admiration for Britten's work was overlaid by other influences, but I never lost my admiration for his work, nor my respect for his brilliance. More even than that, I admired and respected his engagement with the world around him and his determination to be useful to the living. I still do. So I am proud to admit that there is an underlying hint of Britten's voice in every bar of this piece. Without his extraordinary achievement, the world would have been a much poorer place.

Giles Swayne
2025