The face in "The Scream" may bear some resemblance to the face of your guitar, but that's dwarfed by the similarities between this month's sightreading handout* compared to the first ever BGS sightreading handout+. That old handout featured some scary Halloween music composed by a 19 year old Russian pianist back in 1892, while the main piece this month was composed for guitar by a 39 year old Spaniard, also back in 1892!

Classical guitarists will recognize this month's piece even if it's not in their personal repertoire. The challenging original ranged over almost the entire fretboard with drop-D tuning, but its melodic reduction for this sightreading fits comfortably in first position with standard tuning, making it enjoyable to play as a simple sightread.

Its similarities to that scary Russian piece have gone unrecognized, until now. Space on the handout didn't permit including the full versions of both sightreads, so this month's Exercise 1 compares just the first line from the Russian piano piece with the last line from the Spanish guitar piece. Exercise 2 is the full guitar piece sightread. Follow the Oct2023 link below to see the full Russian sightread. Both are a pleasure to play.

*https://jjolson.net/BGS/Oct2025.pdf
+https://jjolson.net/BGS/Oct2023.pdf