The Falcon’s Eye (1999-2000) began as a rediscovery after more than twenty years of my own guitar playing.  Though I play these pieces (in private) with varying degrees of success, I have enjoyed the process of learning them nearly as much as the process of composing them.  The titles are small fragments of poetry which evoked for me something essential about each of the preludes.  The poems from which the fragments come were created by Czeslaw Milosz, Michael Ondaatje, Theodore Roethke, Robinson Jeffers, Linda Gregg, Rolf Jacobsen, Wang Wei and Franz Wright.  In case you are wondering, I composed the music first and then searched among the forty or so fragments that I had collected for an especially resonant fit.  A number of my pieces get their titles that way, except I usually choose the title first and compose the music ‘to’ it instead of the other way around.  The preludes can of course be done as a complete set lasting about forty minutes, or one of many possible subsets of the guitarist’s own devising could be performed instead.     - Donald Crockett