• Medium slow
• Fast
• Very Slow

Tippett's only composition for solo guitar was written for Julian Bream and first performed by him in Pasadena on November 9, 1983.

The title alludes both to the picture of the same name by Picasso and to the poem by Wallace Stevens which it inspired, entitled The Man with the Blue Guitar, whose essence is contained in the first stanza, beginning:

The man bent over his guitar
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.'

The main replied, 'Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

Stevens develops the paradox of outer reality and artistic reality, and the processes of transformation, in a further 32 stanzas. But Tippett here was essentially stimulated by three moods or gestures which he used as the titles for the movements:

Transforming:
Being the lion in the lute
Before the lion locked in stone.

Juggling
...the old fantoche
Hainging his shawl upon the wind.

Dreaming
...Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves

Bream chose to play the slow movement, Dreaming , second and the piece was published in that order. More recent guitarists have restored the original order of movements, as given above, and this the composer has preferred.