1. Lovejail – Read about this movementhere.2. Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter – Read about this movementhere.3. Gavotte – Read about this movementhere.4. A Joyful Adventure – Read about this movementhere.
Today I completed a new piano sonata. What a relief to be finished. I can’t believe it’s over. I feel that I’ve completed something epic. I’ve climbed a mountain.
I started this music in Spring of 2016, during a difficult time in my life, and continued working on it until today, February 20, 2020. In fact, a good chunk of the second movement was written back in 2008, as a completely different piece which has now been dismantled. So this music’s been with me a while.
This music guided me through many life experiences, and was in turn inspired by those life experiences. As a result the sonata takes the listener on a real journey through my wants and hopes and dreams and emotions. It’s a tour of my psyche.
As I’ve noted in other posts about this sonata, this music is riddled with hope. It’s everywhere you turn in this sonata. It’s the main theme of the whole damn piece. Turns out my psyche must have a lot of hope in it.
Oh there’s other themes too: love and healing and time and growth. They all wind around each other, they are all intertwined.
This sonata is also really dang long. I started to say something, then had more to say, then more and more and more. The story takes its time to unfold. If you listen to this whole piece, you will drink deeply from my well of creativity.
When life becomes intense, I tend to stop writing music for a time. This is usually due to a simple lack of time. When a child is newly born, or a business newly started, there is little free time to compose music. However these intense times also plant the seeds for the ripest artistic fruit. Momentous occasions, personal tragedies or triumphs, and major life changes generate emotions that (for me) can only fully be expressed through art. So usually during these crazy times, I am full of artistic energy but have no time to actually put it somewhere.
This music was written when life was crazy. Not sure how I found the time to compose this, but thank god I did. I remember composing a note here and there between teaching classes. In my life, everything was falling apart. I won’t go into the details other than to say that shit had hit the fan. The music I think is still optimistic in its own way. I am an optimist at heart myself. What am I supposed to do, write the saddest music you ever heard? I’m not some tortured Romantic weeping into the piano. I prefer music with a bit of a lift, what can I say?
Love themes pop up all over the place in this music. They poke their heads around corners and say hello, sometimes flirtatiously, sometimes with more serious undertones. Then after they say what they came to say, they flit away again. This whole sonata has that quality as well, and it’s something I really love about this music. I love love themes, especially when they aren’t overly gooey, but more sincere, more complex.
This music is in sonata form. It’s got a lot of Beethoven-inspired content in there, with some country-western overtones. I really like the return of the main theme (starting at 7:57) all the way to the end. This is some of my strongest writing in the more strictly classical vein. There is a touch of modern dissonance in there, but this is truly a classical work.
…at times a bit too classical-sounding? Hard to say. I expressed much that I wished to express with this music, but also something was holding me back I think. I clung tightly to the old forms and styles. My own voice emerges plenty of times throughout the piece, but I don’t feel like I am always my authentic self in every corner of the music. Even if the music sounds like it’s made of 100 different ideas, good old sonata form is right there through the whole piece. Beethoven hovers over my shoulder, raising an eyebrow at every jazzy dissonance.
Ok so the ghost of Beethoven has haunted me for years, and I still haven’t found a way to put him down, to unspool him from my music. But I would ask: how can a house be expected to unbolt itself from its very foundation and just walk away?
So Beethoven remains, and the music is more structured for it. I could go back and try to shoe horn more stylistic originality into the music, but I am going to cut my losses and write the next thing instead. This is still me trying to figure out how to write a sonata, and what I want MY sonatas to actually sound like. Everyone has to have student work. Or perhaps all work is student work, if we never stop learning.
