Look at me get several posts up in a single month! Actually, it has a lot to do with my weekly routine and I have started to include some recording time. Since I have begun my position at St. Andrew’s, I spend most of the afternoon there and take advantage of it. I have been trying to complete Sonata No. 1 at Duquesne University’s Chapel, which I also have occasionally been able to be in, just not lately. In the mean time – I get to start presenting Sonata No. 2!
The Sonata No. 2 begins with a Scherzo – something that may be a general misnomer. Scherzo’s are usually in 3 and are often the second or third movement of a Symphony or Sonata. The word scherzo means “joke” and this piece is not particularly a joke. Scherzos are also often in a Rondo form: ABACA; that is also not the case. This all said, I need to explain how this Sonata came into being. Shortly after finishing the Sonata No. 1, the Organ Artist Series here in Pittsburgh was holding a competition and let me just say that one of the judges commented that Sonata No. 1 would have been a winner. That little nudge included a suggestion to write another one.
I struggled with coming up with new material when I first started trying to compose this Sonata. I had just finished one! How could I come up with more and new material! Well, something I have done for quite some time is hang on to all my old material and I decided to explore some of it and I found something I had written from when I was an undergrad – something from around the time of my first official “BCB” number, The Bishop’s March. The opening 16ths in the right hand and the four note theme: A-E-F-Bb was something I wrote in the very early 2000s. In hindsight, I fell like I intuited that I wasn’t ready to deal with what I felt was a good idea.
Fast forward to late 2017 and I need to figure out what to do and this old material was the catalyst for the entire Sonata! I have told the handful of composition students that I have had to hang on to EVERY idea as you can never predict when something might become useful. I was in part imitating Enrico Bossi’s Scherzo, which in my memory, I didn’t hear until I was in Vancouver where Denis Bédard played it, but I distinctly remember composing my idea in Missoula, MT before moving to Vancouver, BC. Memory is a funny thing! To this Sonata, it doesn’t matter – I found my inspiration!
What is clear: the simple gesture in the Right Hand is really fun to play fast and the Theme mentioned above is harmonically dubious setting up a nice tour through a series of harmonically and chromatically related key areas. In my more wizened years as a composer, improviser, and performer, this movement really wrote itself. I remember struggling with the harmonic language about twenty years ago and when it came to writing it in 2017, it was so much easier to deal with the dissonance. I don’t have too much more to add here (I could talk about this movement FOREVER), just know that this movement is the fruition of about TWENTY years.
The Sonata No. 2 is available here in my shop: https://baetzeditions.com/product/sonata-no-2/