SONATA FOR TRUMPET AND PIANO
A four-movement sonata in an elegant, colorful, French-inspired style, written during the isolation of 2020 as a more intimate addition to a repertoire better known for fanfares.
Instrumentation
Trumpet (doubling Flugelhorn), Piano
Duration
15 minutes (in 4 movements)
Year Composed
2020
Commission & Premiere Info
Dedicated to Jack Sutte. Premiered by Paul Armitage (trumpet) and Ryo Kaneko (piano) at Ford-Crawford Hall, Indiana University.
Program Notes
This work was written during a time of transition and isolation — I had just graduated from undergraduate and I was preparing for moving to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school. The pandemic caused by COVID-19, quarantine, and mask-wearing had suddenly become the new reality. It was also the first time in a long while that I had come to a full stop. With no schoolwork to be stressed about and almost no social contact, I had time to think about what actually speaks to me in music with much less external influence.
While attending school, I often felt pressured to fit into a certain “new music” aesthetic and I was afraid to compose things that might sound like “the past.” Yet I found that I am most satisfied with my own compositions when they are motivically, formally, and harmonically driven, which are traits that are more associated with “older” music. I was also playing Maurice Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin while composing the sonata, and I could not hide the fact that harmony speaks to me, and avoiding tonality and chords is like avoiding the pleasure of listening. Inspired by the elegant and colorful style of French music, I thought that composing a sonata in such a style would be a nice addition to the solo trumpet repertoire, since the instrument is more frequently associated with extroverted and fanfare-like music.
The first movement is in a standard sonata form with a first theme and a second theme, a repeated exposition, development, and a recapitulation. However, a trumpet cadenza is added in the developmental section before the recap. Movement II is a four-voice fugue, and it calls for flugelhorn. The timbre of the flugelhorn is perfect for the contrapuntal texture and the half-minor, half-whole-tone harmony of this movement. The third movement is a Scherzo that has two contrasting sections.
The last movement is a Toccata, a genre most often associated with virtuosic keyboard music. In this movement, I borrowed the typical features of a keyboard toccata (fast tempo, perpetual texture changes, and a lot of notes), and applied them to both the trumpet and the piano part. There are endless 16th notes that sustain the piece from the beginning to the end. The harmony is colorful and shifts constantly. The virtuosity of the movement is reflected by the technical challenges to the performers: double and triple tonguing for the trumpet, running arpeggios and repeated notes for the piano, and the sheer physical endurance that’s required to perform it at the end of the entire sonata.