Piano Sonata tmp
The Piano Sonata occupies a special place in my composerly output, in that it is the final realisation of a project I’ve contemplated since the 1960s. It took shape entirely in my studio in Ballarat, Australia, and the writing occupied me for all of 2015 and the beginning of 2016. Peter de Jager commissioned the work, and I was delighted to be able to provide a vehicle for his astonishing pianistic talents. It was originally written to share a program with the Alkan Symphonie from Op. 39, Szymanowski’s Third Piano Sonata, and Barraqué’s Sonate pour piano, and to a degree the Sonata’s resulting character reflects its intended company; however, although the piece was first performed in an abbreviated form with these other works, it eventually outgrew this plan and become a concert in itself. Cast in a single arch, it lasts about 100 minutes, and consists of nine continuous, inter-related movements.
I am delighted to be able to announce that Peter de Jager’s 9 October 2016 performance of the Piano Sonata won the APRA AMCOS 2017 Arts Music Awards PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR category. While I can take no direct credit for his performance I can at least express my pleasure in having provided the vehicle for Peter’s extraordinary talent. In my opinion, his performance of the work at the ABC in July this year was even better than the one last year, and I strongly encourage fans of superb pianism to listen to it when you have a couple of hours free. The ABC version of the piece is also slightly more complete, and the performance is preceded by a 45 minute discussion of the work between the ABC’s Stephen Adams, Peter de Jager, and myself.
Alternatively, Peter’s ABC performance can now be appreciated through the Scorefollower Youtube channel, without the conversation, and synced with the score.
Note that all rights in this music, and the graphic representation thereof, are reserved by the composer and, where appropriate, engraver. Anyone wishing to perform the work should contact the composer.
Not all of the score is in a final form; although the musical text is definitive, the process of engravure is continuing. The engraver is Andrew Bernard, and his work now comprises approximately half of the score.
In Memoriam Robert Schuck
Whiteout: “a blizzard of unremembering”
[Gregory Bear, Blood Music, p 255] |
Prelude—30″ | |
I | three windows: “refuges in infinite winter”
[Philip K Dick, Conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria, …interrupted by |
Sonata-rondo—11′ |
II | heat sink: “all warmth is local”
[Stephen Baxter, Vacuum Diagrams, p 4] |
Intermezzo I—3′ |
III | Photino birds: “avian dark matter”
[Stephen Baxter, Vacuum Diagrams, p 334] |
Scherzo I & trio—7′ |
IV | gallery of spaces: “in the musical multiverse”
[John Barrow describing Luigi Bianchi’s Classification of three-dimensional spaces which admit a continuous group of motions in The Book of Universes, p 161] |
Passacaglia—22′ |
V | Lévy flights: “random leaps in a musical configuration space”
[Albert-László Barabási, Bursts, p 157] |
Scherzo II—8′ |
VI | EM fugue [A—B—C]: “what emerges when EMs sing”
[Gregory Benford, Across the Sea of Suns, pp 133-144] |
Fantasia—22′ |
VII | k = +1: “Kristian Ireland collapses spacetime”
[John A. Peacock, Cosmological Physics: the Isotropic Universe 3.2: ‘…The Friedmann equation shows that a universe that is spatially closed (with k=+1) has negative total “energy”: the expansion will eventually be halted by gravity, and the universe will recollapse’.] |
Intermezzo II—5′ |
VIII | infallscape: “GM Hopkins culminates cosmic contraction”
[Collins Online Dictionary: Infall: the falling of matter to a celestial body from space under the influence of the body's gravity; Gerard Manley Hopkins: Inscape: the essential inner nature of a person, an object, etc.] |
Scherzo III—4′ |
IX | Tombeau/Ω Point: “voodoo remembrance as end-of-time resurrection”—Memento Robert Schuck†.
[Frank Tipler (after Teilhard de Chardin), The Physics of Immortality, pp xiv, 1] |
Elegy-finale—15′ |
To summarise. The work opens with an introduction, an upbeat, a prelude, that unadornedly states the harmonic material for (almost) the entire piece:
Whiteout
the two main movements, written on a large scale:
IV gallery of spaces – VI EM fugue
the three scherzi, of roughly equal length:
III photino birds – V Lévy flights – VIII Infallscape
the two intermezzi:
II heat sink – VII k= +1
and the pair of elegies, the first incomplete because interrupted, and the second a point of endless stasis:
I three windows – IX Tombeau/Ω Point
The durations given are approximate; any performance will fall close to these values. They provide clues to the psychological weight of each section.
When I set out to write this work, my intention was to produce a single-movement Sonata in multiple sections, like the Liszt or Reubke, or for that matter the Barraqué. I have often compared this piece to the Lyapunov Transcendental Études, but they differ inasmuch as that the Lyapunov set can be played as individual pieces, where the sections of my Sonata cannot – at least not without my specific permission. When discussing this piece I use the terms movement and section interchangeably; the ten segments are movements because they are partly self-contained capsules of meaning, but also sections because they are inseparable component parts of the bigger structure.
In 2015 I was weary of the interminable bickering between the advocates of modernism and traditionalism as ‘the way forward’, and decided that I would use this work as an attempt to demonstrate a possible rapprochement between these two seemingly irreconcilable directions. When laying out the overall segmentation of the piece I sought to have each movement have two designations, a bracingly modernist one given by their titles, and a thoroughly familiar, historically-mandated alternative. So, the opening three windows movement is both an intercutting of two dissimilar evolving gestures, and at the same time a Sonata-rondo. Either descriptor is equally valid.
My initial vision of the work was as a self-contained cosmos, from its point of creation – the scene-setting ur-harmonies of Whiteout – to its end-point. I’m fully aware that the ‘Big Bang to Big Crunch’ cosmological model is nowadays regarded as superseded, but from a musical point of view it is an almost perfect trajectory. So the Sonata ends with a paroxysm, a huge and extended shiver, as its material is annihilated at the end of time …or at least, at the end of the Infallscape. But just as I do not believe in the neat ‘Big Bang-Big Crunch’ model, I also have no faith in Frank Tipler’s expectation that we (and every other potentially possible sentient entity) will be reincarnated at a moment vanishingly close to the end, (technically, where all the world-lines converge under contraction), which he calls, after Teilhard de Chardin, the Omega (Ω) Point. But, deluded or not, that recapitulatory moment offers rich musical potential as a timeless montage of material from all the previous movements. So my Sonata has an entire, static, elegiac, movement after its end.
Of course, a trajectory, while necessary, doesn’t provide enough grain to differentiate the sections of such a structure. So while my Sonata provides an entirely abstract route from Bang to Crunch, it simultaneously offers a story. That story is summarised in the apophthegmatic remarks that immediately follow the titles of the movements, from “a blizzard of unremembering” to “voodoo remembrance as end-of-time resurrection”. The parenthetical notes offer more information about the sources of the ideas, some science, some science-fiction – it’s the idea that counts, not its veracity.
[1] There is a tension between my analysis in the podcast under the 2017 ABC Performance tab and my current (2024) view. It is less to do with how the movements function within the 100 minute architecture, and more a matter of their scale, and affinities.
Holograph Manuscript
Unsurprisingly for a work of this scale, the score has gone through several incarnations. The writing of the piece took just over fifteen months of fairly intense work, and it ended up with a different degree of editing for each movement. Some were effectively complete in my manuscript, like Lévy flights, others like EM fugue remain as mosaics of fragments. This Holograph Edition of the score is the final manuscript version.
Piano Sonata holograph edition
Initial Composite Score
Initial Composite Score, that drew together the completed sections of manuscript and the engraved movements, which Peter has used for all performances since. It is also the score that pans through on the
Performance Score
The Initial Composite Score, while interesting and pleasing to the eye, is not really a satisfactory final version, and Andrew has now made a new, complete setting of the score in Dorico, which is the definitive _Performance Score_. It incorporates minor adjustments that I made between the ANAM 2016 and ABC 2017 performances.
On August 3 2017 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented an event that consisted of a conversation with musical examples between myself, Stephen Adams, and Peter de Jager, followed by a live performance of the piece by Peter. This lengthy event was then published as a podcast by the ABC. That podcast is no longer available online, but it can heard below as a soundfile.
On October 9 2016 Peter de Jager played the entire work for the first time at the Australian National Academy of Music, at the time in South Melbourne. The entire performance was filmed with a single camera, and that video is viewable below. The view of Peter’s hands is partly obstructed, but it does give a sense of the unfolding of the work. Strictly speaking, this world premiere of the piece is a ‘pre-premiere’, because it was for an invited audience and arguably not public, but today that seems a fairly pointless distinction.
There is also a booklet that I produced for the event that offers a succinct overview of the piece, its rationale, and some context.
Program Booklet 9 October 2016
The 2016 ‘pre-premiere’ was not the first time that some of the piece had been heard. Peter gave a remarkable concert at ANAM on August 15 2015 that included movements I, II, V, VIII, IX. This first public outing of some of the material ran to 43’11”, just under half the eventual duration, and that recording can be heard below. The concert program also included the Alkan Symphony for solo piano Op.39, Szymanowski’s Third Piano Sonata, and the Barraqué Sonate
Peter also played the first half of the work – up to the end of Lévy Flights – along with the Alkan Symphony for an Alkan Society concert in London on April 17 2017. There is no recording of this performance, but here are the poster, program book, and a photograph kindly provided by an audience member.
Alkan Society Concert Programme