Twenty years later and this piece, the Piano Sonata #1, finally gets to the see the light of day. Of all my very earliest pieces this was the first one that I wrote that I didn’t get to hear till recently. The other pieces were either performed by someone else or in the case of my works for guitar I would play them. I was not then and am certainly not now a good enough pianist to play this all the way through. I guess something about modern technology and MIDI and computers etc., making life bearable for composers.
This was also the first piece reflecting my then new-found interest in the music of John Cage. I do not remember exactly how I went about writing it but there’s definitely something going on with chance processes generating material which then gets processed through those same chance processes. I would explore this idea more fully in a piece I would write not too long after that. (The Prelude and 3 Variations for Piano.)
Looking at it now it seems to be a way to hint at Western European Harmony’s reliance on a tonal center (you establish the key a piece of music is in by going back to that note (the tonic often along with it’s dear friend the dominant (a perfect fifth above the tonic, eg, C and G in the key of C)) but in a much more modernist way.
Interestingly this actually works against Schoenberg’s 12 Tone Method which completely avoids giving special attention to any one pitch over any other. So, harmony for a new day? Maybe.
The piece also reflects an aesthetic I was working toward then which I still subscribe to today of treating sounds as individual events. Surrounding them with space and keeping them simple. A kind of thin Webern, perhaps. The work is also in three distinct sections though I'm unsure how they relate to each other (form) other than being built with the same tools and from the same materials.
Copyright 2017 David Bellows