I recently shared a video of the performance of my Sonata No. 1 for violin and piano. In that post, I mentioned that one of my goals in writing the sonata was to write music that was distinctly American. Today, I wanted to walk through the first few minutes of the sonata and explain some of the American musical influences that went into it.

The piano opens the work with calm, alternating chords made up of spacious intervals like fifths, sixths, and octaves. Over this foundation emerges the violin, which presents the main melody of the sonata’s first movement. That melody is comprised almost entirely of fourths and fifths, intervals that were popularized in the American musical imagination by Aaron Copland and film composers like Erich Korngold. In this way, even the intervals that comprise the opening melody of the sonata are American.

The opening melody also draws on film music, another uniquely American genre. Some of you may recognize strains of the theme song from the Laura Ingalls Wilder movies hidden in parts of the melody. Notably, that theme song is also comprised of mostly fourths and fifths.

The violin then accelerates fragments of the opening melody, and the instruments descend together into the secondary melody of the first movement, a ragtime. Ragtime is another uniquely American genre, one that has not often been featured in our concert halls. The violin presents the ragtime melody, then passes it to the piano, which elaborates on it with virtuosic runs and flourishes.

Fourths and fifths are again featured in the canon (a musical form in which two instruments play the same melody, but in staggered order) that follows the ragtime section. The violin takes the fragments of the opening melody that it explored earlier and melds them into an accelerating climb. As the instruments near the peak of the phrase, the piano intensifies the excitement with octaves and tenths. At the peak, the two instruments tumble downhill, pushing and pulling in “two versus three” metered combat until crashing together into a resolving D Major chord.

The above video is only the first three minutes of the first movement. The subsequent minutes contain many more examples of the incorporation of American musical heritage into the score. However, hopefully these few paragraphs give you a glimpse of the way I tried to work that heritage into the sonata.

Enjoy,

T