Happy Birthday, D. Scarlatti!

Hello, everyone!

Well, today is a special day for a number of reasons. First, it's Domenico Scarlatti's birthday, and that's always a big deal to me because I have a special place in my heart for his music. Normally on this day as a sort of ritual, I make it a point to play through my favorite sonata of his (K.230), no matter how busy I am. (I do the same with R.90 on December 3rd for Soler, because it's the closest thing we have to a birthday for him.) I already played K.230 this morning, and today I'll also be uploading thirty sonatas of my own to YouTube in honor of one of the most daring and ingenious composers in the history of music.

I "caught the bug" from Scarlatti, as my harpsichord teacher liked to say; it was a Scarlatti recording that introduced me to harpsichord music, and I was an instant zealot. I was fourteen at the time, so I'd already studied music for a decade by then, but Scarlatti had been nowhere in the curriculum (not even K.9), and, having never really been exposed to harpsichord music, I thought of Bach as great piano music. The recording I heard -- it was a mix of Scarlatti and Handel played by Malcolm Hamilton -- introduced me to something totally new. I bought a set of 3 CDs pulled from Scott Ross' complete recording a short time after that, and then I was totally blown away by how incredibly different the music was from anything else I'd heard before. It amazed me enough that within a short period of time I'd all but abandoned the piano and found a wonderful harpsichord teacher, who taught me so much more than one would expect to derive from music lessons. This was a good ten years ago, and I was impulsive and chose the wildest sonatas to play at ridiculous speeds. Scarlatti was all flash and dazzle to me back then, even after I'd heard and at least informally played through all the solo sonatas, many of which are quite a bit more sentimental than I'd realized at the time. My teacher encouraged the flashy playing, and left me entirely in charge of the literature we'd explore together. I give you this history because I feel that it's significant to point out that music has always been a great diversion for me -- never a chore -- and I've been very lucky to have the freedom to experiment with it. Playing new Scarlatti, Soler, and Seixas sonatas to me was always a great adventure, and my teacher never beleaguered me with absolute rules about how to do this and that. Fun music was allowed to stay fun for me, and I think that's largely why I felt comfortable writing my own sonatas.

If you read my introductory post, then you'll know that I echoed Scarlatti in my mission statement concerning the sonatas: I'm really looking to entertain the player and the listener, not so much move or make you better in any way. The sonatas themselves are frivolous enough, but I might emphasize this point by letting you know that these are not the sort of studied pieces you might spend up to an hour writing for upper-division theory classes. These are quick, often spontaneous little pieces conceived of in a variety of places, not really serious things I confined myself to my desk to write. Also, they're pieces by a harpsichord player and for harpsichord players, and it's very often that I wrote them with some kind of idiomatic or technical device in mind. I've thought to myself before: "Wouldn't it be fun to have a sonata built on nothing but hand crossings?" and decided beforehand on many occasions that the next sonata I'd write would have huge leaps in the left hand, fast scale passages in the right, and so on. Of the 157 sonatas I've completed to date, only about a handful were written without some kind of gimmick in mind that would fall fairly easily under the hands and, most importantly, be fun to execute. Despite this sort of backward approach, I think (or at the very least hope) there is enough real musical content for them to be enjoyable to listeners and players alike.

My plan is to make one post here per sonata, embedding the video and talking a bit about the history of the sonata and what I was intending when I wrote it. I write all my sonatas out by hand on regular store-bought manuscript paper, and I'll probably scan the first page (or at least the first system) of the score for each sonata and post it so people might have an examples of my atrocious musical handwriting. This is something I know for sure I won't be able to do today for this first group of sonatas, but once I have the time to realize it, I'll come back and edit the posts and include score snippets. I'm meticulous about recording the dates and times at which and the places in which the sonatas are started and finished, so I'll include that data as well.

As I mentioned in my first post, the 30 sonatas I'll be sharing with you were randomly drawn from a set of 157. Sonatas No. 1 and 30 were excluded from the random drawing -- No. 1 because it was my first ever attempt and writing a sonata and seemed an appropriate choice to start the set, and No. 30 because I wanted to end with a fugue like Scarlatti did. The process for selecting the remaining 28 was nothing overly scientific: I spread out the scores face-down on my bed and floor and asked some friends to go in and pick up 28 of them. We ended up with a bit more than 28 because I'd paper-clipped together sonatas that I'd intended to be paired. I let my friends blindly decide which ones to discard until we had exactly 30, including the first and last. The end result is a decent balance of some very old and some fairly new sonatas, with a heavily disproportionate number of minor key versus major key sonatas (22:8). The majority of them are set at fairly fast tempi, and I was happy to see that some very Iberian-natured ones were picked. All in all, I think this set of 30 is a pretty good representation of my efforts in writing in this genre, so I'll start my gratitude at Colin and Jonathan for their blind but expert selection skills.

I owe a debt of gratitude principally to my parents for recognizing, helping to cultivate, and forever supporting whatever musical ability, if any, I came pre-wired with or later developed. I might have a very different set of hobbies today if I hadn't grown up with a strict perfectionist father and a music-loving mother. Friends have my personal thanks for their tactfully administered kind words and encouragement so as to moderate the arrogance I feign for humor's sake. Particular thanks to Colin, Preston, Chelsea, Yuki, and Hideaki, Ashley, Justin, and Stephanie in that exact order, with Stephanie being the absolute least important! :o) Now, on a serious note I do want to thank all those people yet unknown to me who happened upon this page out of a genuine interest in sonatas they may have heard on YouTube. I really do appreciate your having taken the time to listen to them, come here, read this, and so on. I'd be happy and honored to receive feedback from any of you.

On more big universal thank-you to everyone reading this. It's a busy world, and time is a precious thing, so I'm honored to have had your attention, and I hope that at least a few of you will stay aboard as I continue to release more sonatas in the near future.

-KD