Sonata No. 1 in D Minor

This sonata opens a set of 30 sonatas I wrote at various stages of my life and gathered together with the help of some friends to honor Domenico Scarlatti, who has served as a great inspiration to me on a number of levels.

I was 15 when I wrote this sonata, and if I'm honest, I have to say I only really wrote it to see if I could write a sonata in binary form. I wouldn't put it among my best sonatas, but it's an important one because it sort of got the ball rolling, so to speak, on what has ended up being quite an enjoyable hobby for me in the decade since.

This sonata was fairly simple to write and is fairly simple to play as well. My notes on the score say that I started it at 10:09 PM and finished it at 10:53 PM, though for whatever reason, I didn't date it. I remember playing it after I wrote it and thinking it was decent enough to share with a friend, so I gave it to Jonathan the next day at school, and he called me that evening and gave it his stamp of approval. I was especially happy to hear that he liked it because he leans more toward grandiose and super romantic piano compositions than tiny little things intended for the harpsichord. (To this day, he refers to harpsichords as toys...)

So far as the composition of this sonata is concerned, it very simply modulates from d minor to a minor in the first half, and returns to the tonic in the second, with no remarkable modulations or anything unexpected. I was fairly comfortable composing music in general back then, but I think I was too scared to be adventurous in my first foray into emulating to some degree Scarlatti, Soler, and other composers of the like whom I adored then as I do now, and particularly revered them as untouchable gods of composition back then.

I don't think there's much more to be said about this sonata, except that I'm happy to start off the set with this piece for reasons both chronological and sentimental, and I hope that despite it being my earliest attempt at writing anything like it, listeners will be able to enjoy it nonetheless.