Sonata No. 22 in C Major

Started: 12-11-08, 4:35 PM
Completed: 12-11-08, 5:38 PM
Orange, CA

This sonata is the only one in the set that was written for and expressly dedicated to someone. That someone would be my dear friend and lifelong rival Stephanie. It was my Christmas present to her last year.

Stephanie and I started a very healthy friendship and rivalry in my junior year and her sophomore year of high school. We both have a love for language, so we were instant rivals to be the best writer in our tiny prep school. (She really had no chance in this respect if you ask me! :-p) Later, the rivalry even extended into our college years, as we attended the same university and even shared an English major, though mine was with an emphasis in pre-law, and her was in something insignificant, I'm sure. The rivalry continues to this day, as she believes it's somehow more prestigious to be able to write books than to be able to sue people. There are areas in which we share no common ground, though, and so we're each forced to concede our own inferiority to the other, but in only those respects. She's a much better dancer than I am, for instance. She had a natural talent for it, studied it classically, and hit a semi-professional status with it. It's not really for me to say whether I had any natural talent for music, but in perhaps all other respects, music is for me what dance is for Stephanie. I've never asked Stephanie for dance lessons, but at some point, we thought it would be a great idea for her to learn harpsichord from me. It was a short-lived endeavor.

Two things stand out in my mind when I think of our lessons together. The first is that I'm really a terrible music teacher. She needed instruction from the ground up, so to speak, and I had only one way of explaining everything, and if it failed, there was nothing more I could do to help her understand. It damages me to say this, but she's really a brilliant girl, so the fault was mine when I couldn't even make sense of time signatures to her. The second thing that stands out is that she really can't trill. It was her choice -- not mine -- to play a particular piece with a few ornaments, and she insisted on attempting to play them. Each time she'd try, her hand would lock up in this terrible sort of claw. It was the funniest thing to us both, even though she hit me for laughing.

Anyway, this is all relevant because in wondering what sort of sonata I should write for her, these things came to mind. I thought I'd write a sonata that has time signature changes in each half and is full of ornaments of all sorts. In short, I wanted to write for her a sonata she could neither understand nor play. The obnoxiously long trill at the end is a sort of musical slap in the face.

I'm happy to say that she enjoyed the sonata nonetheless and promised in return to bake a bunch of cookies for me.

I don't eat sweets.

Enjoy!