If it Ain't Baroque. . .

Sonata No. 30 in C Minor

2009-10-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

Started: 10-01-2009, 1:22 PM
Completed: 10-01-2009, 1:59 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

I wanted to end this set in a similar fashion to Scarlatti's Essercizi, so this is really more of a fugue than a binary sonata. It can't hold a candle to Scarlatti's bizarre but great K.30, but remember -- I set out to honor him, not best him. It might even be a little haughty of me to think that these meager efforts of mine could pay him any sort of honor, but I can truthfully say I had good fun writing, compiling, and presenting these sonatas, and that's ultimately what matters. In my mind, music is art, and art is entertainment first. It's meant to enrich us , and is valuable if it accomplishes this in even the slightest way, whether purely superficial or emotionally moving. I'd like to think that this project will in the near future entertain others, but at the very least it will have entertained me and some close friends, so already it's not for naught, so to speak.

If this is the first post you happen to see, I encourage you to check out the 29 or so previous ones and listen to what's there.

I thank you all for your time and await your feedback. I'll happily post more sonatas in the future if there's interest, so please feel free to let me know what you think of what you find here. In the meantime, take care, and, of course,

Vivi felice!

Sonata No. 29 in C Major

2009-10-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

Started: 9-01-2003, 9:35 PM
Completed: 9-01-2003, 9:58 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

This little piece is a whole different cup of tea. I was happy to see that another slow sonata made it into the set, as most of the others picked are set at pretty quick tempi.

This is a plain and simple piece that moves from C to the relative minor (a) in the first half, then moves back to C before closing. I was going for something that opened sweetly and innocently, got momentarily sad, and ended on the same sort of sweet and innocent note on which it opened.

I'll admit a kindergartner could have written this piece, but, for whatever reason, it remains one of my mom's favorites among all the pieces I've written.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 28 in D Minor

2009-10-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

Started: 5-25-2008, 12:07 PM
Finished: 5-25-2008, 1:00 PM
Newport Beach, CA

I wrote this sonata in my office waiting for a client. This is one of those funny ones that started life as an idea scribbled somewhere (in this case at the bottom of a lease agreement) and ended up developing into a full sonata that I later went home and wrote out on actual manuscript paper.

This sonata moves along at a moderate pace; it's not overly fast or slow. I tend to think the point of hand crossings is to create natural popping effects and accents as the hands bounce around abruptly, but in this case the hand crossings are meant to be played much closer to a legato or portamento than than something pointy and articulated. No fireworks this time -- I'm going for something a little sexier here.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 27 in G Minor

2009-10-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

Started: 4-29-2007, 7:33 PM
Completed: 4-29-2007, 8:10 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

This sonata, like all the remaining ones in the set, is another standalone.

Though this is another melodically-driven sonata, it's actually in the left hand that most of the variety can be found, with figures ranging from straight octaves to tremolo effects. I couldn't resist adding some bounciness to the second half, this being shared between both hands.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 26 in D Minor

2009-10-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Started: 8-13-2004, 3:31 PM
Completed: 8:13-2004, 4:36 PM
Santa Monica, CA

I wrote this sonata at my friend Colin's house. He and I are really night and day when it comes to playing harpsichord. His absolute god of music is JS Bach (and mine is, too, when it comes down to it, really, but Soler's good humor has won me over for life, I think), and he could really sit at an instrument and play Bach all day long. He plays very straight, very controlled, and very well. If Colin prefers to sing or talk to you with is instrument, I prefer to yell at you with mine. We meet in the middle in the French school of music, where he leans toward things like Couperin and d'Anglebert, and I prefer Duphly and particularly Forqueray. This is all irrelevant, I suppose, because this sonata is nothing like any of that. I've written lots of pieces in strict counterpoint for Colin to play for fun, but this certainly isn't one of them, even though I conceived of it at his house and sitting right next to him.

In terms of technical demands, I'd put this sonata in the middle. It uses a lot of wrist rotations in the left hand, and I think this can wear out beginners. I think it's a very fun technique once you're comfortable with it, and it creates a very exciting effect if you play it very rapidly. I personally go pretty wild with it in Les Cyclopes and La Marche des Scythes. It's at a more moderate tempo in this sonata and shouldn't be inhibitive to avid players.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 25 in C Minor

2009-10-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

Started: 3-15-06, 7:07 PM
Completed: 3-15-06, 7:50 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

This is one of my favorite sonatas of all the ones I've written. I think it's a very easy play and good fun; there's nothing tricky going on at all in either hand. It's certainly easy enough for beginners to play, and anyone even slightly more advanced would be able to play it at sight. There's nothing profound here at all -- just a melody supported by a very simple bass.

Enjoy!

Sonatas No. 23 and 24 in A Minor

2009-10-27T09:36:00.000-07:00

No. 23
Started: 2-12-2006, 6:14 PM
Completed: 2-12-2006, 7:04 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

No. 24
Started: 2-12-2006, 7:12 PM
Completed: 2-12-2006, 7:56 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

This pair consists of two contrasting sonatas in a minor.

The first sonata in the pair is a straightforward and player-friendly piece driven by a melody supported by broken chords and arpeggi in the bass. I was going for something Spanish again in this sonata.

The second sonata of the pair is built entirely on hand crossing. It's a busy piece in terms of the left hand passing many times over the right (generally twice per measure), but it remains simple and entertaining to play. For the sake of humor, the final high and low As that sound in unison are played with very crossed hands, the right playing the note in the bass and the left playing in the treble.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 22 in C Major

2009-10-27T02:00:00.000-07:00

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.) 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!

Sonatas No. 20 and 21 in G Minor

2009-10-27T01:21:00.000-07:00

No. 20
Started: 8-15-2008, 8:33 PM
Completed: 8-15-2008, 8:56 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

No. 21
Started: 8-16-2008, 10:11 PM
Completed: 8-16-2008, 10:46 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

I love this pair of sonatas. I love the key of g minor in general. If we assume that when I write a good sonata it's a matter of luck, it's safe to say that I tend to get lucky when I write them in g minor.

The first sonata is pirate music to me. It's all melody, fun to play, and can probably be played at sight even by many early students. Chords in both hands near the end of each section thicken for dynamic and dramatic effect. This is just an absolutely frivolous sonata with no other purpose at all than fun.

The second sonata in this pair is very much like the first in spirit. This was another sonata written to be enjoyed equally by the listener and the player. There's a strong emphasis on melody here again, but there is a much more active left hand part in this sonata than in the former. The ostinato in the bass and even the rhythmic figures in the right hand beginning the second half are a tribute to Soler, who built an entire sonata off this magnificent and sinister sounding figure. Despite the quick pace of this sonata and the high speed broken chords, I don't think that it's difficult to such a degree that it detracts from this sonata's fun factor.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 19 in G Major

2009-10-27T00:14:00.000-07:00

Started: 4-25-2009, 1:17 PM
Completed: 4-25-2009, 1:45 PM
Newport Beach, CA

I've written out musical ideas in some very strange places. It's never really happened, but I have this fear that I'll lose an idea if I don't write it down within a reasonable period of time after imagining it. My friends might argue that I'm very much one, but I think I'm only somewhat of a clean freak. Either way, I have a big aversion to writing on myself, so you'll never find me scribbling ideas onto my palm or my arm, but I have written on a number of dinner napkins, loose envelopes, deposit slips, etc. This particular sonata was actually written on my iPhone. I went bed and table shopping with my mom at Ligne Roset, and at some point I fell completely out of the loop and it ended up being my mom and the store rep on one side of the store and me in a chair on the other. In my boredom, I came up with this little sonata.

This is an easy sonata from a technical standpoint, and there's nothing overly remarkable about in terms of its composition either. It's just a straightforward beginner or intermediate level sonata.

I guess in a sense it paid to be stuck off in a corner for forty minutes or so. (And I actually liked the chair so much I went home with one just like it.)

Enjoy!

Sonatas No. 17 and 18 in C Minor

2009-10-26T23:29:00.000-07:00

No. 17
Started: 6-23-09, 5:59 PM
Completed: 6-23-09, 6:44 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

No. 18
Started: 6-24-09, 2:32 PM
Completed: 6-24-09, 3:01 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

These two c minor sonatas were completed only a few months ago and probably comprise my favorite pair in the set of 30.

I was pretty adventurous in the first sonata in the pair. There is a bunch going on here. The opening and closing sections of each half have a bunch of mordents in the bass much more common in the French school than the Iberian one, but I think there's little else French to be found here. I happen to love traditional American circus music, and there's s some wacky bounciness in the bass to that effect before the first half ends. The sonata ends with two ascending arpeggi leading to a single falling one.

The second sonata in the set is a furiously paced Spanish-style sonata that probably sounds a lot harder to play than it really is. The figure I use to modulate involves momentarily overlapping the hands and is a lot of fun to execute. There are mordents in this sonata, too, but this time in the right hand. I use them to insert a little break before a quick cascade closing each half.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 16 in D Minor

2009-10-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

The manuscript for this very early sonata in d minor isn't dated, but it didn't come very long after my first sonata, so it would be a bit over a decade old also.

The device I had in mind when writing this sonata was clearly rapidly repeating notes. At the close of each section, there are some jumps in the left hand sort of similar to Scarlatti K.12, only moving in the opposite direction before landing deep in the bass. The closing figures are an extended play on the opening figures that momentarily sound two voices at once (in an octave).

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 15 in C Minor

2009-10-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

Started: 12-27-1998, 8:16 PM
Completed: 12-27-1998, 9:09 PM
London, England

This is another simple unpaired sonata in c minor.

The are changes in rhythm in the cruxes, and the closing passages feature very player-friendly hand crossings that won't scare off even beginners.

There is really not much else to be said about this sonata except that I hope you

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 14 in D Minor

2009-10-26T22:32:00.001-07:00

Started: 1-07-1999, 2:14 AM
Completed: 1-07-1999, 3:03 AM
Edinburgh, Scotland

In this set, there are more sonatas in d minor than in any other key, and my friend Justin is particularly fond of this one. He flattered me by telling me that if he ever decides to learn to play piano or harpsichord, he'll want to learn this piece first.

This is a fairly basic sonata that opens with broken octaves in the treble and closes each section with broken octaves in the bass. I was going for something Spanish-sounding here again, and I hope this will be particularly obvious in the closing sections of each half.

Melody drives this sonata along, and it falls very easily under the hands as well, so it should be entertaining for both the listener and the player.

Enjoy!

Sonatas No. 12 and 13 in D Major

2009-10-26T21:41:00.000-07:00

No. 12
Started: 6-16-2008, 8:22 PM
Finished: 6-16-2008, 8:54 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

No. 13
Started: 6-16-2008, 9:09 PM
Finished: 6-16-2008, 9:50 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

There are only two pairs of sonatas in D major in my entire set, and this one happened to be picked randomly.

The first of the pair is a very simple Solerian sort of sonata, just like something Soler would have written himself, except not very good! Soler is my absolute favorite composer, and I feel that drawing serious comparisons between me and him is undeserved praise for me or an undeserved affront to him. Both maybe, and neither one is healthy, so let me simply say this first sonata of the pair is very easy to play -- a beginner sonata, maybe -- and meant to be a decent bit of fun, too. The left hand mocks the right and vice versa, with one passing over the other first, and then, well, vice versa.

I'm going to call the second sonata whimsical because I feel that I'm using "playful" to death in these descriptions. In terms of technical demands, it's really just about as easy to play as the first. I tried to end each section with a sort of mischievous little figure.

Both sonatas were intended to be cute, and I hope I accomplished that.

Enjoy!

Sonatas No. 10 & 11 in C Minor

2009-10-26T21:15:00.000-07:00

No. 10
Started: 10-11-2005, 9:35 PM
Finished: 10-11-2005, 10:08 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

No. 11
Started: 10-13-2005, 10:03 PM
Finished: 10-13-2005, 10:41 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

This pair of sonatas groups one very Spanish-sounding sonata with one rather unusual one. The sonatas may seem almost too different to be paired (and they were written two days apart), but I did very much intend for them to be played in sequence.

Interestingly enough, though the first sonata in this set was written years after its C major predecessor in this set, both sonatas use octaves in the bass in almost the same fashion. This is interesting to me, at least, because I know I hadn't used it before the C major and I don't think I've used that figure since, so it's not as though it's something very common in my writing. There are some simple hand crossing passages near the ends of each half, and there is a pretty active bass throughout that gives the sonata a pressing sense of momentum (or so I hope, because that's what I intended!). The octave figure that opens the sonata returns at the close of each half. I often like to do that, close sonatas with some variation of the way they open; sometimes I do this by inverting the harmony, but many times I restate the opening lines in some way. I think it brings a nice bit of symmetry to the piece. Besides, it guarantees that if you've managed to come up with an appealing opening, you'll have a ending, too. :o)

The second sonata in this set is uses some strange devices. Each half is essentially cut into three sections, each separated by a brief silence. It's a pretty simple formula: I open each half with the first section, modulate to the dominant/tonic in the second section, then close. There are some quick descending scales at the ends of all but the middle sections. The key in which the sonata is set demands that these glissandi really be played as quick scales rather than con dedo solo (a technique of which I am very much not a fan at all, after having played Liszt's murderous Hungarian Rhapsody No. 15).

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 9 in C Major

2009-10-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

Started: 3-13-2001, 4:33 PM
Completed: 3-13-2001, 5:09 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

After the sonatas for this set were picked, I noticed a huge disparity in the number of sonatas in minor keys versus major keys, so when choosing how they'd appear in sequence, I tried to sprinkle the few sonatas in major keys between those in minor to reduce the risk of things becoming tiresome for anyone listening to them all in one sitting. This was a little difficult, because as it happened, many of the sonatas selected were actually paired with others. This particular sonata is a standalone in C, and I've sandwiched it between the previous in e minor and a pair coming up in c minor.

This is a playful sonata that makes use of a lot of octaves in the bass. There are some pretty big jumps in the right hand near the close of each half, but I wouldn't classify this sonata as difficult to play by any means. With that said, I should point out just for the sake of humor that there is a scratched out trill in this manuscript at the close of each section. Apparently I'd originally called for a trill to be performed on both notes of the sixths that end each section. I guess I realized at some point that this would be insanely difficult to negotiate, so I killed the trill on the lower note and brought this sonata back into the realm of something people might actually like (and be able) to play.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 8 in E Minor

2009-10-26T20:33:00.000-07:00

Started: 10-06-1999
Completed: 10-09-1999
Huntington Beach, CA

I don't have an exact figure, but if I had to guess, I'd say that maybe only 20 or so of the sonatas I've written are in slow tempi. (If I'm going to type "sonatas" maybe I should type "tempos" and "arpeggios"?)

This sonata is also remarkable because I use so-called Alberti bass. I have nothing at all against it (I love Mozart more than I can say, and where would his piano concerti [concertos?!] and sonatas be without it?), but I don't often use it myself.

This sonata begins in e minor and moves to the relative major (G) in the first half, then moves back to e minor before closing. I alternate between the the back 8' and the lute stop in this recording for variety.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 6 & 7 in C Major

2009-10-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

No. 6
Started: 5-03-2003, 10:06 AM
Completed: 5-03-2003, 10:33 AM

No. 7
Started: 5-03-2003, 10:46 AM
Completed: 5-03-2003, 11:09 AM

These two sonatas were written back to back and are intended to be played and listened to that way as well.

My very close friend Colin likes to say that my sonatas are either really diabolical sounding or "super cute." He thought these two were super cute when I played them for him.

The first is very basic, maybe even run-of-the-mill baroque-sounding music. I'd like to think that it's better than run-of-the-mill, but it looks like it took me less than a half hour to write it, so I was either highly inspired or really just fooling around. I'll let the listener decide.

I was trying to be silly with the second sonata. I think that with both sonatas I was aiming for something really childlike and playful. In that sense, I'd say that these sonatas better hint at the real nature of their composer than anything that's come before them; that's to say I'm not a very brooding person by nature. :o)

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 5 in G Minor

2009-10-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

Started: 4-16-2000, 5:15 PM
Completed: 4-16-2000, 6:06 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

I was happy to see this sonata in the bunch that my friends picked out because it stands out to me as particularly Spanish-sounding, and Spanish music is great. I leave it up to the listener to determine whether my Spanish music is great.

This sonata really benefits from a double manual instrument because I think the changes in tone color/dynamics enhance it.

Sometimes I leave messages on the backs of my manuscripts when they're done, remarking on particular aspects of the sonata that were hard for me to write or discussing what I'd hoped to convey when I wrote it, but there's nothing at all to that effect on the manuscript for this sonata, so I think the goal was just to write something very Spanish-sounding and appealing to play.

I hope I did just that. :o)

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 4 in F Minor

2009-10-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

Started: 4-15-2002, 6:24 PM
Completed: 4-15-2002, 8:11 PM
Huntington Beach, CA

The original manuscript copy of this sonata is framed and hanging on the wall outside my friend Jonathan's bedroom. I gave it to him as a birthday gift several years ago.

There are certain Scarlatti and Soler sonatas in particular that I have a blast playing because they're over-the-top showy. K.120 in Scarlatti's catalogue and R.10 in Soler's come to mind. They're the kind of sonatas you want people to see, not just hear, because there's a huge visual impact to their execution that people miss out on when listening to recordings or even live performances from far away in the audience. I know that I didn't set out to outdo Scarlatti 120 or Soler 10 when I wrote this sonata, but I think that what resulted is something that actually trumps both those sonatas in terms of calorie burning.

This sonata features some big hand crossings, first left over right and then right over left. I call for something similar to K.27, where for no good reason, really, the right and left hands switch places to maintain the same little counter-melody. It's a bit more drastic in my sonata, and this is certainly one of the most technically demanding sonatas I've written, but it's still very playable. This is a fun sonata to play for people standing close enough to see your hands, as you're likely to give them a good laugh with it!

And it's great cardio.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 3 in C Minor

2009-10-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

Started: 12-19-1998, 8:03 PM
Completed: 12-19-1998, 8:32 PM
London, England

I've mentioned several times already that the 30 sonatas in this set were randomly pulled from a much bigger set, but I didn't mention that the way in which these sonatas were numbered was something I determined personally. As this sonata was written within days of its predecessor, I chose to number this sonata directly in sequence as no. 3.

It was the holiday season, but I'm afraid this sonata, like the last one, sounds rather more sinister than festive! Evidently Santa Claus was not on my mind. I can tell from looking at the score that I did have a particular figure in mind, though. More on that below.

This particular sonata breaks away at least in part from some of the earlier sonatas I wrote, which were in very strict binary form and didn't tend to introduce any new material in their second halves. I think this would be a fairly difficult sonata to play on instruments without actions that allow you to repeat notes fairly easily because it's built on figures that feature some pretty quick but short repetitions in both hands. I had those figures in mind when I set out to write the sonata; I wanted to produce a sort of echo effect. Broken octaves feature in this sonata, as in the previous, but this time they take place in the right hand rather than the left.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 2 in A Minor

2009-10-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

Started: 12-16-1998, 9:33 PM
Completed: 12-17-1998, 10:12 PM
London, England

I completed 13 sonatas while living in the UK, and this is the first of them. Of those 13, 11 were written in London. It's one of the only places on the planet to which I could imagine comfortably uprooting from Southern California and moving to spend the rest of my life. It was a wonderfully creative environment for me, and had I not been so busy at the time, I think I could easily have written inspired sonatas all day long there. Some of my favorite Mozart and Haydn pieces were penned in London, too. Maybe it's a remarkably inspirational place to foreigners.

This is really an easy and fairly fun sonata to play, in my opinion. There aren't any technical obstacles to speak of at all, and the bass consists largely of simple arpeggi and bouncy broken octaves. Like most of my sonatas, it's really melody-driven with nothing too thick or complicated harmonically, so it's more likely to appeal to the listener and the player than the scholar.

Enjoy!

Sonata No. 1 in D Minor

2009-10-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Happy Birthday, D. Scarlatti!

2009-10-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

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

Welcome

2009-10-05T12:59:00.001-07:00

I'd like to inaugurate this blog with a sincere welcome to friends new and old, and so I will: welcome to you all!

For those of you who happened upon this blog by chance or referral (and not because I know you personally and insisted you read it), I should briefly introduce myself. I'm Killian, and I live in Huntington Beach, California. I've loved and played all sorts of music (particularly baroque) and video games (particularly fighting) since my childhood, and this blog will be focused on the former.

I've established this blog mostly for the purpose of having a medium through which I might write in greater detail about a music project I'll be launching in the coming weeks. On 10-26-2009, Domenico Scarlatti's 324th birthday, I plan to post on YouTube a collection of 30 of my own sonatas, more in his honor than in this style. Some of you may already have guessed that I chose 30 to coincide with Scarlatti's Essercizi per gravicembalo, a famous collection of 30 sonatas published some 268 years ago and surely far superior to mine in every conceivable way. And like Scarlatti, though undoubtedly more appropriate to me than to him, I want to admonish all prospective listeners and players to take the sonatas for what they are, so to speak -- that is, I'd like for everyone to keep in mind that my meager submissions to the musical world are always written entirely in the interest of fun and entertainment, and neither for the sake of educating nor moving anyone in any profound sort of way. I can say sincerely that if even a single person should derive any kind of entertainment from playing or listening to anything I've written, I'll already have accomplished what I set out to do. (And if I should hear that someone has actually learned from or been moved in any way by what I've written, I think I'll be equally moved myself!)

In my first post beyond this introductory entry, I'll give a bit of history concerning the 30 sonatas, which I pulled from the 157 sonatas I've finished to date. Some were selected for specific reasons (Sonata No. 1, for instance, really was the first sonata I ever wrote, and seemed appropriate to open the set), but most were selected randomly. The final sonata in Scarlatti's Essercizi per gravicembalo is actually a fugue. In keeping with this spirit, I wrote a fugue to close my set of 30 as well.

My plan following the release of the initial 30 sonatas is to continue presenting more sonatas on YouTube and writing about them here in the coming months and years. This is something I'll be happy to do if I find that there's interest in the first 30. I might release more in big batches until all the current sonatas are posted, and then maybe write and make available a new one each week thereafter.

Before closing, I want to thank you, the reader, for your interest, at least inasmuch as you've taken the time to read this, and I invite you to follow the development of this project, send criticism, send suggestions, and even send praise if you find anything worthy. Your care will fuel my desire to share. I also want to thank those close personal friends without whose encouragement, persistence, nagging, etc., I may never have resolved to create this page at all.

My proudest hope for this project is that it ends up mutually entertaining for you, the listeners/readers, and me, and I'm excited to get the ball rolling and see what happens. Thank you all again for reading, and remember:

Vivi felice!