Piano Trio

Program Notes

For some decades, I practiced in my compositions the concept of “abstraction,” a term that I brought over from the world of visual arts. Throughout art, there exist various levels or degrees of variation. First, in music (as in poetry), there is exact repetition. Next along the spectrum is “variation,” where some aspect is varied allowing us to take a small step away from the original. An “abstraction” is a larger step, sometimes a much larger step. In an abstraction, so much is varied and to such a degree that it may call to question whether the variation even has a direct relationship with the original. However, if the abstraction is musically artful, our ears and intuition will tell us that, indeed there is a relationship, (although one that may be hard to track for the music theoretician). Here I applied this approach to these three sonata movements. The traditional method for sonatas would be to build them using tonality. But here, the principle of “abstraction” of melodic gesture and instrumental texture is the constructive concept for these three sonata forms. Richard Wernick complimented the piece.