Sonata For Cello And Piano
Todd Tarantino
About this work:
Many years ago I participated in a master class with Charles Wuorinen. While discussing an old and probably forgettable work of mine, Wuorinen's words were sharp and direct: "You are a slave to the barline," he told me. Since hearing this remark, I have been trying to question the authority of these accepted tyrannies: melody, rhythmic regularity and the barline, while at the same time creating a work that was exceedingly beautiful and formally compact. The Sonata for Cello and Piano is my first attempt at this revolution.
In some of my earlier works, I experimented with smaller units, using motivic fragments in various guises to create thematic unity. Theme was not created by melody, but rather through interval, gesture, shape or in a more abstract sense, sound. What instead unified the piece was a sucession of pitch intervals, in some senses a row, though neither twelve-tone, nor intended to be. The piece is constructed from this generational row: intervallic relationships derived from it become points of stability and accompaniment patterns derive from its shapes. This generational fragment, found in an old sketchbook and marked with the rubric, "What the ear dictates," is little more than nine notes, variously spaced, and yet is at once the germ and the piece itself, much as in the Missa Prolationem of Ockegham or many of the works of Webern. The focus of the work is shifted from music based on melody over accompaniment to an equilibrium between the two - everything is ground.
In the first movement the cello struggles to discover itself, its melody, so to speak, within an environment provided by the piano. Forward motion is created through the emergence and dissolution of inner voices: not so much the succession of notes, but rather the succession of sensations. The second movement contrasts the first by focusing on intervals and rhythmic patterns that were for the most part avoided in the first movement and voicing itself in a rugged, jazzy and agitated stance. The third movement is a consummation of the previous two, much as Britten, in his solo cello works ended the piece by giving away the theme, a variation and theme, if you will. The cello plays the germinating material over a strict canon in the piano in which the notes of the cello part are taken out of their rhythmic context and prolated to varying degrees. The naked tones of the cello seem to emerge from the piano part. One listener remarked that the effect is of the "cello floating in space." In the end the piece creates a nonrhetorical, though lyrical, moment. It describes nothing and succeeds in merely existing and then disappearing to dust, leaving only a memory.
The work was written for and is dedicated to the cellist Michael Finckel.
Year composed: 1996
Duration: 00:14:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Keyboard plus One Instrument
Instrumentation: 1 Piano, 1 Cello