Program Note for Sonata-Fantasie No. 2 (2003)

A couple of years later, Jasper and Dave approached me for a new work. When I began the Sonata-Fantasie No. 2, the first goal I set for myself was to compose a piece that was as different from the first sonata as possible. Therefore, I decided to write a multi-movement work that would be lighter in nature and one that would not be programmatic. The overall structure of this sonata is loosely modeled on György Kurtag’s piano concerto …quasi una fantasia…. The first three movements are very brief, followed by a more extended finale. The piano part to the first movement, Apparition, was originally written as the accompaniment to a song I composed and later discarded. The light quality of the music still intrigued me and I reused it unchanged, adding the violin passages later. The second movement, Aphorism, is the shortest movement, lasting only 10 bars. It contains almost nothing but perfect intervals. The third movement, Fragment, is in ABA form with the second A section in retrograde of the first. The last movement is a passacaglia, a baroque musical form that is essentially a set of variations over a repeated bass line. With this piece, however, I wanted to make the passacaglia theme more and more obscure with each variation until it disappears completely in the violin cadenza. It reappears clearly when the piano enters after the cadenza and lasts until the end of the work.