The Story of the Piano Quartet
In 1993 I was already a seasoned composer, having completed a wide variety of compositions and obtained performances of many of them. But I decided to supplement that experience with some academic degrees, so that fall I began work on my master’s degree in composition from Georgia State University. During that initial fall semester, I composed a piano quartet, consisting of a single movement of about 23 minutes in length. (A piano quartet is a chamber work for violin, viola, cello, and piano.) I recognized the high quality of the new piece, but like many of my chamber compositions from that era, it did not receive a satisfactory performance during that decade. Many years later, beginning in late 2014, I embarked on a major project to revive many such pieces, to bring out modern editions of them, and to get them performed and recorded. In the case of my Piano Quartet, the 1993 score had been created in a software that had become defunct, so a new Finale version was needed.
I began the conversion process in March 2018, at first working on it off and on in the background to other projects. A major push to completion began in the early spring of 2019. The original version of the work, as with several of my compositions from the time, included portions that were too obscure and dissonant for my evolving aesthetic outlook, so I revised some passages and completely replaced others. I had promised my string players that I would have parts ready for them by the end of August, so between the quartet and other projects, I was working very long hours that summer. Finally, on August 21, 2019, I completed my last edits and sent out the parts. Because of its sheer length multiplied by the relatively large number of instruments, the full score (not including individual parts) for this piano quartet ran to 81 pages, making it the largest score I had yet converted to Finale.
The work is in sonata-allegro form, with all the melodies related in that they grow out of descending chromatic motions. The style is thoroughly Romantic, including the kind of soaring melodic lines that characterize much of my music, but also sections that bristle with energy and drive, with a hypnotic beat perhaps more suggestive of Prokofiev or even Stravinsky than Rachmaninoff. As in my other works, these diverse melodic materials are woven together in counterpoint. The harmony is definitely tonal, extended by use of the octatonic collection in some parts.
The pic below shows the opening bars.
The composition is in B-flat major, but it opens mysteriously, on a C major (V/V) harmony, with the piano presenting bell-like chords and the cello playing open fifths, against a mournful viola melody, which is later answered by the violin and then the cello. Eventually, by a rather devious route, the piece finds its way to V (bar 18, after the end of this excerpt) and then to I (bar 23). There the principal theme begins, and perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out to have been anticipated by the opening viola phrase. I plan to explore the work’s structure and techniques in more detail in future posts to this blog.
By late September of 2019, performers for the project had been determined, including violinist Cari Sue Jackson, violist Camille Phillips, cellist Sarah Langford, and myself on the piano. The first rehearsal was on September 28. Because of the complexity of the music, ten rehearsals were needed. Fortunately, all three of these string players were highly skilled performers, and they captured the feeling of this music and approached it with enthusiasm and dedication. We finally recorded the work in late February of 2020. Very soon after that, a worldwide pandemic came to America, so in retrospect we were fortunate to have completed the project in time. I uploaded the audio of the recording to SoundCloud on March 19 and the video to YouTube on March 25.
