Three Pieces for Violin and Piano

Full Score, PDF        Cover
(all three pieces have orchestral versions linked below)
There are two versions of the violin part: letter-size, for paper printing, and another for electronic music readers, with the violin part large and including reduced piano staves.
Violin Part, Letter      Violin Part, E-Reader

  video (YouTube)       MP3 recording      WAV recording (CD quality)     

.  Orchestral Version

Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord

(July 20--Aug. 6, 2014) 

Adagio andalusia     [7:50]  
  video (YouTube)     MP3 recording    WAV recording 

      The second piece was inspired by the radio.     On July 6, 2014, WNYC broadcast “The World’s Most-Used Musical Sequence”, which was an hour-long compilation of musical excerpts demonstrating the use of the Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord. NPR followed up with five minutes on Weekend Edition on July 20. Despite the forbidding academic name, this series of four notes, with many modifications, has been used for centuries by musicians all over the world.
          The basic sequence is four descending notes with the pattern whole step, whole step, half step. On a piano keyboard, one example would be the four white notes going down starting from E. This composition uses the Diatonic Phrygian Tetrachord both unmodified and highly modified in pretty much every way I could think of, frequently with several modifications simultaneously, in a reasonably contemporary idiom. I will leave it to musicologists yet unborn to deal with the analytical details, as I have some pride in not having opened a music theory book since 1975, and I don’t want to have to look things up.

Mozart's Twelve-Tone Row
 (June-July 2014)

Allegro assai: Half Fast: Tempo I: Moderato: Tempo I  [6:14]

    The finale (the first to be written) is a modern take on the most dissonant music written by Mozart; the final half of the final movement of his 40^th Symphony. This section starts with what is very nearly a twelve-tone row. What I have done here, as I have done several times in the past, is to see what I would do with the key ideas of this piece written in my own style and form. This is by no means an arrangement of the original, but instead is an entirely new work. (Never fear—as I have never written in the twelve-tone style, which I find obnoxious in the extreme, I have not done so here either.)

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        Over the last decade I have preferred to write pieces from about 15 to 25 minutes long; this is most suited to the kind of music that I write. In our fast-paced era of minute attention spans, what people want is music of much shorter duration. Almost all composition contests are for very short pieces. I have frequently urged performers to consider playing single movements, but this happens infrequently. As a result I decided to write some short pieces for violin and piano that could be played together for the same effect as a single piece, but which would each stand alone.
          All three pieces have orchestral versions.
          These three pieces were first performed at Duke University on January 11, 2015, by Eric Pritchard, violin, and Greg McCallum, piano.
          Accidentals hold through the measure and not beyond, and do not refer to other octaves. Eric Pritchard edited the violin parts.