Sonata for Trombone and piano in B minor

[rappy]

Hello,

I want to present you my newest composition, a sonata for trombone and piano in b minor which lasts about 33 minutes. It is in three movements:

MOVEMENT 1 - MOLTO ALLEGRO

The first movement roughly follows the sonata form .

Two remarks for the listener:

- at 10:45, the tromboist will play a solo cadanza
- at 11:42, there should be a deep pedal tone, whole note (B flat), but Finale unfortunately doesn't play it

Download: Click here

MOVEMENT 2 - PRESTO - ANDANTE AMABILE

Being a little bit shorter than the first, the second movement still lasts about 9 1/2 minutes. It is actually a symbiosis of a Scherzo and a slow movement. It begins with a Presto (c# minor) which suddenly breaks off and an Andante amabile in the parallel key E major follows. The Andante consists of 2 themes. The second theme begins in B minor, which can be seen as a reminiscence of the first movement, but gets back to c# sharp minor after a while, and soon the Presto comes again. And last but not least, there's the first Andante theme again.
Thus the form is pretty simple: A - B - C - A' - B'

Download: Click here

MOVEMENT 3 - GRAVE - ALLEGRO MOLTO MODERATO E GRAZIOSO - ALLEGRO ANIMATO

The third movement is a rondo with a slow introduction and a long coda. The introduction in B minor (although the tonic never appears) is based on the tritone interval. It leads into the Rondo which is in B major. At the end of the rondo, the tone row of the first movement appears again and leads into the coda, which presents a new theme and a part where nearly all of the themes of all movements are combined. At the very end, there's the tranquillo part of the developement of the first movement again which finishes the sonata quietly.

Download: Click here

Some comments would be very kind!

Greetings,
ralph

[rappy]

Here's the second movement:

http://www.dgsp-rheinland-pfalz.de/sonate2satz.mp3
http://www.dgsp-rheinland-pfalz.de/sonate2satz.pdf

[Kullervo]

First movement doesn't work for me.

[rappy]

The link is old. Here's a new one (I've got limited webspace...): http://www.megaupload.com/de/?d=VSXKR0AW

[rappy]

Last movement: http://www.dgsp-rheinland-pfalz.de/sonate3satz.mp3

No comments yet?

[Larry Rinkel]

Last movement: http://www.dgsp-rheinland-pfalz.de/sonate3satz.mp3

No comments yet?

I'd love to, Rappy. Just too busy to give you the attention you deserve... Sei geduld, bitte.

The first thought, on looking at the PDF of movement 2 is, is it playable? The scherzo looks very hard pianistically, and the trombone part very active. Also, why leave out the posaune at the ending of the movement?

[rappy]

Thanks, at least someone who's paying attention ;-) Of course I have Geduld :-) It will certainly take a lot of practice (for the piano part, for the trombone part I can't say, a tromboist from school promised me that it's playable with practice), but it should be playable, yes. Well, concerning the ending, the second movement fades away and in the introduction of the final movement the trombone starts alone. It should make sense.

Maybe the score looks a bit ugly because it hasn't been cleaned up yet, I must apologize.

Thanks for your reply. I'll send you the score of the final movement on request

[Larry Rinkel]

Thanks, at least someone who's paying attention ;-) Of course I have Geduld :-) It will certainly take a lot of practice (for the piano part, for the trombone part I can't say, a tromboist from school promised me that it's playable with practice), but it should be playable, yes. Well, concerning the ending, the second movement fades away and in the introduction of the final movement the trombone starts alone. It should make sense.

Maybe the score looks a bit ugly because it hasn't been cleaned up yet, I must apologize.

Thanks for your reply. I'll send you the score of the final movement on request

Please do. Hearing it only tells me half the story.

[rappy]

I've rewritten the opening post. Maybe this raises your interest (apart from Larry, who seems to be interested already, I think )

[karlhenning]

- at 11:42, there should be a deep pedal tone, whole note (B flat), but Finale unfortunately doesn't play it

That's odd, Ralph; Finale plays that note for me . . . .

[rappy]

With GPO (Kontakt player)? Did you change anything? My Finale trombone does not play anything below the E 

[karlhenning]

I have to wait until I'm home to check . . . .

[lukeottevanger]

Rappy, you needn't have a persecution complex about lack of comment on your music - it is pretty much par for the course, I think, and doesn't imply lack of interest so much as merely being indicative of a sort of inertia. I have pieces on my thread, such as most recently a clarinet sonata which I feel to be one of my best works, which also garnered (relatively) little attention, but that's absolutely fine: I didn't write the thing for that reason.

If you don't mind me pointing out, also - in the past I have paid a lot of attention to your music, writing lengthy responses to it, praising your rapid development over the last few years, and also commenting on areas which I find problematic to my tastes (which usually have to do with difficulty and, more precisely, the issue of handling and balancing 'difficulty' as a musical parameter; I'll go into that again if you wish, as it's probably my main response to your music). I even recall, a few years ago, taking one of your early pieces and writing a bar-by-bar commentary on it, offering my own alternatives to many passages whilst trying to not to turn it into anything other than your own work, to try to help with some of these issues. I'm sure others have done the same over the years. So don't get to feeling that it's only Larry who shows interest and offers advice! 

I had a look at your second movement a few days ago - a really big piece of work with some impressive ideas, I thought. I didn't have time to play it through, so once again my response is mostly textural - again I have issues with the difficulty, especially of the piano part. I don't mean that it is unplayable, just that it looked, to me, to be out of balance. But I need to look again...

[rappy]

Hello luke,

thanks for your response. I understand all your points. I appreciated your detailed and extremly helpful comments on my works VERY much, but I don't expect them, from nobody! I'll have a composition teacher soon, and he will get his money for looking more closely. Nevertheless, I'm always astonished - so many hits, no comments. If I listen to someone's composition, if it's not awfully bad, I always write something - at least that I liked it, if I have nothing else to say. But I shouldn't care about that, you're right.

The point about difficulty you've mentioned eminently reasonable. My comment on this: it's a highly virtuoso piece. The trombone part, from what tromboist have said, is extremly difficult, so the piano part has to be either. But honestly, it's not THAT difficult as it looks like. The first four bars might be difficult (I wrote that on vacation when I did not have a piano, but I liked it that much that I didn't want to change it although it's quite difficult), but the rest is far easier than it seems to be, because I composed it at the piano almost all the time and it lies well in the fingers. It's, of course, difficult, but no more difficult than e. g. a Schumann sonata presto or other virtuoso piano writings - at least I hope so.

[lukeottevanger]

Hi there!

It's not so much actual difficulty I'm talking about in this case, as perceived difficulty from the perspective of the listener. It's a shame I can't get at your PDF of the score now, because I'd like to look again, but from what I recall, the piano part tends at times to to dominate over the trombone part simply because it has reams of notes and the trombone only one at a time - a perennial difficulty in writing for single-line instrument and piano. It's an added difficulty in the case of the trombone because that instrument has to play extremely difficult things in order to sound as if it is balancing the piano in this respect (I'm not talking about volume balance but about the 'impact' or 'impressions' that each part makes on the listener). Where a violin or clarinet (etc.) can rattle off reams of notes or volleys of double-stops (even if in the event these are actually simple reams and easy volleys) and thus create an equal impression to the piano, the trombone is somewhat more limited. It's far from an insurmountable problem, of course, and there are plenty of passages where you deal with it very well indeed (IIRC) but one always needs to be aware of the question 'how will this balance out for an audience?'

But as I say, I'd like to see the score again, because I may very well be misrepresenting it!

[johnQpublic]

There's an even bigger world of being ignored, Rappy. It's the professional world of music.

Just try and get anyone to put into print good things about your work. It's not easy. There's just so many composers out there wanting to get their works heard and acknowledged.

Think of G-M-G as training ground for the real world. 

[rappy]

Just a question to Larry and luke, in the 3rd movement when part B of the rondo appears (E minor), there are some terrible parallel fifths beetween bass and melody. It sounds good to me and I neither want to change the harmony nor the theme... but I still have a guilty conscience about that. What would you say?

[lukeottevanger]

Hi Rappy

Sorry, should have PMed you to say that I couldn't get the link you sent me to work - the download kept failing. So I haven't been able to look at the score again yet, and haven't relistened. Sorry!

As for your question about parallel fifths, I suppose the standard answer would be: if you like them, then keep them. Parallel fifths aren't always 'wrong' anyway, not even in standard tonal harmony. I don't know whether in this case they add anything to the sound that couldn't be gained in any other way, but that is only one reason why composers use parallel fifths. For example, there's a Chopin Mazurka which has sprung to my mind which features prominent parallel fifths for extended sequences - and which really wouldn't work if it didn't. I'm not sure of the character of your Rondo theme, but I can easily imagine an 'unbuttoned', last-movement rusticated Rondo - as in some Chopin Mazurkas, or 'rustic' pieces in general - in which prominent fifths would be very much the way to go!

[rappy]

Hi,

thanks for your response. I've uploaded the score separately and I'll PM you the link. In this case, the fifths are between the trombone theme and the bass on the first beat of two bars, but the trombone plays some notes inbetween which softens the effect. I'm not sure, however, because it's not written in a style in which parallel fifths are common.

[Larry Rinkel]

Just a question to Larry and luke, in the 3rd movement when part B of the rondo appears (E minor), there are some terrible parallel fifths beetween bass and melody. It sounds good to me and I neither want to change the harmony nor the theme... but I still have a guilty conscience about that. What would you say?

Don't worry about the parallel fifths. If it weren't for parallel fifths, Debussy couldn't have existed.