Sonata (2023)

for Oboe and Piano

I. Groove
II. Song
III. Play

Although I have loved and studied the depths of contemporary classical music for most of my musical life (and long to some day write an austere modernist masterpiece in the vein of Berg’s Wozzeck or Berio’s Sinfonia), at the end of the day I’m a sentimental sap. I realized this as I furthered my studies in college; I learned a ton about Ligeti and Penderecki and all manner of staunch avant-garde artists (and loved them all), but I realized that I am also a sucker for a good Strauss waltz, or a tender and sincere Mozart aria.

After a phase of writing some particularly dense (and, frankly, aimless) atonal music, my compositions very suddenly turned in a very different direction than they had been heading in past years. As I wrote, I began to reorient my concept of harmony and voice leading, drawing from what I had learned in my many years of schooling in common-practice theory while also infusing it with a harmonic tongue more associated with jazz than anything else. I spent a particularly significant amount of time looking at reductions and transcriptions others had made of songs by Jacob Collier or Hiromi Uehara, or the wonderfully funky compositions of Nikolai Kapustin. As I looked through these, I “discovered” major sevenths, minor ninths, sharp elevenths; all manner of extensions and colorations that I unhesitatingly and gleefully added to my vocabulary.

Though the Sonata for Oboe and Piano is not the first piece I wrote after turning to this particular brand of harmony, I feel it is the work that cauterized this aspect of my style; classically oriented and formally-driven yet decidedly funky and schmaltzy, with rapidly changing rhythmic schemes and wild contrasts between the smooth and the spiky, the sonorous and the discordant, the dainty and the boisterous.

Duration: 16 minutes

Sonata for Oboe and Piano was completed in June of 2023. It was premiered by Thacher Schreiber and James Brandfonbrener on April 20th, 2024 in New York, New York.

This work is also available as an arrangement for soprano saxophone.