Sonata Malcontento was composed for pianist Carl Cranmer, and has also been performed by Lisa Emenheiser in 2016 at the Smithsonian American Collection. It can he heard on my recording January (New Focus Records, 2016).
At the time of its writing I was taken by the vitriol and anger of the political landscape, particularly its classist and racist edges, and channeled my unease and anger into a piece that is sadly just as timely this year as it was then. Sonata Malcontento is a three-movement work whose sound world inhabits the twilight atmosphere between hyper-Romanticism and expressionism, but the piece has its roots firmly planted in earlier keyboard styles as well.
The virtuosity of the first movement is punctuated by a number of solecisms irrational outcries against the world in fistfuls of pitch, and also by its many fleeting, triadic harmonies that are never allowed to cohere into a lasting tonal center. The whole of the first movement is nominally held together by a loose sonata form, which, like our current political reality, barely resembles its ideal form, if there ever was one.
The mixture of new and old styles can best be heard in the second movement, a disquieted nocturne of nightmares and existential fear. The pace of the movement quickens by a series of proportional shifts like a late medieval motet while its surface ornamentation is a distorted reminiscence of an aristocratic, Rococo style.
The final movement, a rondo-like structure, "looks back" to earlier movements for some of its core ideas, and like the preceding movement also plays with proportion, its ritornello being twisted a bit around different meters and textures by the end.
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