Sonata progress
The sonata for double bass has now passed the five-minute mark, and the rough draft of the exposition is safely down on paper! Although there are several changes I need to make yet, it’s nice to be able to move on to the development. It’s always difficult to know exactly how “out-of-the-box” to make the piece, especially when working in a traditional form like sonata-allegro. On the one hand, it’s nice to have a preset form to use as a kind of guardrail when writing a piece; it’s much easier than composing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. But at the same time, when we look at the canon of so-called ‘classical’ music, there have been an awful lot of sonatas written, from tiny Scarlatti works to 45-minute long Romantic masterpieces to modern pieces like the sonatas of Pierre Boulez and Poul Ruders. So the challenge is to make a piece that tips its hat to sonata-allegro form yet proves its individuality by breaking the rules just a bit. In the case of the double bass sonata, I’ve decided to develop both themes at once, often at the same time. This’ll hopefully help to provide that sense of being propelled to the big restatement of the theme at the recapitulation.
So, work continues on the sonata as each day that I really need to get going on Kara Halleck’s commission, a song cycle setting of Muriel Rukeyser’s Iris…