10 Sonatas
for Solo Violin or Viola
10 Sonatas for 6 String Violin
Five
of the sonatas (violin edition, #4, 6, 7, 9 and 10) were premiered at Duke
University on March 31, 2006 in a program with Eric Pritchard, three of his
students, and a friend of mine (Lin-Ti Wang). Eric played Sonatas 1, 9, and 10
on his faculty recital on January 14, 2007. You may see the program here. (Note that in the current edition, what had
been Sonata 10 is now Sonata 9, and what was Sonata 11 is now Sonata 10.)
Eric recorded #1, 9, and 10 again in October 2009 with better surroundings,
more takes, and some engineering, so those recordings are included here. I gave
an introductory talk in '06 (click here for the recording) that may be a touch hard to
understand due to the heavy reverb in the hall. A better recording (and shorter
talk!) is from the '07 recital here. On August 10, 2014, Eric premiered Sonata #3
at the Unity Center of Peace in Chapel Hill NC, and the videos are posted on my
YouTube channel with links below. Many thanks to the musicians.
Mary Kay Robinson performed the Sonata #4 in Brevard NC on February 15, 2009.
Below are links to all ten scores in PDF format, much more convenient than
downloading each movement in Finale. (There had been 11 sonatas until
late November 2015; I have eliminated the old Sonata #8, using its middle
movement for the first movement of the old Sonata #9 to make the new Sonata #8.
The old #10 and #11 are now #9 and #10.)
In 2002 I made a version of the first three sonatas for 6 string
electric violin. In March 2017 I started a new attempt at playing violin again,
which I did every ten years to no avail. In hopes of playing 6 string violin, I
arranged all ten sonatas for 6 strings. However my arthritis once again made
all this futile. Note that this arrangement has considerable differences
from the original, in order to take full advantage of the instrument. In
addition, in 2002 I arranged the Bach Sonata #1 and Partita #2 for 6 string
violin, and I completed the difficult copywork into Finale on March 25, 2017.
Those two arrangements have their own web page.
The arrangement of the ten sonatas for 6 string violin led to major changes in
several of the 4 string sonatas and improvement in many details of the copy
work, layout, and typo correction. This led to the second edition of the ten
sonatas in both violin and viola versions. Earlier versions should be
discarded. The extant recordings are all of the first edition; it will take
some time to have recordings of the second edition.
10 Sonatas for Solo Violin Legal-size Score (PDF) Cover
Letter-size Score (PDF) Cover 10 Sonatas for Solo Viola Legal-size Score (PDF) Cover
Letter-size Score (PDF) Cover 10 Sonatas for 6 String Violin Legal-size Score Cover
(note;
all recordings are of the edition that was current at the time of
performance. Only Sonata No. 2 is of the current edition. The latest edition, from July 2017, has some new passages,
especially in the later sonatas. Only the 4 string violin sonatas have
been performed to date.)
These solo violin sonatas were written between
1975 and 2003 in a rather complex pattern of starts and stops, composition and
disposal, editing and recopying. I wrote a solo violin sonata in the spring of
1975, and based my now-eliminated First Symphony based on its ideas;
dissatisfied, I completely re-wrote it in January 1979, saving little from the
original. I revised the first movement again in the spring of 1991 and the last
movement in 2002. The second sonata came along in 1976, composed for Deborah Moreland’s
18th birthday as a two-movement work. I rewrote both movements in
1991, and in 2002 reversed their order and added a third movement written in
1991. (In addition, in 1975 I wrote a sonata for solo ‘cello or viola, but
discarded it later.) In 1979
I decided to write a total of 64 movements in 21 sonatas for solo violin,
correlating each movement to a hexagram of the “I Ching”—not by using chance to
determine things, as John Cage did, but just as a kind of unifying device and
as an illustration of the nature of each hexagram. As I finished the 21
sonatas, my arthritis became severe enough that I could no longer play violin,
and the sonatas remained unperformed. In 1991
I made an electric violin which I used for six months. It appeared that I was
going to be able to play again, so I went back to work on the 21 sonatas,
throwing out the weaker movements, rewriting those that had promise, and
keeping the ones that were fine as they stood. This made the new total of 16
sonatas with about a third completely new material. However after this six
month period I was no longer able to play, both physically and due to other
complications. At this time, when I was forced to vacate my dwelling, my
landlord threw away all my compositions that had been copied in ink. There
followed ten years where making music was not possible. In late 2001 and early
2002, I had a stable life studying physics at NCSU, an old piano, housing, and
access to a woodshop. I made two electric violins, a 4-string and a 6-string,
that I held like a cello, with an assistive device to hold up my bow-arm. I
could only play for a limited time before it became too painful, but the new
attempt at performance inspired me to rework once again my old solo violin
sonatas, including arrangements for viola and 6-string violin. (I located two
copies of the old 21 sonatas that I had given to violinists, returned
unperformed, and also recovered pencil drafts from the 1991 revisions—thus
recovering from the landlord’s editorial judgment.) This led to once again
throwing away weaker movements and a radical re-ordering of the remaining ones
in sets of three or four to make eleven sonatas that were reasonably
consistent. The grouping is arbitrary, though, and in performance it is
perfectly respectable for the violinist to pick whatever movements seem appropriate
and play them in the order of his or her choice. By
spring of 2003, it became clear that the arthritis was too advanced and my
attempt at a return to performance had to end. Now I rely on others to perform. In
November 2015 I was making a revision of the copywork and making an
experimental arrangement for cello, when I realized that the eighth of the
eleven sonatas had two weak movements. I kept only the middle movement, and
made what had been #9, 10, and 11 the new #8, 9, 10, with the old middle
movement now the first movement of the new #8.
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