Sonata Mozartiana for flute and piano (2009).

Sonata Mozartiana is one of those pieces that took years to finish. The idea for the piece comes from every composer’s secret question: how do I stack up to the great composers of the past? It’s a hard question to answer because music today is much different from music in the past. It’s probably impossible to compare Stravinsky to Mozart, let alone me to Mozart. On the other hand, it would be possible to compare my music to Mozart’s if I wrote in Mozart’s style. Composing in Mozart’s style is something most composers should be able to do. After all, many of us teach Mozart’s music and the music theory that we teach is supposed to explain how Mozart did what he did.

I must admit that I failed in my attempt to compose an interesting piece in the style of Mozart. While I didn’t have any trouble writing in Mozart’s style, everything I wrote seemed pretty dull and uninspired. When I would try to improve my work, I would find myself using techniques invented after Mozart’s time. The original ideas that I had were just not suitable to Mozart’s style. Then it dawned on me that I was doing the opposite of what I should be doing. Instead of writing new melodies in Mozart’s style, I should be using Mozart’s melodies to write a piece in my own style.

 Sonata Mozartiana is based on melodies from four different Mozart works: Eine kleine Nacht Musik, the Adagio for glass harmonica K617, The Magic Flute, and the Turkish Rondo from the piano sonata K331. While the piece is a serious work and took quite a bit of effort to compose, it has many lighthearted moments. In the first movement, I take music from the end of Mozart’s second theme and turn it first into a kind of chromatic fugue and later into a kind of latin sounding pop tune. The magic flute movement has a “take off” on the Queen of the Night’s aria. The queen sings a passage with a number of very high notes (high Fs). In my version, the flute does her one better by doing the high Fs an octave higher. The last movement has the flute and piano separate “drunkenly” into different keys (a technique Mozart himself used in his Musical Joke).

Sonata Mozartiana, III. Magic Music, P. Thompson, flute, M. Yount, piano (excerpt).