Sonata O'Carolan for piccolo and piano (2011).

On the night that Mel Powell died I was in the wine cellar of the university president's house playing background music for a "Medieval Dinner." These dinners were fundraising events designed to imitate a renaissance or medieval banquet with medieval costumes, medieval food, and medieval music. We often played Irish and Scottish folk music as well as medieval music at these events. This Celtic music seemed appropriate. There is a limited amount of true medieval music available and some of the Celtic tunes are, in fact, very old. During a break, I asked the other musicians for advice. I was composing a sonata based on Irish folk songs and I needed a slow Air for the middle movement. The immediate response was: you should use The Separation of the Soul from the Body by Turlough O'Carolan. I looked up the tune a few days later and heard on the radio that Mel Powell had passed away.

Mel was my mentor and teacher for two years while I was studying at the California Institute of the Arts (Calarts). Mel was a larger than life character. In his youth he was an internationally famous jazz musician. He was one of the great arranger-pianists of his generation. He worked with Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Django Reinhardt. He found success on his own after the second world war and became so famous that he played himself in a movie about jazz musicians (A Song is Born—1948). He married a movie star and gave up jazz to devote himself to writing classical music. He enrolled at Yale University and studied with the great German composer Paul Hindemith. He became Hindemith's assistant at Yale and took over the chair of the composition department at Yale when Hindemith retired. He left Yale in the 1960s and moved to California where he founded the music department at the California Institute of the Arts along with fellow composer, Morton Subotnick. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1990. It seemed fitting that I would dedicate this piece to Mel's memory, but my initial efforts were not very satisfactory. I tried to imitate Mel's musical style, but his style could be somewhat severe and the Irish tunes just didn't seem to lend themselves to that approach.

After many years of playing around with the material, I decide to allow the melodies themselves to dictate the style of the piece. Because the piece was based on Irish folksongs, it turned out to have a style that blended popular-folk music elements with techniques from contemporary classical music (minimalism). At first glance this seemed inappropriate in a piece dedicated to Mel Powell. Then I remembered two of the last times I saw Mel. One of these was a conversation I had with him concerning the future of classical music. He believed that classical music in the future would not have a single style, but would be a mixture of the styles of the past and present. The second time, was the last time I heard Mel play piano. There was a concert of very difficult contemporary music at Calarts. After intermission there was an announcement that the piece on the second half of the program had been canceled. Instead Mel and one of his friends would improvise jazz. Mel had not played jazz in public in decades. At this point Mel was already ill. His muscular dystrophy forced him to hobble to the piano, but his playing was incredible--brilliant and full of joy. After that concert, he had a revival of his jazz career. Maybe he would have approved of the pop music influence in this piece after all.

Sonata O'Carolan, Robert Fruehwald, piccolo, Matt Yount, piano (excerpt).