Works/Strings

Straightman & Jokester is from Bravo, Encore!, the third set of Opus Homage — a series of twelve pieces commemorating the great composers for the violin. Rather than imitating each composer, I took inspiration from qualities of their music and then composed in my own style. This set doffs its hat to the writers of encores and show pieces — or flash trash as I affectionately call them. These pieces astound audiences with their daring and bravura.

Fritz Kreisler wrote some of the most entertaining show pieces. Many of his pieces are like the dinner mints after a good meal — exactly right for the occasion. I modeled Straightman & Jokester on Kreisler’s Recitativo e Scherzo capriccio. Both his and my pieces are for solo violin, begin with a brooding meditative section followed by a rollicking display of virtuosity.

A Czech-Presbyterian Church in Iowa commissioned me to write a short string quartet as part of their 150th anniversary celebration. (I ended up writing two quartets, since this one became too adventurous for a Sunday morning church service—both tonally and technically.) At their suggestion, I took the Hussite Hymn as inspiration for melodic ideas. Legend tells us that during the Hussite Wars (1419-ca. 1434), the followers of Czech protestant Jan Hus would sing this hymn with such intensity that it instilled overwhelming fear in the enemy army and they would turn and flee. Adopted as an unofficial national anthem, Czech composers then used in it their compositions—Antonín Dvořák in his Hussite Overture and Bedřich Smetana in his Má vlast.

The piece opens with fragments of the hymn emerging from a shifting texture until the melody fully emerges in a waltz-like form. After the waltz, the opening texture returns, settles over a pedal point that builds until bursting forth into a wild furiant inspired section. The final section is a quasi-medieval contrapuntal treatment of the hymn tune in its original form with a short codetta at the end that drifts into the mist.

I have an affinity for things Czechoslovakian because I grew up in a town nine miles from Spillville IA, where Antonín Dvořák and his family spent the summer of 1893.

Written in 1995

Commissioned by Wil Dietz for his performance at the International Double Reed Society’s convention in Tallahassee FL in 1996—because he loved the piece of mine he’d heard at the 1993 Convention (4 in Motion, for flute, clarinet, oboe, and piano)

I fell in love with the bassoon when I heard its solo in Scheherazade and played (I’m a violinist) Haydn’s Symphonie Concertante for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon when I was 14.

I decided to exploit two of its features: lyricism and buffoonery—also its renaissance/medieval roots—a much honkier comical sound—like the oboe’s predecessor the shawm)—thus the antiquated misspellings of the piece and its movements.

The title describes the look of the bassoon (tawny—yellowish brown, as some bassoons are) and its LONG throat singing ayres (or airs…a term for English songs of the Renaissance).

The lyric outer movements surround the scherzo-like Frolick—which has the cadenza that ends on the bassoon’s lowest note—over which the strings play serenely (the bassoon is up to comic tricks…) before all return to joking around.

The last movement is misremembered Palestrinian counterpoint, some rules followed but then broken, using a stolen Kyrie chant.