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To those of you who know me as a sometime arranger of cello music, usually from original Bulgarian works for other instruments or orchestra, it may come as a surprise that over the last couple of months I have become slightly obsessed with composing … for piano. I have never considered myself a composer, nor am I a performing pianist, so this current creative wave of mine has come up unexpectedly. But as long as I’m on it, I plan to ride it out!
There is a bit of a backstory here. When I returned permanently to the US after a quarter-century (OK, I rounded up from 23 years) of musical adventures in Bulgaria, I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful young people on projects geared to making musical creativity more immediately accessible to students with a very limited musical knowledge base. One of the tools we developed to facilitate this creativity was a musical notation cipher, where each letter of the alphabet is linked to a music note letter. The original idea for this type of code, arrived at quite spontaneously as I remember, came from two very dear students, cellist Tressa Hunt and violinist Ellen Hayashi. Based on a substitution principle, the code unlocks possibilities for creating a melody—a cipher in sound—from any series of words.
For centuries, classical composers have been using similar techniques to fashion musical cryptograms. Personal mottos have formed the basis of such works as the F A E Sonata, a collaborative effort of Schumann, Brahms, and Dietrich, who took violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim’s Frei aber einsam (“free but lonely”) motto as their theme as a birthday surprise for Joachim in 1852. (Brahms’ Scherzo movement for this sonata is often played as a stand-alone piece: )
Over a century earlier, Johann Sebastian Bach had introduced his…
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| Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean |
Simply thrilling to me personally, and heart-warming to think that you were probably drafting this post at your mother’s and my dining table during your recent visit to North Carolina! You spoke of your students and their requests. I look forward to what our cousin, pianist André Duvall, might say by way of comment on this Alwinac post.
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