William Bolcom (b. 1938)
Violin Sonatas
The Seattle-born composer and pianist William Bolcom
studied at the University of Washington with George
Frederick McKay and John Verrall, with Darius
Milhaud at Mills College and the Paris Conservatoire,
and earned his doctorate at Stanford University. Since
1973 he has taught at the University of Michigan, where
he is the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished Professor of
Music in Composition, has undertaken commissions
from organizations and individuals worldwide, and has
received numerous honours and awards, including the
Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1988 for his 12 New Etudes
for Piano.
Bolcom’s compositions, widely performed and
recorded, include seven symphonies, various concertos,
three operas for Lyric Opera of Chicago, three theatre
operas, and an extensive catalogue of chamber music as
well as keyboard, vocal, and choral music. For over
thirty years Bolcom has accompanied his wife, mezzosoprano
Joan Morris, in performances, both on stage
and in over two dozen recordings of American popular
song. William Bolcom offered the following notes about
the four violin sonatas:
Ever since I was small I have been fascinated by
two musical sounds more than any other, the voice and
the violin. I cannot sing, although until recently I had
so-called perfect pitch, a gift that is more a curse than a
blessing, I never could seem to get my voice to agree
with what my ear tells me is right, and I have never
shown aptitude for any other instrument than the piano.
When I was about ten we trundled out my maternal
grandfather’s imitation Stradivarius, made in
Czechoslovakia, I believe, and I took a few not-verysuccessful
lessons; when the violin was stolen out of the
back seat of my father’s Buick, that was the end of my
studies of that instrument.
I had, however, the wonderful luck about that time
to get to know a local practising violinist well and,
through him, the violin literature intimately. Gene
Nastri, who was then string and orchestral director for
the schools of Everett, Washington, an industrial town
where we then lived, was kind enough to play through
the little violin-and-piano tunes I wrote for him,
interspersed with long reading sessions of the
Beethoven and Mozart violin sonatas and much else. I
cannot think of a better way for a non-player to find out
about the history and psychology of that instrument than
what Gene afforded me, and I shall always be in his
debt.
The First Sonata for Violin and Piano was
composed in 1956 during my freshman year at the
University of Washington in Seattle. It was written for
Peter Marsh and his then wife Joanna, who never did
perform the piece. The next spring the violinist Joy
Aarset and I gave the first performance of the sonata at a
university concert. The present revised version was
requested by the Hanley Daws - Katherine Faricy Duo
of Saint Paul, who first performed it there in 1984.
I have mostly tightened the piece from the first
version - over 200 measures of repetitious passages
have been excised, as well as a fugue in the last
movement - but I rewrote only slightly, trying to keep
the youthful energy of the piece. Only three measures
have been added, in the second movement, to fill in a
link I always felt missing. I have always had an
affection for this sonata and am glad for the opportunity
to present it in this new version.
Coming 22 years after the first, the Second Sonata
results in part from the violinist Sergiu Luca’s
association with the great jazz fiddler Joe Venuti. Luca
was one of the first classically-trained violinists of the
late l970s to begin showing interest in jazz styles, and
Venuti, the living legend in his eighties, still had perfect
intonation, dazzling technique, and dozens of fresh
musical ideas. One unforgettable evening in April l978,
at Michael’s Pub in New York, Joe invited first Sergiu,
then my wife Joan Morris and me, to play sets with him,
bassist Milt Hinton, and drummer Bobby Rosengarden.
(I do not remember what or how we did, as my head was
buzzing with excitement at sitting in with the Master.)
Sergiu had secured a commission from the McKim
Fund of the Library of Congress for a new piece for us
to play; that summer, as Composer in Residence at the
Aspen Music Festival, I began work on the sonata,
incorporating in it many of Joe’s stylistic tricks,
alternate left- and right-hand pizzicato, double-stop
slides, his encyclopedia of nuances. One day in August
1978 Sergiu phoned me at Aspen; Joe had died, and the
Second Sonata became his memorial.
The first movement, Summer Dreams, is a modified
blues with a contrasting middle section. Brutal, fast is a
furious improvisation on a small interval, containing
one of the toughest passages for the piano I have ever
written. The Adagio which follows is a rhapsodic arioso
leading to a closing, hymn-like tune. The final In
Memory of Joe Venuti, a sort of Venutian salsa, recalls
much of his style.
The first performance by Sergiu Luca and the
composer took place on 12th January, 1979, in The
Coolidge Auditorium at The Library of Congress in
Washington, DC.
I am told by my long-time librettist and collaborator
Arnold Weinstein that stramba means something like
“weird” in Italian, and this [the third] is certainly a
weird sonata. Its uncanny mood possessed me
throughout its creation. I of course had Nadia Salerno-
Sonnenberg’s highly individualistic violin style in mind
when writing this work; it was a pleasure to invoke her
dramatic, passionate personality in my work for her.
The first movement, after a long and highly
theatrical introduction, intones “guerra, guerra” in its
principal motive, obsessively and implacably, like war
in human history. The Andante seems hardly a relief
from the tragic mood despite its lyricism. “Like a
shiver” is a scherzino leading directly into the last
movement, which shares a mood somewhere between
the darker tangos of Astor Piazzolla and Arabic music.
None of these moods is quite “on the nose” or easily
definable literally; the whole work is “stramba.”
Sonata No. 3 was commissioned by the Aspen
Music Festival with support by the Debby and Martin
Flug Foundation in honour of the 75th birthday of the
legendary violin teacher Dorothy Delay. The first
performance was given by Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
and the composer in Aspen on 12th July, 1993.
The Fourth Sonata is a present from a wife to a
husband. Cynthia Birdgenaw, concertmistress several
years ago for the University of Michigan School of
Music’s University Symphony Orchestra, married
another violinist, Henry Rubin, of the University of
Houston faculty (concertmaster of the Brooklyn
Philharmonic before going to Houston). Cynthia had
asked for a technically challenging and brilliant work in
honour of her husband’s fiftieth birthday.
The first movement generally embodies a sonataallegro
form in miniature, directly followed by “White
Night,” an evocation of insomnia. (In the midst of this
latter movement a Christmas-carol-like tune emerges,
similar, I find out, to a traditional Danish one - not
surprising, as I grew up in towns in Washington State
with a high percentage of Scandinavians. Whereas the
memory of it was intended to be soothing toward sleep,
it proved to have the opposite effect on me.) As with the
Third Sonata’s finale, the next movement has an Arabic
quality, filled with drama and fatefulness - perhaps
some prescience of the current world atmosphere? - and
suffused with my love of that music; it leads to the Jota
finale, a Spanish dance with Moorish roots.
The Fourth Sonata (1994) was first performed on
26th January, 1997, by the composer with the violinist
Henry Rubin at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, Michigan.
I am delighted that the married team of Solomia
Soroka and Arthur Greene have recorded my four violin
sonatas. They have brought a special insight to the
works, emphasizing the traditional qualities which I
have always insisted were at the core of all four.
William Bolcom