Composer: Joyce, Brian

Instrumentation: Solo and Piano Instruments: Oboe, Piano

Genre: Contemporary

This "Sonata" for Oboe and Piano is in 3 movements and is a nice addition to the college recital repertoire.  The movements are:

1. Prelude

2. Rondo

III. Fantasia

Program notes from the composer:

Brian Joyce’s two sonatas, one for oboe and piano, the other for flute and piano (also published by Cimarron Music Press) are sister works. Both were written in 1971 when Joyce was an undergrad composition major in college and both are reflective of the seasons in which they were composed: the flute sonata, written in Spring, is fresh, expansive and tuneful while the oboe sonata, composed the following September, has a more burnished autumnal quality. About the oboe sonata the composer writes:

“My intention in this sonata was to write a more tightly and economically constructed work than the flute sonata of the previous Spring, while trying out some new ideas I had been considering. The oboe sonata breaks the traditional mold immediately by putting its slow movement first, following it with a galloping rondo, and saving its longest, most complex movement for last.  This third movement has a symmetrical arch-like form in which the key centers of each successive principal section rise by minor thirds. This puts the central slow section (equidistant from both ends of the movement) at a tritone away from the movement’s ostensible key. There is also quite a bit of dabbling with metric modulation and non-tertian harmony. The Sonata was revised in 1992 and received its premiere in November 1993. At that time, the piece was older than I was when I first wrote it.”

The sonata is dedicated to the composer’s wife, the oboist Susan Joyce.

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