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Piano Sonata 3

At the core of Piano Sonata No.3 is the solid foundation of the Classical and Romantic piano sonata repertoire. The articulation of established musical architecture and recognised formal structures through all of the compositional parameters, without compromising the individual and original harmonic language, was one of the principal challenges in composing this work. The other major challenge in this, the last of a set of three sonatas, was to embed motivic and thematic links across the set.

Whilst each Sonata can be performed individually there are clear harmonic and thematic links between them: for example, the first movement (Molto adagio – grazioso) employs a motive based on the slow episodes in the third movement of the first sonata and, as with each of the other two sonatas, the rigorously applied harmonic structure of each movement is a ‘closed’ chord sequence that, through rotation and transposition starts and ends with the same chord. This process, which develops the concept of modes of limited transposition, generates chord sequences that contain the same intervals but have different pitches over a pedal tone. The most obvious manifestation of this technique can be found in the third movement, Allegro, where each rotation of the chord is articulated in ascending arpeggios at the start, and then again from the a tempo at bar 104 until the end of the movement.

Piano Sonata No.3 makes an original and creative contribution to the understanding of closed chord harmonic structures projected over multi movement/multi work duration. It makes a significant contribution to the literature and is one of very few full-length multi-movement works composed within a set of equally rigorous compositions over recent years thus enhancing the understanding and practice in contemporary composition.