JAVS Spring 2019

two-movement work. At his wife’s suggestion he agreed to add another movement:

In this final movement, the dialogue between players continues to develop, intertwined with prior thematic material. Such interactions begin from the viola’s first few notes, which are adapted from the piano’s inner voices in the very first measure of the piece (ex. 10). 16 Nonetheless, unlike the initial two movements, this one has freed itself from harmonic expectation and formal constraints. What binds this movement together is its relationship to what came before: perhaps we might hear this final movement in dialogue with the sonata itself. Leah Frederick is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she also studied viola with Atar Arad. She holds a B.M.A. in Viola Performance and a B.S. from Mathematics from Penn State University, where she studied viola with Timothy Deighton. Leah is currently writing a dissertation that studies diatonic voice leading using mathematical techniques.

“The kind of last movement I knew I could not add—that in fact I detested—was a fast, concluding movement in order to fulfill a purely perfunctory function. If anything, it would have to speak the language and expressive character of what preceded it. I rejected the idea of a stormy finale—a kind of ‘battle scenario’ merely to round off the old fast-slow-fast structural format. After days of fretting and worrying about the problem, I settled on writing an epilogue, one that had the sense of ‘remembrance of things past,’ a musical recollection of major idiomatic elements that were characteristic of the opening Allegro moderato movement. To accomplish this I knew that I needed to write a fantasia—a free, open, unhampered musical flow that went from thought to thought without being bound into a tight formal structure. The Fantasia: Epilogue became the shortest of the three movements, but despite its restless, constant changing motion from idea to idea, it ends the work with a sense of deep repose and resolution—paradoxically, because of its last, stabbing, painful, più forte espressivo outburst just before the concluding pianissimo F-major chord.” 15

Example 10. Rochberg, Sonata for Viola and Piano, III, mm.1–2

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2019