Publisher: Onibatan Music.
This is a work for violin and piano. Phantasy for violin and piano, op. 47, by Arnold Schoenberg, is one of those pieces that has stayed close to me almost my whole life. When I was very young, I played the piano part of the piece with my mother, Esther Glazer, who was truly a great musician and a master of both this piece and Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, a piece she played with many orchestras over the course of her long career. Before I learned the piano part of the Phantasy, I had already pretty much memorized the violin part since she practiced it in her studio at home, along with so many other pieces, while I was playing with toy trains in the next room. My mother was one of those musicians who didn’t distinguish between Shapey and Schumann, Wolpe and Wieniawsky or Berio and Bach. She gave it all the exact same dedication and love. All of which naturally transferred to me. But the Phantasy was a bit special because when I decided to become a composer, I soon became aware that Schoenberg was someone whose music one had to absorb and process, one way or another. But since I had played this piece many times, it was already an old friend and I always loved both its high drama and exquisite tenderness.
A long time after that when I realized that my son Benjamin, another wonderful violinist in the family, was also smitten by Schoenberg’s music and expressed interest in learning the Phantasy, I knew I had to compose a companion piece that would simultaneously be a musical letter of respect to my mother, my son and to a composer whose music has been central in my life. There are moments in Derivatives in which Phantasypeeks out and is actually quoted but for the most part, my work consists of a conversation between my ‘Schoenberg-like’ music and my ‘non-Schoenberg-like’ music. And even in the ‘non-Schoenberg-like’ music, the materials are mostly derived from those of Phantasy itself. The few materials that are not directly related come from another important musical figure in my early years, Easley Blackwood, who was a remarkable composer and pianist whose work is hardly known these days.