As a performer and composer, I find music to be a powerful way for me to share my story with the world. It is not just personal, but also political: in unabashedly narrating my own experiences, I fight for a world that is humane and liberating for all people.
My music senior thesis, culminating in this recital, has evolved into a personal project that has helped me to process and reflect upon my experiences in college. It’s a snapshot of not just my musical learning, but also my psychological growth. So in this digital program guide, I share with you both the stories of the pieces I will perform and their significance to the story I weave of my own life.
There are several connecting themes among the composers and works represented:
First, the composers are all keyboardists themselves (with Frank, de la Guerre, and Beethoven all having concertizing careers alongside composition), so their approaches to composing for piano or harpsichord are strongly influenced by their own performing skills and tastes. Beethoven is well-known for demanding louder and larger pianos and composing works only playable on such pianos (most notably the Hammerklavier sonata), thus contributing to the evolution from the fortepiano of his time to the modern pianoforte. De la Guerre rose to fame for her improvisational skills on the harpsichord, and her densely ornamented scores are a hint to how elaborate and elegant her improvisations must have been. Frank frequently performs and records her own works, including Sonata Andina.
Second, all of the works either reference or have origins in folk music or dance. Frank’s Sonata Andina and Lyadov’s preludes both are largely based on a folk music tradition (the former Andean, the latter Russian). My composition similarly draws inspiration from Chinese folk (and classical) music, though more in an intuitive manner, based on music I’ve heard growing up. The dances in the de la Guerre suite have origins in folk dances, only later becoming court dances for aristocratic ballrooms. The second movement of the Beethoven sonata paraphrases two Austrian folk songs that were popular during the composer’s time.
Third, the lives of each of the composers have been strongly marked by experiences of disability and/or neurodivergence. de la Guerre was a child prodigy whose career greatly benefitted from having stunned the King’s court at a young age, and Lyadov shows signs of cognitive and/or emotional difference that seems to have hindered his musical productivity and led to his being labeled as “lazy.” I am a neurodivergent person who has struggled with mental illness, and this experience is part of what I musically narrate in my composition fluxing, quivering, transforming. Most strikingly perhaps, two of the composers — Frank and Beethoven — live(d) with substantial hearing loss.
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