To Rose (2016)
Instrumentation: horn, piano
Duration: 11 minutes
Music is an ideal gift for anyone. It appeals to the heart and mind, but best of all, never expires and can be experienced again and again. When Kevin Miescke, professor of horn at Eastern Illinois University, asked me to write a piece for his wife, Rose Sciaroni, to celebrate their first anniversary, I was delighted. I had never composed an anniversary present before! My mind was teeming with the musical possibilities, but I knew the piece had to be beautiful, harmonically sumptuous. After some initial brainstorming with Kevin, we decided To Rose would be a theme and variations for horn and piano on the music of Roses’ bridal march, Quam pulchra es, a motet by John Dunstable. Dunstable was a prominent English composer of the early fifteenth century associated with La Contenance Angloise, an English style of polyphony. To handle Dunstable’s music in a twenty-first century composition, I approached the theme in a manner analogues to Paul Hindemith in his Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. I retained the voice leading of the original source, but explored chromatic alterations, transpositions, and fragmentations possible with Quam pulchra es. I additionally drew on counterpoint practices part of Dunstable’s time such as Landini cadences and Faburden, an improvised practice of vocal polyphony creating parallel moving chords. The variations that follow rework the theme to create contrasting moods and harmonies.