Fantasy-Sonata and Dream Music No. 1 - Piano Solo

FANTASY-SONATA: I shall never forget the first Domaine Musical concert in Paris in the fall of 1959; organized by Pierre Boulez, thenew-music group included Paris's most virtuosic musicians. I had recently entered the Paris Conservatoire to study with Darius Milhaud and had never heard anything like most of the repertoire on that concert. Boulez, having had to cover for the ailing Hans Rosbaud for earlier concerts that season, finally was listed as conductor of the ensemble for, I believe, the first time ever. My strongest memory of that time is a stunning piece for three orchestras, Allelujah II by Luciano Berio. The Boulez-Berio-Stockhausen triumvirate was paramount in the European new-music scene. Webern was considered the avatar of a new, serially oriented, often-aggressive music shorn of tonality and free from tradition. I was simply bowled over by this musical world's utter newness. Returning to the States in 1961, I found nothing but rejection of the whole European scene in New York. While earning my doctorate at Stanford, I began to play music of those three composers and others like Henri Pousseur and Olivier Messiaen in San Francisco and the Bay Area, about the only place along with Los Angeles showing much interest in this body of work. It would be a fairly long time before New York embraced this music at all, mostly following Boulez's taking the helm of the New York Philharmonic. My 1961 Fantasy-Sonata (there were only small revisions in 1962) is influenced naturally by my new familiarity with these masters and my longtime deep love of Charles Ives, both combined in the sonata. Though there are twelve-tone passages, I don't believe there is much trace of the ideological bent of that era to crush any reference to past musical language as so many Europeans sought to do. I had simply never undergone the trauma of World War II which had impelled so many artists to repudiate anything from past music. Looking at the music of my Fantasy-Sonata from 55 years of distance, I have to admit the sonata really is-of all things-in G major! -William Bolcom DREAM MUSIC NO. 1: Dream Music, from 1965, turned out to be the first of three pieces derived from music I viewed as a score for or heard in dreams. For me, dreaming music is a very occasional occurrence and doesn't happen for years on end, the most recent time being what became a short passage in my 2008 band symphony. There are three Dream Musics: No. 2 for percussion ensemble and No. 3 for small chamber group. Dream Music was premiered in Berlin while I was a pianist at Pierre Boulez's Domaine Musical-a Paris virtuoso performance group dedicated to new music-during the summer of 1965 in Berlin. We played a wide range of composers; I remember music by Gilbert Amy, Iannis Xenakis, and Vinko Globokar, a brilliant trombonist-composer, among many others. -William Bolcom