Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses

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    The first and third piano sonatas of Carl Vine: a dialogue of musical contrast and complementation
    Schmidt, William James ( 2011)
    The Australian composer Carl Vine has brought his own unique mode of expression to the genre of the sonata, and with each of his own piano sonatas from 1990, 1997 and 2007, this expression has manifested itself in different ways. There is a small amount of existing literature on these sonatas, including several doctoral theses from the last decade, which tended to focus on performance interpretation and on Vine’s original influences, rather than examining the questions that underlie these sonatas’ relationships to each other. While the First Sonata, written for the Sydney Dance Company, became an international success under the hands of Michael Kieran Harvey, the Third Sonata is in a very different idiom and appears superficially to be more traditional in its musical language and its treatment of the sonata genre. Yet an examination of both works, and of and the similarities and differences in their expression and their treatment of the musical elements, will reveal a comparison that is more multi-faceted and far-reaching than this, and will moreover show that many of the superficial stylistic differences between the two sonatas can in fact be identified as polarised, inverted applications of a unifying underlying principle. The purpose of this thesis is to undertake such an examination, which will start off with an introduction to the context of the two sonatas, a comparison of their openings, and an investigation into the various ways in which the composer treats specific elements. The study will then move beyond the elements to compare remarkably similar musical passages in both works, before synthesising the findings to make illuminating conclusions about the compositional frameworks of the two sonatas. Through investigation of the network of dialogues set up by the two sonatas across the various fault-lines between them, this thesis aims to shed light on the sonata as a form, on the underlying principles that unify seemingly diverse modes of musical expression, on the expressive language of Carl Vine, on the constancy and change of a musical language over time, and on the important role that polarities can play in music.