Brass Tacks

Andrew Lewinter composed music extensively as a young musician, but stopped composing music at age 17 when he turned his attention to playing the horn. After a 14-year career playing the horn as a performing orchestral musician and soloist, Lewinter began again to compose music. His first foray into composition as an adult was to write a sonata for horn and piano, which was fitting for someone who had devoted so much of himself to performing on the instrument.

The Sonata for Horn and Piano is a three-movement work in a decisively romantic style. The intervals of the first measure form the basis for the entire work, and much of the music in the rest of the piece is an outgrowth and development of those intervals. The last movement opens with a tongue-in-cheek skeletal version of the first movement theme, first played on the piano, and then rudely interrupted by a fortissimo horn rip. What follows is a theme and variations, which are interconnected and quasi-developmental.

Statement from the artist:

In 2016 I decided to start composing music. I wrote music as a kid but stopped after high school. Since I played the horn professionally for a lot of my life, the first goal I set for myself was to write a sonata for horn and piano. As a first project, I decided to extensively review theory, form, and counterpoint, using many books, scores, and a lifetime of playing and listening to classical music as my guides. My piece would use common practice harmony and standard classical forms, such as sonata-allegro form.

The Sonata for Horn and Piano that I composed was beautifully premiered by my friends Lydia Van Dreel and Sandy Holder at a Northwest Horn workshop in 2018, and later recorded by friends and great musicians, James Wilson and Katherine Ciscon. That terrific recording by Wilson and Ciscon is now available on this Navona Records release.

I am really fortunate that such great musicians recorded the piece that I wrote. Thank you also to Christian Schubert, who engineered the recording, as well as Bob Walp, who produced it.

After writing the Horn Sonata, I continued composing, and stuck with tonal harmony and standard classical forms, although my compositional style continues to develop. Tonal harmony is a musical language that allows me to express the widest range of emotions and western classical music’s traditional structures provide guide rails within which I can be creative.

At this point, I‘ve written more than a dozen multi-movement pieces of chamber music, and am forging ahead almost every day.

— Andrew Lewinter