Lee, C :: Sonata

The Sonata for Flute and Piano was written in 1959, during the time Consuela Lee attended Northwestern University for her master’s degree in composition and theory. It was written in the same year as Lee’s Dance Suite for small orchestra, which was modeled after suites by Bach and Handel and formed the subject of her dissertation.

The Sonata packs a great deal into the four minutes of its single movement, and holds to aspects of the traditional sonata form-exposition, development, and recapitulation. An opening theme wanders between playful and quietly Romantic, climaxing before returning to the opening dynamic. A second, driving theme, with repeated notes and triplet flourishes, begins in the piano and migrates to the flute, then develops. The final third of the piece returns to the opening material, transformed by the second theme’s ideas; after the final climax of the work, it ends in a quiet, contemplative restatement of the opening theme.

Lee’s particular underlying harmonic progressions and back-and-forth chromatic movements in the Sonata are found throughout her works, and are based on bepop harmonic forms. She frequently uses fourths and fifths as passing tones in her melodies in addition to octave displacements of otherwise neighboring tones; both techniques are particularly common to composers of the mid-twentieth- century United States.