Sonata for Piano No.5

Fun fact: it took me about three days to write the last 20 measures of this piece, which ended up containing only 17 notes in total. If I were Beethoven, I would have left you all the scratched-out failures in my sketchbook; but this being the age of computers, no one will ever know how many monstrously inconclusive and complex codas originally graced the draft Finale of this work. I will probably hear them all in fitful nightmares going forward, however.

A work that begins expansively, with a pair of perfect fifths stacked above C, manages to end in a flurry of tritones, whose delicious ambiguity nevertheless fails to distract from the ultimate goal: Gb, itself a tritone distant from the original C. There is a certain logic in this, embedded in the row and its permutations themselves. (1) C-G-D (2) Eb-Db-Bb (3) B-A-Ab (4) E-F-Gb.

Enjoy!