Variations on an American Folk Song

Instrumentation: piano

Composed: 1954

Duration: ca. 3 min.

Score: 7 pp.

library.newmusicusa.org/allenbrings

I have reached a stage in my life when it has occurred to me that I might have a musical biography. Excluding juvenilia, it would have had to have begun in 1954 with a single song and these piano variations. Unlike many contemporary composers, I have never wished to promote my most recent compositions to the exclusion of my earliest. They are different, of course, but what I wanted to say then I believe I said just the way I wanted to say it and would not be able to say it in quite the same way ever again. While performing two of these early works recently after many years and having now the advantage of an objectivity born of years of teaching, I found them, to my great delight, to be still good. They are youthful works with all that that implies: they are overtly expressive, sometimes self-consciously dramatic, romantic (with all of the connotations which we associate with that word), occasionally even a little naive. Perhaps it is because of these qualities that the music still seems fresh and enjoyable to play. Variations on an American Folk Song was based on a tune the origins of which I have long forgotten. It was revised in 1958 while I was stationed in West Germany with a U.S. Army regimental band, at which time it acquired greater harmonic richness and the coda with which it ends.

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