Introduction to the Piano Music of Carl Vine with Emphasis on His Piano Sonata No. 3

This treatise provides an introduction to the piano music of Carl Vine with an emphasis on his Piano Sonata No. 3 (2007). His piano music is virtuosic, expressive, and energetic. It is filled with technical passages that utilize the entire keyboard, yet are idiomatic and arouse the musical imagination. His music uses 20th century compositional techniques like metric modulation, polyrhythm, quartal harmony, and chord clusters, while blending them with his pianistic background. Compositionally, Vine's third sonata is a departure from his earlier sonatas. The first sonata was modeled after Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata and the second sonata utilizes elements of Maurice Ravel's Miroirs. Vine's third sonata is inspired by his own music, particularly The Anne Landa Preludes (2006), which are a collection of twelve pieces that can also function as a single work. The concept of amalgamating multiple ideas to create a single work of drama was the inspiration for the third sonata: a one-movement structure with four clear subdivisions performed attacca. Very little has been written on Vine's third sonata, and there has been no in-depth discussion of the form of the movements or how motives and their relationship to each other within this work are realized. This treatise provides a biography of Carl Vine, a review of Vine's solo works for piano, and an examination of the process Vine uses to create standard formal patterns and the manner in which he uses motives in Piano Sonata No. 3. Examining how the form is applied and when motives are used within the framework of Vine's third sonata will provide pianists approaching this work with a greater knowledge of the fundamentals of the sonata, which is important for making this work more comprehensible.