PROGRAM NOTES:

Trio Sonata was commissioned by four musicians who annually attend the Chamber Music Conference in Bennington, VT. The group wanted a new piece that would have ties to the trio sonata genre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Like early trio sonatas, this piece is scored for two treble instruments, one bass instrument and piano.  The four movements follow the traditional slow, fast, slow, fast arrangement.  The titles for the individual movements—I. Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic; II. Chatterbox; III. Three Chairs: for solitude, friendship and society; and IV.  Run-on Sentences–suggest that the piece is a study in dialogue, debate, and interplay between instruments.