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SEXTET (2007)
PLAY MUSIC
- Allegro
- Adagio
- Presto
- Allegro
While “Googling” his own name on the web, Scott Eggert, a professor of music at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania, was intrigued to discover that there was another composer who shared his last name. Joachim Nikolas Eggert (1779-1813) was a contemporary of Beethoven and Schubert. Joachim Nikolas (or JNE in these notes) was born in northern Germany, in the same general area from which some of Eggert’s ancestors had come. JNE had had no children, so he could not have been a direct ancestor, but could he have been a relation of Eggert’s? And what sort of music had JNE written?
Fascinated, Eggert began to research this “lost” composer, who had worked most of his short life in Stockholm. After obtaining copies of the elder composer’s handwritten scores from the State Library in Stockholm, Eggert did a complete transcription of his namesake’s f-minor Sextette.
“It revealed itself to be a richly delightful piece of music. Why, I wondered, was this splendid music not better known?” Now inspired, and with the help of a semester-long sabbatical, Eggert began to write his own Sextet, also in four movements, employing the same key centers, the same tempos, and a similar structure for the movements. “Occasionally, I even lifted a passage quite literally from the earlier score, though, of course, not allowing it to remain literal for long!
“Odd as it sounds, as I worked, I imagined there was some sort of growing connection between us—a creative empathy. Since musical ideas inevitably come to a composer from an unknown place, and since accessing them is always something of a mystery, it wasn’t much of a leap to imagine that JNE was helping me out a bit now and then on this piece. As a kind of testimonial, I went so far as to incorporate, in every movement, the musical motive created by our shared name: the pitches E-G-G-E and the solfege syllables R(e) and T(i).
“Only as I neared completion of the piece did I realize another little connection—JNE wrote his Sextette in 1807; mine was written exactly 200 years later in 2007.” Even as Eggert was finishing up his transcription of the 1807 Sextette, Amadeus Press released another modern transcription of the work, the first publication of a JNE composition since the early 19th century.
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Beverly Butts, clarinet
Cheryl Staherski, horn
Johannes Dietrich, violin
Rick Ney, viola
Marie-Aline Cadieux, cello
Gina Barrett, bass |
