Faculty recitals are a place where artists can flex a little more creative muscle than their teaching duties often allow. Tim Jones, who's an assistant violin professor at Wichita State, will have that opportunity when he performs on Friday evening. For this month’s ArtWorks, Jones described his recital to Torin Andersen and gave him a sneak preview.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
So Dean Roush is highly celebrated in his field and also in Wichita. He is retiring this year. So I'm just very excited and honored to be putting a work of his on the program. The "Lacrimosa" by Dean Roush is actually a piece ... I first played during my undergrad.
Then the [remaining] first half of the program is a Bach sonata and a Ysaÿe sonata. So these two composers...essentially 200 years apart, really have a lot to do with each other, they have a close relationship.
Bach wrote ... three partitas and three sonatas, but bound together in a book that we all cherish. These pieces are written for solo violin. So Bach wrote these partially to show people, [at] that time, just how incredible the violin really is.
Moving on ... to Ysaÿe...[he] also wrote six sonatas for solo violin. Not a coincidence at all. Ysaÿe was a Belgian composer in the 20th century, and rumor has it [that] he heard Bach's sonatas performed and went home in a fury to compose the first draft of his own six solo violin sonatas.
So the thing to consider is that in 200 years, the capacity of the violin ... had not actually changed. But the technical capacity of the performers, between the 18th and 20th centuries has grown immensely. ...If you see videos, for example, of early Olympic games and compare them to videos of the last 10-20 years, you see that although the human body has really not changed that much, what we have pushed the body to be able to do is really incredible.
And then ... Beethoven — not single-handedly, but retrospectively — we look at him as one of the pivotal composers who moved us from the Classical [Period] to the Romantic Period. ...He wasn't just born in one and died in the other, he made the change; he created that transition through his compositions. So knowing that this is his last violin sonata, you might be expecting something rather avant-garde or out there. At first glance, or at first, listen, it's actually pretty straightforward. It's not a piece that's hard to listen to or confusing. However, if you [listen] again — if you are one of those people who knows a little bit about music history and music theory — you'll be in for a lot of surprises.
In this case, I have performed the Bach and the Ysaÿe before the Dean Roush piece. I...played [it] during my undergrad, but at that point, [I] was still a little baby, I can hardly really say that I performed it. And then the Beethoven is new to me.
Tim Jones will perform Friday evening in Wiedemann Hall.
