Serenade for String Trio, Op. 8
Though living closer to the inner city of Richmond, Virginia, Baber attended a suburban high school typical of mid-1950s America, except that it had the outstanding music program in the state.
The best players at Thomas Jefferson HS provided music for monthly PTA receptions, a good place to try out parts of this trio-serenade and other pieces, such as the Virginia Dances. Most of the Serenade was assembled during the high school years except for an acceptable coda for the last movement Rondo, which was rewritten in college, along with endings for 1st and last movements of the Sinfonia, Op. 7, the companion piece to the Serenade and the only other extended, multi-movement work of these early years. For many years, the Serenade was put aside in favor of the more modernist String Trio, Op. 24. But at the insistence of Irving Ilmer, who in the early 70s at the University of Kentucky much preferred the earlier piece, a new set of parts were realized from the chaotic original score. When Baber's wife Melissa later launched her copying and publishing enterprise for two of the operas, Frankenstein and Rumpelstiltskin, and her favorite chamber works, the Cello Sonata, the Shakespearean Songs, etc., she made a definitive score and a set of corrected parts for the Serenade, which have been used in all subsequent performances. Click here to listen to a recording. |
suite no. 1 for viola and piano "Virginia Dances," Op. 31, No. 9
Yet another manifestation of the youthful Virginia Dances, Op. 3 , these tuneful movements, unlike the Suite No. 2 for Viola and Piano, are of only moderate difficulty. They were arranged for viola and piano in 1966 during the composer’s time in residence at Southern Illinois University as a member of the Illinois String Quartet. They were requested by musicologist Wesley Morgan for a series of outreach concerts aimed at local service organizations, schools, and churches.
These six dances were influenced by the style and enthusiasms of Baber’s teacher, John Powell, whose own music was deeply influenced by the folk music of Virginia. This folk quality and the lack of extreme difficulty make these dances very suitable for young players. A few of them were original melodies which imitated his teacher’s style, a couple were on melodies given by Powell, and at least two were influenced by the similar dances of Brahms and Dvořák. |
SUITE NO. 2 FOR VIOLA AND PIANO, Op. 35, no. 2
This second collection of pieces for viola and piano came about in a similar manner as the Suite No. 1 for Viola and Piano. In the Spring of 1971, the chairman of the music department at Kansas State Teacher’s College (now Emporia State) asked Baber, who was on a one-year appointment for a Ford Foundation-like project involving six colleges, to present programs for service organizations, schools, and churches, as was done with the First Suite. This time, however, the designated accompanist was the superlative concert pianist David Yeomans. Reluctant to use the simpler First Suite with its perfunctory accompaniment for so fine a pianist, Baber wrote a new Suite with more professional-level demands for both soloist and accompanist.
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viola sonata no. 2, op. 15, no. 2
This three-movement work was written in the spring of 1962 at the end of Baber’s senior year at Michigan State University. It was first performed by the composer and Rita Fuszek on May 14 on a program of student works. The piece is spring-like and buoyant. It requires a professional level of performance of both the solo player and the accompanist, though it is not out of reach for college student performers. The middle movement, which reworks one of the composer’s finest melodies, contains a Scherzo as its middle section. The playful last movement Rondo has at its center a portrait of Baber’s mentor, Gomer Jones, a student of Elgar’s who was a passionate Bach enthusiast. Thus, that section reflects those two composers.
Click here to listen to a recording. |
suite for viola and harp, op. 14, no. 8
This attractive, lyrical work makes more demands upon the harpist, perhaps, than the violist. It was written over the Christmas break in 1961 and first performed in Milwaukee as part of the 1962 Spring tour of the Michigan State Singers, whose director, Richard Klausli, used instrumentalists during intervals of his choir concerts. Karen Murphy was the harpist, with the composer playing the viola.
Click here to listen to a recording. |
duos for violin and viola, op. 1
As in the cases of other collections from Baber’s earliest period, 1948-1956 (Opp. 1-12), the opus number is not entirely reflective of the time of composition. These duos, like the songs and madrigals, were written over the space of nine years before college and drawn together by their genre or texts. However, the first duo is indeed the composer’s first successfully-completed work, written to be played with his string teacher, Frank Wendt. The recording is with Irving Ilmer and the composer in October, 1971. Sets 2 and 3 demonstrate Baber’s growing formal sense, especially with binary form, as well as his increasing virtuosity as a performer. Like the Mozart duos, which were the composer’s models, these duos are as demanding of the viola as they are of the violin.
Click here to listen to a recording. |
trio for flute, viola, and cello, op. 61, no.5
This trio was written in the fall of 1986 for a concert at the Headley-Whitney Museum in Lexington, Kentucky by the Ashland Trio, Merrilee Elliott, Catherine McGlasson, and Roberta Guthrie. After more than a dozen performances of the Serenade, Op. 8, adapted for the flute, Elliott challenged Baber to stop complaining about the displaced lowest violin notes and write a trio especially for the Ashland Trio, as constituted. A first draft of movement I was abandoned as too modernist for the group’s proclivities and purpose, providing music for weddings and informal occasions. The final result was a work which returned to the tuneful spontaneity of the composer’s 1950’s style. In three movements, the work is not prohibitively demanding, but does require a level of facility representative of the Ashland Trio’s professional caliber.
Click here to listen to a recording. |
sonata for cello, unaccompanied, op. 34, no. 2
The Sonata for Cello Unaccompanied, Op. 34, No. 2 was written in the fall of 1970 for David Cowley and was first performed by him on October 22 at Emporia State University. The four-movement work reflects not only the composer's lifetime devotion to J.S. Bach, but his immediate preoccupation of those years, his first opera, Frankenstein, with novelist John Gardner. One can also hear something of the vast Kansas prairie in the quiet spaciousness of the third movement.
Requiring a cellist of professional stature, the unceasing lyricism of the Sonata is overcast with the kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory elements of Gardner's Frankenstein libretto. In 1974, the Sonata was given a prize from the California Cello Club and was performed by Phyllis Luckman on a concert at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, with all the other winners. Click here to listen to a recording. |
Quartet for violin, viola, cello, and piano, op. 82
The Quartet for Piano and Strings, Op. 82 is a large-scale work written for professional performers, though it is certainly accessible to outstanding university musicians. In four movements and nearly 30 minutes in length, the Quartet is, along with the Sonata for Three Cellos and Piano, an example of Baber's muscular, lyrical, neo-classicism at its most mature.
The work was commissioned by the Kentucky philanthropist Lucille Little to be performed at the Dedication Ceremony of the new Fine Arts Library that bears her name, on the campus of the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, February 16, 2001. Click here to listen to a recording. |
Divertimento for Viola and Piano, Op. 32, No. 1 "Frankenstein"
Needing a new work to put on a concert at Southern Illinois University, Baber pieced together excerpts from his first opera, Frankenstein, which was being written with novelist John Gardner at the time. The results were gratifying enough that Baber went on to write two more Divertimenti in the same five-movement format.
The five movements of this Divertimento are played attacca and have the same hallucinatory quality as the other works inspired by Gardner's kaleidoscopic libretto. After an initial burst of satirical atonality reflective of the opera, the work settles into Baber's more lyrical and tonal modernist style. Click here to listen to a recording. |
DIVERTIMENTO FOR Violin, Cello, AND Harpsichord, OP. 32, NO. 3 "Ghost"
The third of the Divertimenti written during the years of work on the opera Frankenstein is scored for muted strings and harpsichord, giving the work its ghostly quality. (The second of the three Divertimenti, for flute and piano, is published by ALRY Publications, and is available at this link.) Like the others in this opus, the "Ghost" Divertimento is made up of five movements played without pause and veers between emotional extremes. It is one of the composer's favorite of his shorter pieces.
Click here to listen to a recording. |
Six humoresques for cello and piano, op. 106
Written in 2012 as a commission from the Kentucky Music Teachers Association, these short pieces were first performed October 21 at Morehead State University with Geoff Hershberger and the Canadian composer-pianist John Greer.
The six movements are arranged to be played together, but individual movements could be excerpted for special occasions, especially the Tango, Virginia Dance, Bolero, and Polka. Click here to listen to a recording. |
Mephisto rhapsody for violin and piano, op. 37
Like the three Divertimenti, op. 32, and the Cello Sonata, op. 34, no. 2, the "Mephisto Rhapsody" was written during the years Baber was working with John Gardner on the opera Frankenstein and shares many of the same dramatic and hallucinatory characteristics of that period. Far more extroverted and intense than the other instrumental works of this time, the Rhapsody requires a professional level of playing from both the violinist and the pianist.
Click here to listen to a recording. |
string quartet, op. 30
Written in Carbondale, Illinois for The Illinois Quartet
Premiered May 8, 1968 Myron Kartman, Herbert Levinson, violins Joseph Baber, viola; Peter Spurbeck, cello Click here to listen to a recording. More information coming soon. |