Dear Johanna

Dear Johanna (2016) was written for The Hartt School’s premier ensemble, Performance 20/20. Unique instrumentations such as this one were assigned to student composers with the task of relating each new piece to Beethoven’s Große Fugue. Dear Johanna meets this challenge by using a retrograde of Beethoven’s subject as the most prominent pitch material, while illustrating the real-life custody battle between Beethoven and his sister-in-law, Johanna, over her son.