Dear Johanna (Trumpet & English Horn)

Dear Johanna (2016, arr. 2025) was written for The Hartt School’s premier ensemble, Performance 20/20 and arranged for Nairam Simoes and Kristin Leitterman. 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.