Joe Stollery

This is a sonatina written in mid-2020 for baritone saxophone and piano, which bases its premise on an interpretation of Aesop’s fable of ‘The Donkey and the Lyre’. I have come across this fable while collecting materials for my wind quintet piece Aesop’s Duos, and although it wasn’t eventually chosen for that set, I still felt it could provide an effective musical statement of its own; indeed I was particularly struck by some of the deep messages pervading this relatively light and simple story.

The fable tells of a donkey who comes across a lyre lying in a field. He strikes the strings with his hoof and gets entranced by the sounds produced. He considers exploring this music further, but then decides not to, in the belief that no one can teach him, a donkey, how to make it sing. The moral states that talents cannot flourish in the wrong circumstances.

The sonatina is straightforward in its characterisations; the baritone saxophone represents the donkey, while the piano part symbolises the lyre. For both instruments, I have made much use of idioms I feel work appropriate to this approach. In my opinion, the baritone’s timbral qualities match remarkably well to the vocalisations of a donkey. Naturally, I have also made a significant feature of a single falling two-note motif that identifies the iconic bray. This is variated on motivic grounds throughout the work, ranging in interval from a sixth to over two octaves, sometimes in the foreground, and at other times providing grounds to melodies. The piano part meanwhile has a more rigorous shape. As it essentially represents a harp (and furthermore a harp being strummed by an equine!), I have chosen to restrict the tonality of the accompaniment to a seven-note system of which each note can be ‘retuned’ at certain times (the score demonstrates this in boxed text above the appropriate place), as well as limiting the texture mostly to block-chords splayed across registers to imitate hoofs hitting the notes. This leads the accompaniment to be made mostly of diatonic triads and super-triads, although the system sometimes reverts onto more chromatic scales, and it should be noted that the baritone part is always free of this harmonic restriction, adding useful chromatic notes to the music where necessary.

The sonatina itself is in one continuous movement, divided into four main sections, each based rhythmically on a certain equine gait (chronologically getting faster at each stage, i.e. Walk, Trot, Canter and Gallop), each one in a diatonic key that is raised by four degrees in succession. In between are interludes (or ‘Brays’) which act almost as recitatives for the baritone sax, as the piano part is harmonically shifted between succeeding gaits.

There is also a ‘Prelude’ and an ‘Exeunt’ to cap the whole piece, and it is here that the main theatrical elements of the fable have been interpreted; the Prelude suggests a pantomime of the donkey stumbling on the strings of the lyre, causing a startled reaction, then tentatively playing about with the strings, before building enough confidence to tune the strings into a consonant harmonic form and settle on the basis for a couple of short ‘songs’. After each successive gait brings in more optimism and joy, the Exeunt sees it all tumble back down to gloom, as the donkey seems to realise the folly of his strivings (in musical metaphors, he fails to retune the piano back up into one more song) and eventually gives up, leaving with an unaccompanied solo.

What I find particularly moving about this fable is that it shows a character trying to reach for the heights, but not being able to due to lack of self-esteem and misaligned circumstance. The cold, bleak moral seems to be suggesting that it doesn’t matter if this donkey could potentially create some truly sublime art (this irony is heightened in my choice to name him ‘Orpheus’, the most sublime of musicians): if the circumstances aren’t right, he cannot (and would not) proceed forward from beyond maybe a couple of trifles. This argument is demonstrated in The Donkey Orpheus, in that there are four short movements, each seeming to reach a greater sense of musical height, but also that in the end these are still only miniatures, and for that matter the whole piece is only labelled a ‘sonatina’ rather than the grander form of ‘sonata’.

In spite of this potentially depressing image, I wished to finish the sonatina with a more hopeful message. Firstly, while the donkey does abandon the lyre in the field (throwing it down with an audible ‘clunk’ in the piano) and wanders off, he does so not unhappily, but singing a bright, merry song. This encourages one to think of him remembering all the joys of the music he just produced, comfortable in the knowledge that despite the limits that were just set out for him, he can by no means be prevented from still producing wonderful sounds. Furthermore, as the baritone’s line disappears in the distance, the last minute of the sonatina is given over to the piano alone, who provides quiet reflections and recollections of some of the donkey’s motifs, almost as if the abandoned lyre is projecting a message of hope to the donkey, that maybe he can find it and play it again someday…? The final two chords sum it all up with an impression of the donkey’s bray.