Although Samuel Barber is best known for his 1936 "Adagio for Strings" (which he wrote as the slow movement of a string quartet), he was also an important composer of works for piano. This paper examines one of his most lush works for piano, Piano Sonata Op. 20 ("Excursions"). This work, like his other compositions, was essentially neo-romantic in form, affect and idiom.
The work, more completely tonal in composition than some of his other piano works (which, like some of his work for strings, makes passing references to the twelve-tonal music that marked the work of many of his contemporaries writing in the first decade of the 20th century. This sonata, as is true of his other works, is both lyrical and neo-romantic - although not in any way nostalgic (which is rather surprising, given its overtly regional references) (Mellers 119).
The passion for Americana that swept into the hearts and minds of so many American composers in the years leading up to and during World War II was something that affected Barber only slightly, but it is the very stuff of which the "Excursions" sonata is woven. Each of the sonata's four movements invokes a different indigenous form of American music, with the first movement being a celebration of boogie-woogie left-hand patterns and the second replete with references to the achingly slow yearning of the Southern blues. Although we are concentrating on these two movements in this paper, we should also mention for the sake of completeness that the third movement is a collection of lyrical variations on "Streets of Laredo" and the fourth is a medley of barnstormin' fiddling.
Barber himself downplayed the importance of this work, calling the movements "nothing but bagatelles", adding:
These are "Excursions" in small classical forms into regional American idioms. Their rhythmic characteristics, as well as their source in folk material and their scoring, reminiscent of local instruments, are easily ...