Dr. Mark Clinton, Hixson-Lied Professor of Piano in the Glenn Korff School of Music, will present a piano recital titled “The Power of the Tritone” on Thursday, March 25 at 7:30 p.m. in Kimball Recital Hall on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln downtown campus. In common practice Western harmony, the tritone is the interval between two notes separated by six half steps. It is considered the most harmonically unstable of intervals and represents the greatest possible harmonic distance between two different key areas (for example F to B). The three works on the first half of this program, although they represent three distinctly different style periods, are firmly in the key of F (major or minor). Beyond the establishment of a common tonality, each of these works uses counterpoint within their different compositional languages—in Bach the fugue, in Beethoven canonic imitation in the second movement and fugato in the third movement, in Chopin the surprising imitative moments that are an important part of the work’s narrative fabric. The second half of this program features the monumental Liszt Sonata in B minor, an epic work whose tonality is a tritone away from F major/minor. This orchestrally conceived composition employs a highly chromatic language that propels the music in unexpected directions, even exploiting the tritone harmonic relationship from time to time! The half-hour work is written in multiple sections without interruption, and prominently features the technique of thematic transformation—the process of modifying a theme so that in a new context it is different, but still clearly made of the same elements.

No in-person audience.

Program: https://unl.box.com/s/lj0rsouo9klwkh5vn31l006vgwh3s56k