ROCK SONATA No.1

for Solo Piano 1973

David Hellewell

This may seem to be a conflict of terms: there is Rock, and there are Sonatas, utterly opposed in style content and expression to each other. But Hellewell has created a new form, the Rock Sonata, which combines, fuses and develops features and elements from music on many kinds of different and seemingly-conflicting sources such as jazz, rock, latin-american, pop, classical, baroque, symphonic, ragtime, medieval, funk etc: in other words a mutation and transformation of both modern and traditional music to produce a new species. His new music is ‘multi-dimensional’ in that each piece has its own specific character which can, in perhaps many cases, be more-or-less identified with a recognisable popular idiom; but with the more extended works, such as, for example, the Rock Sonatas, the idioms are so multi-dimensional that a style label is not applicable. There are now six Rock Sonatas, and Hellewell has created many large-scale and related works in this new genre.