Emma Lou Diemer: Complete Sonatas and Seven Etudes for Piano

Emma Lou Diemer (1927-2024) was one of America’s foremost musical voices and one of the world’s leading female composers of the twentieth century. Her works, generally categorized within the Gebrauchsmusik aesthetic, were something she prided herself on making easily accessible to everyday players of all levels and abilities. This outlook was reasonably influenced by her teacher and mentor Paul Hindemith, with whom she studied as a female protégé at Yale University in the late 1940s. Hindemith’s influence would shape her lifelong musical voice, as she herself described her compositional inspiration as being guided by simple melodic lines and accompaniment, with a particular lyrical intent so agreeable to an audience that, no matter how simple or complex the material, they would want to sing the memorable tune on their way out of the concert hall after just one listen. It was no mistake that her favorite composer was Mozart, whose music she equally enjoyed both playing and listening to. Diemer once mentioned, “For better or worse, I want to be like Verdi who wrote into his eighties and was still writing hit operas.” Active well into her nineties, Diemer created music that reflected a wide range of influences, from her Midwestern upbringing and her closeness to the Episcopal Church to the teaching of Roger Sessions and Paul Hindemith. Sessions’ more experimental approach fascinated her, while Hindemith encouraged versatility, a stronger engagement with traditional forms, and the writing of music for a wide range of settings and performers of all abilities. Her 461-page autobiography, “My Life As a Woman Composer,” was published by Ardent Writer Press in 2021.

Diemer’s first piano sonata, Sonata for Piano in One Movement (1949), was written during her studies at Yale, where it was premiered.

That same year, she was working on some large works by Brahms and Prokofiev, in particular Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata.

She described her first sonata as dramatic and bold, with a Brahmsian sweep of range and textures. It is a single movement in ternary form consisting of two main ideas: an ascending first theme built from an eight-note motif of major and minor seconds, and a march-like second theme. The tonal center gravitates mostly toward E major, with substantial hints of E minor. After an exposition that clearly states both themes and reaches its conclusion only after covering a wide keyboard range of more than six octaves, a development unfolds with two contrasting ideas yet again: the first in 6/8 meter and at the fastest tempo, and the second in a slow chordal texture in which Diemer manipulates the intervallic relationship of the primary motif. It is important to note that Diemer does not modulate to either the relative or parallel key, but to the distant key of F-sharp minor. Thematic transformation occurs in the recapitulation, in which both themes return in G-sharp major. The initial ascending motif returns for the coda, before the most technically trialsome display awaits the performer: a conclusion of rippling, machine-gun octaves reminiscent of the openings of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Grieg’s Piano Concerto, giving a sharp and decisive ending in E major after much of the piece has been bitonal in nature.

Diemer’s first piano sonata was successfully submitted in 1952 for consideration for a Fulbright Scholarship to study piano and composition at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, Belgium, which she received, studying there from 1952 to 1953. During the summers of 1954 and 1955, Diemer studied composition with Roger Sessions at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood Institute. She was influenced by Sessions’s concept of structure, “using a few ideas to their limit, being able to make the form develop naturally and without any lessening of tension and interest.”

That same year, in 1955, she also wrote her Second Sonata for Piano, which won the Missouri Federation of Music Clubs Award. Unlike her first sonata, which was a school and competition work, the second was composed at her home in Warrensburg, Missouri, out of her own interest in the piano sonata and under the influence of Sessions. Similar to the late sonatas of Beethoven, it is a work consisting of two contrasting movements: the first at a moderate tempo and in sonata form, and the second, mostly fast and relentless, in variation form, with a slow and ponderous introduction. The sonata form in the first movement is unmistakable, while the almost camouflaged variations in the second movement make it the most complicated movement in Diemer’s piano sonata writing. There is no key signature in either movement; however, the tonal center in the first gravitates mostly toward B-flat major, whose opening two-part homophonic theme almost mimics the texture of the Second Piano Sonata by her mentor Hindemith, with its Alberti bass accompaniment. A contrasting secondary theme in the dominant key of F major meanders until the closing theme is heard, bridging into the development, which starts with the opening thematic element in the tonic.

With the recapitulation starting with the second theme in B-flat major, one hears the whole movement as an arch form, ending with an agreeable ascent of the opening motif from the low to the high register in the tonic, B-flat major, similar to that of the first movement of Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata, written in the same key.

The second movement is divided into two sections of contrasting yet contrapuntal texture. The first is a declamatory statement that echoes the works of another American composer, Aaron Copland, while the second is a theme and five variations on the half-step motif of the opening. Following Sessions’s example of structure and influenced by Brahms’s “developing variation,” the first variation, with an E-flat minor sonority, consists of a dialogue between the two hands and between the treble and bass registers, growing into an octave texture. This builds dramatically toward a second variation of Stravinskian rhythmic inspiration, with displaced accents and sforzandos in mixed meter, marked “very fast” with a metronome indication of quarter note = 169. The trochaic rhythmic idea is broken up in the next variation as triplets are introduced, with rhythmic diminution of the original half-step motif. The fourth variation continues this diversification process, with the meter in 7/8 and the key changing to D-flat, accompanied by a Chopin-like, swirling arpeggiated bass. Diemer’s use of the theme almost foreshadows a fugue, which she reserves for the final variation in the tonic key, recalling the opening theme from the first movement. This movement as a whole is compositionally complicated, diffuse in its contrapuntal nature, and technically challenging for the performer in a way almost uncharacteristic of most of the composer’s other pieces. It can be considered the most technically difficult piece in Diemer’s entire piano output.

It took 45 years before Diemer was motivated to revisit the sonata genre. Her third and final sonata was completed in 2000, nine years after her retirement, at the request of Los Angeles pedagogue Carol Dvoran-Lancaster, and was inspired by Hindemith’s philosophy “that a composer should be able to write for the non-professional as well as professional, to write easy as well as difficult music, and should be able to make all of it interesting to the performer and the listener.” Perhaps in keeping with this philosophy of writing music for both sophisticated musicians and amateur listeners, the Third Piano Sonata is harmonically the most consonant of the three. Admiring people who could write quality music for professional groups as well as quality music for beginners, Diemer considered the third sonata not only the best among her three, but also the most comfortable “under the hands.” She did not intend to make it too difficult, as it was written for both Lancaster’s students and Lancaster herself, who was starting to feel the effects of age on her technique. The conception of the piece as a whole was a bit of a hodge-podge, as the first movement, Serenade/Toccata, was originally a self-contained work, published as such in October 1996 and premiered by Kathleen Murray in January 1999 at the Festival of Contemporary Piano Music. The third movement, Tango Fantastique, was written in May 1999. To round out the commission, the second movement, Interlude, was completed in April 2000 at Lancaster’s request, after she asked for the work to be “colorful, rhythmic, expressive, and not too discordant.” Diemer surely found this agreeable, as she believed that after decades of twelve-tone and atonal music, “tonality gives the listeners a sense of stability and calm” to which they could return. Diemer confessed that this sonata’s organic process “unfolded a bit more freely, though there are definite themes and their development,” with more focus placed on the literal term “sonata,” meaning “to sound,” than on careful attention to formal structure. The style of writing in Third Piano Sonata includes several gestures similar to those of Diemer’s early sonatas: bitonality and modality, major/minor key juxtaposition, sectional form, long harmonic rhythm, and harmonic shifts. Written between 1996 and 2000, it is her only three-movement sonata and the only work of that genre with a title for each movement.

Serenade/Toccata consists of six main sections, including a partial recapitulation of the opening theme in the fifth section. A coda is heard featuring a condensed version of the theme. The toccata element is felt through the relentless rhythmic pattern of 3+3+2 in perpetual motion. An 8/8 time signature appears frequently, adding to the excitement. An ambiguous tonality of G major is hinted at throughout, though a swooping glissando covering more than four octaves concludes the movement, ending sharply with a suggestion of the relative key, E minor.

The second movement, Interlude, a bellscape in arch form noticeably shorter than its neighboring movements, functions exactly as its name suggests. Echoing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, it is an almost incidental-like flower between two abysses. The Coplandesque, pensive soundscape is bookended, yet again, by a heftier, lighthearted character piece, Tango Fantastique.

Influenced by Latin American dance music, Diemer recalled, “one can’t come away from hearing the type of music in Argentina as I did without being inspired by the rhythm and seductiveness and energy of the tango.” Indeed, the pulsating 3+3+2 rhythm in the first theme, next to the habanera bass rhythm in the second, creates an unmistakable dance aura. The sectional form employed, in which the secondary theme becomes more dominant only to be interrupted by larger “scene changes,” recalls another habanera-inspired piece, La soirée dans Grenade from Debussy’s Estampes. Though not in strict mosaic form, the lack of a strong exposition, constantly interrupted by longer sections with loosely related melodic material, idiomatic techniques, and nonstandard uses of the instrument, evokes a South American scenic soundscape. The main tonal center tends to gravitate around E Phrygian, melodically and harmonically, at the beginning, and concludes strongly in E major at the end. Diemer was open about the influence of Ravel in this movement, as there is frequent parallelism in chord progressions and hand motions.

The Seven Etudes for Piano were written in 1965 at the request of Stewart Gordon, a friend and colleague at the University of Maryland, College Park, where they both taught at the time. An active recitalist, Dr. Gordon frequently showcased and premiered new works by fellow artists at the East Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art and the Universities Concert Series. For Gordon, a formidable pianist, Diemer considered these Etudes her most advanced and complex pieces. No. 1, marked “fast, energetic,” presents a web of canon and counterpoint over frequent mixed meters and much syncopation, creating a jazzy yet agitated ambiance appropriate to the subject matter of the time in which it was written, “Selma Montgomery – March 1965.” The use of the sustain pedal is prevalent here, as well as in the second Etude, a study in the articulation of two-note slurs. The sadness and sobbing effect is well underway through the constant descending seventh intervals. The tempo “rather slowly” is indicated; however, if there ever were an occasion for a more appropriate marking of “mesto,” this piece is probably the most fitting candidate in all of her solo piano output. Diemer’s fastest tempo is given in Etude No. 3, marked “Very fast,” with a metronome indication of quarter note = 208. It is a perpetuum mobile of constant eighth notes featuring repeated notes, broken chords, and octaves, while the technical demands call for wrist rotation and side-to-side motion. After much frolic, the piece ends abruptly and quietly. Etude No. 4, with its direction “continuous tremolo,” tests finger quality and endurance, while Etude No. 5 tests various articulations inspired by Arnold Schoenberg. The shortest of the set, this humoresque concludes almost in an “if you blink, you miss it” fashion. Another Californian immigrant, Rachmaninoff, is the inspiration for No. 6. Absent are thick chords, wide interval spans, and complex note-spinning voicings, but ever-present is the expressionism so adored and even revolutionary for the time of the composer being paid homage to. Quartal harmonies and ninth intervals recall the passion behind the Études-tableaux in C minor, Op. 39, No. 7. The piece’s final measure ends hauntingly with a twelve-tone series, perhaps an “inside joke” reference to the previous Etude’s inspiration. Romp and cavort conclude the set in the final piece, a circus gallop featuring intervallic thirds and death-defying skips and jumps. All Etudes are marked with English tempo indications coupled with exact metronome markings, and those bearing titles are of American influence. Diemer would teach at the University of Maryland until she was granted a position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1971, where Etudes Nos. 1, 3, 5, and 7 were performed in 1976 at a concert of Keyboard Compositions by Women Composers. Ironically, Stewart Gordon would follow her to the West Coast years later, teaching at the sister institution, the University of Southern California. Diemer would remain in California until her passing in 2024.

Matthew Weissman © 2026