The following program note written by Allen Sapp was published in the program at a Cincinnati Composers’ Guild concert on 30 May 1992 at the Contemporary Arts Center, 115 E. Fifth St., Cincinnati.

“As the Eliot choruses [of the previous work on the program, Sapp’s “Five Landscapes” (1950) for mixed chorus] marked the beginning of my teaching life and the end of its phase of credentialization, so the Fourth Violin Sonata is a second beginning of creative work after many years of academic and arts administration. Somewhere about 1963 my career deflected away from music and composition into work with foundations, consulting for arts and educational institutions; the muse was stilled– or perhaps silenced forever? By 1980 the flavor and joy and excitement of academic administration had soured, seeming to be but one long crisis of budgets, of values, of uncomfortable or unpleasant personal encounter.

“To return to composing—was there ever really a composer there? Was there anything to say? Was the craft gone? Was the impulse to communicate, to share, to deal with private realities present and alive? The Fourth Violin Sonata arose from a dark moment of anger, despair, low esteem, barren memories—and was the work I invested everything I had, to try to rise above the blackness of the moment. It is in two movements which bear more than a passing resemblance– in design and in sprit– to the Beethoven Piano Sonata op. 111. The first movement is an A–B–A1–B1–A2 form, very complicated metrically and rhythmically. It is bitter at times, ironic, expostulatory, raging against– one knows not what! The second movement is a set of variations with an expanding modular structure 9/16, 10/16, 11/16, 12/16, 13/16, . . . As the texture becomes more dense there is a final resolution– not only of the musical materials but clearly the sense of empowerment and of optimism and of acceptance. I regard the Fourth Sonata as the beginning of my late phase of composition and possibly the most important and memorable of my works. It was played first at a concert in Buffalo in 1982, celebrating my sixtieth birthday, by Thomas Halpin and Norma Bertolami Sapp.”