JMU NEWS INTERVIEW, March 2004:

Rather than taking a Spring Break excursion to a sunny beach or a rugged mountain or to a big city for a few concerts, JMU’s composer-in-residence John S. Hilliard engaged in a bit of time travel.

                From his Music Building studio, Hilliard "journeyed" to 1782 Vienna to meet the mind and genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his possession was a manuscript fragment for a composition for violoncello and cembalo, his passport to understanding the celebrated performer and composer’s style.

Hilliard's mission: to complete the fragment for performance at the "Mozart in Augsburg" festival in Germany May 15.

                He likens the once-in-a-lifetime commission to that of an artist being handed about a fourth of a Leonardo da Vinci painting with instructions to complete the canvas for the master.

"It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done," Hilliard said of "Mozart Rounded-Off," the 144-measure piece for cello and piano (in place of harpsichord) he composed from the starting point of the 33-measure fragment Mozart left.

"The completed piece is probably about 70 percent Mozart and 30 percent me."

                The professor of music believes his work is the second attempt at completing the partial score written down when Mozart was about 26. Another composer, Otto Gerber, completed the fragment a few years after Mozart’s 1791 death at age 35.

                James Wilson, a cellist at Virginia Commonwealth University who was familiar with Hilliard’s contemporary compositions — and whose father, George Balch Wilson, had taught Hilliard at Univ. of Michigan — approached the composer last August about completing the musical fragment for the German festival. Wilson will play the cello part at the Augsburg premiere, while Carsten Schmidt of Sarah Lawrence College performs the piano part. Hilliard will attend the May premiere of the Mozart-Hilliard composition.

                Hilliard admits there are ironies to his selection as the composer to complete Mozart’s fragment. Since childhood, Hilliard has gravitated to difficult dissonant and modern works rather than the classic compositions of Mozart.

"Mozart is a genius without doubt," he said. "but I've always found his music too perfect maybe."

                "I’m almost embarrassed to say this," Hilliard said. "As great as Mozart is, he’s not one of my favorites. Maybe that gives me the alacrity to try something like this.  I think that it probably helps me in the sense that it’s not as intimidating to me as, say, Bach would be.  I don’t feel quite as intimidated of Mozart as I probably should.

"I have great respect for Mozart and he’s obviously one of the greats. But, in terms of my own personal taste, it’s taken me a long time to like his music."

                Hilliard’s respect for the master composer comes from two fronts. First, the JMU composer can trace a link to Mozart on a compositional "family tree," a copy of which he includes in his students’ composition notebooks to show students they are the next "branch." The teacher-to-student "lineage" chart, from the 18th to 21st centuries, notes Mozart as the teacher of Johan N. Hummel, who taught Ferdinand Hiller, who taught Engelbert Humperdinck (not that one), who taught Arthur Farwell, who taught Roy Harris, who taught Robert Palmer (not that one), who taught Hilliard.

                Second, Hilliard remains impressed that Mozart did not make sketches, or drafts, as he composed. On his photocopy of the one-page fragment Mozart wrote in ink, Hilliard said, "There’s not a single spot that’s marked out."

"In one letter, Mozart said that his compositions were already worked out totally in his head before he even set pen to paper," he said. "He had that kind of mind."

                Which begs the question: Why didn’t Mozart finish the piano and cello composition? As it remains a mystery, Hilliard can only mull the possibilities. Perhaps Mozart, who made his living in Vienna after leaving the employ of the Archbishop of Salzburg, received a paying commission that caused him to lay the manuscript aside. Or perhaps he was writing the composition with a certain cellist in mind and had a falling out with the performer.

                While music scholars know of another Mozart fragment, a cello concerto, also left unfinished, "It’s kind of unusual for him," Hilliard said. "There are not that many sketches of Mozart around. Most everything that he left was in full score."

                After fighting off his initial "I can’t do this" fears, Hilliard began researching Mozart’s compositions and studying his transitions between movements to determine how best to expand the 33 measures into a complete movement. Hilliard’s assignment was further complicated by gaps within the handwritten score. About two-thirds of the measures were complete, with the remainder showing notes for cello or piano only.

                "The fragment is a slow movement, andantino, which indicates in most cases for his style that it would be a second or third movement in a multimovement piece," Hilliard said. "Now there are a few instances where Mozart wrote a slow movement that stood by itself, but not many. So I wondered what it was supposed to do.

                "And then the other problem with it — besides that it’s Mozart and you’ve got to be maybe a little crazy to try to finish something that someone so important started and think that you can do it anywhere near what he did — is I can’t figure out what form it is," he said.

"I’ve studied Mozart sonatas and Mozart rondos and theme and variations, and this doesn’t really match any of those in the way it starts. So I kept looking at it and finally decided I would make it into a sonata rondo, which was a form that Mozart liked."

                Hilliard worked diligently on the composition, first transcribing the tiny notes from Mozart’s fragment to a computer-aided composition software. He distinguished Mozart’s original passages from his own with notations using "Wolfie," Constanze Weber Mozart’s pet name for her husband. From there Hilliard completed the 33 measures, "guessing from what’s up above, what the chords were," he said. Some portions are "right hand Mozart/left hand Hilliard."

                He was permitted to draw from themes from other Mozart pieces to complete the fragment. He chose to borrow a slow movement theme from one of Mozart’s early, rarely played, piano concertos. "It’s in the same meter and about the same tempo," Hilliard said. "I had to rescore it and do some work on it to get it to fit here, but it does."

                Finally, less than a month before his deadline to submit his composition, Hilliard completed the fragment. He’s pleased with the results of his unique opportunity given the time constraints of the project.

"I can’t write melodies like Mozart," Hilliard said. "I could if I had months and months to just keep experimenting until I got very much like his — maybe. It’s hard to assume a style that’s like someone else."

                And while the Mozart fragment was finally finished 223 years after the musical genius first touched ink to paper, Hilliard’s work was not. The Mozart in Augsburg commission also calls for Hilliard to compose an original work based on the fragment.

                His planned movement, which he figures to be much easier to write, will have a faster tempo and will be written in a higher key than the Mozart-Hilliard piece. Hilliard will probably write the composition for performance at the May festival fairly quickly.

"Most composers I know today start a piece and they rarely go back and revise it," Hilliard said.

In contrast to Beethoven, who would have done a number of revisions, and to Mozart, who revised in his head before reaching for his pen, Hilliard has little time to write or revise.

For in May, it's on to Augsburg.