Fantasizing and Improvising

Composer David Serkin Ludwig and violinist Bella Hristova, who are married, speak with Nicky Swett about Swan Song, Ludwig’s fantasy for violin and piano, which appears on the Sonic Spectrum concert on March 5, 2026.

Nicky Swett: Swan Song is inspired by a specific work by Franz Schubert. David, what do you find beautiful and inspiring about his music?

David Serkin Ludwig: He’s my favorite composer. Schubert is a composer I’ve spent my whole life with. I remember reading Schubert biographies as a teenager and how he really appealed to my emo side! The songs and the orchestral works are wonderful, but for me, the chamber music has been especially meaningful. Later in life, I came across a recording of my grandfather [pianist Rudolf Serkin] and great-grandfather [violinist Adolf Busch] playing Schubert’s C-major Fantasy for Violin and Piano. Thinking about the opening texture of the piece and that specific sound made me want to do something similar and try to capture that ineffable moment.

NS: When you wrote Swan Song were you thinking very specifically about that recording, or about Schubert’s Fantasy in general?

DSL: The recording probably echoed in my mind, but the ultimate inspiration was much broader. There is a moment in the piece when Schubert is quoted directly. I say to audiences that it’s like Schubert’s ghost briefly walks across the stage. But it’s generally a larger thing: the idea of a fantasy; the idea of kaleidoscopic changes, where every turn brings you to a new place. There are a lot of Schubert’s textures and Romantic leanings in the piece, but also a virtuosity that’s a little different than Schubert’s.

NS: What is a fantasy in music, and what should a listener expect from works that fall under that description?

DSL: The fantasy is an interesting form. It’s what composers call their piece when they have no idea what else to call it. In a fantasy, it’s not that things don’t repeat—things do repeat and they need to repeat to be intelligible and to communicate an actual narrative. But it doesn’t follow a traditional set path. There’s something fun about it. You’re constantly exploring new places and new territories in the process of the journey.

NS: Bella, when you have played this piece, are you thinking about the way you would play Schubert or experiences you’ve had perhaps playing this Schubert Fantasy? Or are you separating from that and trying to create a new aural experience?

Bella Hristova: All pieces that I play feed off of each other. So even though I’m not actively thinking about the Schubert Fantasy when I play Swan Song, there is that one point where, as David said, Schubert’s ghost walks across the stage.

DSL: Do you get scared then?

BH: I don’t get scared! I love that part and I love how David’s writing comes out of it. Schubert sort of evaporates into thin air. If you break down most music, it is just scales and arpeggios, right? But then composers do such different things with those elements. Many of the same techniques that Schubert uses, David also uses. There are lyrical sections, there are some very physical and technically demanding sections. There are gorgeous, ethereal sections, which is how the piece starts. It’s all there, just through a 21st-century lens.

NS: There are several aleatoric passages in the piece—places where the rhythms and pitches aren’t fixed and can be improvised, or where you cycle through a repeated gesture as many times as you like. When you’re playing this, how much pre-planning are you doing and how much are you deciding in the moment, inspired by what you’re hearing around you?

DSL: I’m about to get into trouble, I suspect.

BH: Whenever David writes aleatoric [improvised] passages, I’m just not comfortable being that spontaneous on stage! I’m very comfortable being musically spontaneous on stage, but when it comes to not knowing what notes I’m going to play and in what order, it’s just not something I have a lot of experience with. So when David writes “ad libitum” passages where he says something like “downward run, avoid scales, avoid patterns,” I’ll usually write down something in my music that I can then practice. It appears random, but to me it’s not.

DSL: You’re giving away all the secrets!

BH: Well, I gotta! That’s just how I deal with it. I think other people are very comfortable improvising on stage, and I admire that.

DSL: It’s fair enough, because I think performers spend their whole lives like actors learning how to reproduce lines and how to interpret lines given to you. When you play Beethoven, you’re not going to change notes. If you act in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you’re not going to be like, “To be—or maybe I won’t, actually.” And the accuracy of a player’s performance is a starting point. Technique gives you freedom.

On the other hand, in aleatory music the composer has not requested something really specific, but instead has said, “play these notes in any order,” or “here’s the bottom note, here's the top note, play 15 notes in between that you choose.” The word comes from the Greek word for dice—because it’s like rolling dice. For me, I’m interested in the blurry lines between abstraction and something syntactical, something that’s both abstract and realist at the same time. Often, the violin might be doing something a little more improvisatory, but the piano is holding a beat that’s very tenable. That gray space is really interesting to me as a composer.

NS: I was struck by that moment where you request a descending gesture, but without any discernible scale. Most improvising is based on deploying different kinds of patterns in real time, so improvising while actively avoiding a pattern would be extremely hard!

BH: It’s something that goes against a lot of classically trained musicians’ instincts. I know it goes against mine. I have tried to just do it on the spot, usually in the practice room. And what I end up with is a lot of noise. I suppose if I practiced it enough, I could do it. But I think we look for patterns. When it says “without any pattern,” you really have to be conscious of what you are doing because our brains are always falling into patterns in one way or another.

NS: David, you have described this piece as a dialogue between different characters on the topic of this Schubert Fantasy. How do these characters come out over the course of the piece?

DSL: Another way of looking at it is that different perspectives emerge in the piece—different perspectives on the idea of a fantasy and what that means. Just like in cubist art. If you look at a Picasso or a Braque painting, you’re looking at the object from many different vantage points at the same time. That’s what happens in Swan Song as well: you’re looking at the material that we have in the beginning of the piece from many different aspects without necessarily realizing it.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a program annotator and editorial contributor at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.