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The Hardy Boys Variations

for two pianos

Duration: 9 min.

Theme: "Frank and Joe Hardy"
Var. 1 "The Secret Panel"
Var. 2 "Hunting for Hidden Gold"
Var. 3 "The Secret of the Caves"
Var. 4 "While the Clock Ticked"
Var. 5 "The Hidden Harbor Mystery"
Var. 6 "The Secret of Skull Mountain"
Var. 7 "The House on the Cliff"
Var. 8 "The Flickering Torch Mystery"
Finale: "Solving the Case"

Program Notes:

The Hardy Boys Variations is the result of a Prism commission by the Hartt School, and was premiered at the Hartt School on February 8th, 2006 by Anastasia Seifetdinova and Yu-Chen Shih.

The piece is based on the classic teen mystery series which chronicles the adventures of brothers Frank and Joe Hardy.  Each book begins with the brothers stumbling upon some clue which leads them into a strange mystery involving smugglers, thieves, or other villains.  Through luck and coincidence, the brothers soon find more clues that leads them to the villains hideout.  There they are captured.  The villain divulges his plan to the brothers, then leaves them to die in some sort of trap.  The brothers miraculously escape, and the police arrive and arrest the villain.  Afterwards, the brothers return home and everybody relaxes and recounts the adventure… 

The books in the series are not the result of a single author, but rather a collective of authors called the Stratemeyer Syndicate which wrote all the titles under the pen name Franklin W. Dixon.  In order to create coherence in the series, a formula was devised that allowed the stories to sound similar in style even though they were written by different authors.  As a youth I feverously read through the original 58 book series, and was captivated by the adventures of the brothers.  Now as an adult, I pay homage to the series that has lasted over 75 years and captured the collective imaginations of numerous generations of young readers.  The use of variation form made sense once I became aware of the “Hardy Boys” formula and the Stratemeyer Syndicate.  After all, each book was nothing more than a variation on the preexisting formula.  The titles of each variation was taken from a book list I procured online, using only the title of the book as a suggestive direction for the variation.  The only exception to this is variation 8 – “The Flickering Torch Mystery”, from which I found a picture of the brothers playing guitars.  I thought it would be good to fill in the music I imagined they were playing…                                                         

   – Ryan Jesperson, Dec. 2nd, 2005.

The Hardy Boys Variations was premiered on February 8th, 2006 by Yu-Chen Shih and Anastasia Seifetdinova at the Hartt School in West Hartford, CT