Until last summer, during a rehearsal at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival, when Scott Yoo pushed his violin into my hands and said, "Hang on to this for a minute," I had never held a real violin before. They are strangely weightless, as if they might float in mid-air if you let them go, and I was terrified I might give in to temptation and try it (I didn't). As a student I studied woodwinds, and my main instrument was the very earthbound clarinet. I haven't held a clarinet in a long time, either, but to this day, when thinking out a tune or reading a passage from a score, my hands still do clarinet fingerings as a way of "realizing" the intervals.

It's strange that I've only written one other work that features the clarinet (my Trio for clarinet, cello and harp), and that was ten years ago. Perhaps my old instrument has felt too familiar in some way, but it is a remarkable machine. It's more like the flute than the other reeds in its broad range of personalities, in its ability to leap effortlessly from its lowest register to its highest, and back again. And then there is of course its beautiful sound, which Mozart so loved upon hearing it the first time that he wrote clarinet parts into earlier works that did not already have them. And his stunning concerto, K. 622, remains to this day (and I dare say through tomorrow as well) the most beautiful ever written for the clarinet.

My concerto is in a well-known, three-movement format: the first is a developmental form (those familiar with musical forms will recognize it as a kind of Sonata-Rondo), the second is a very slow, pensive music, in a simple A-B-A form. (I composed this movement while on the Costa del Sol last October, when the talk of war first became serious. The sunshine had little effect on my mood. In fact the entire concerto is a darker kind of music than I have written in a long time. I continued this mood in my trio for trumpet, piano and bass, Night Music.) The last movement returns to the more complex, developmental character of the first.

The work differs from a standard concerto in that it has no cadenza, but that is in keeping with the overall character of this piece. Indeed, the title Concerto for Clarinet, Strings and Harp is intended to make clear that this is a concerto for the ensemble as a whole. What skills I have in writing for strings I owe to Scott Yoo and the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, who have taught and tolerated so much. The work is dedicated therefore to all of them, this amazing community of brilliant soloists.