When I was invited to attend the Tage für Neue Musik in March of 2003 as a featured composer, I was asked to write one new work that would be presented with an entire evening of my other chamber pieces. I settled on trumpet, piano and bass, having worked before with both Manfred Bockschweiger (trumpet) and Ichiro Noda (bass) during a previous festival.

Talk of war in Iraq had been loud and clear since the previous fall, the period during which I composed the Concerto for clarinet, strings and harp. While not as blatantly political as Night Music, the concerto is the darkest piece I have written in a long time, due largely to the looming sense of catastrophe that I (and most thinking Americans) felt during those days. By the time I sat down to write Night Music, the American war machine was in full swing, and the voices in Washington were become increasingly shrill and dismissive of opposition.

I have always found political or topical artworks very problematic. By using the word "artwork" we express an expectation of abstraction - this is where the power in art lies, after all. But in the face of all these recent events I found myself unable to avoid the politics of the day in my work. I knew that the German audience would be sympathetic, but more importantly I wanted them to understand, contrary to what they were being told in their own press, that American sentiment about this war was hardly monolithic.

Little explanation is needed, I think, for the message in Night Music - the titles of the individual movements say it all. I should explain here that the title of the last movement came to me courtesy of CNN. A reporter in the Kuwaiti desert was interviewing a 21-year-old Marine recruit, who had never been in battle before. When asked what he thought war would be like, he responded, "It's just like a football game."