9'

1. Clara Asleep
2. Sexton in Central Park
3. Rain Through Café Windows
4. Oranges & Chocolates

Composed during my student days in Philadelphia, the first movement, Clara Asleep, marked "like a subdued organ prelude," is a musical portrait of my cat. She was at the time no larger than my fist, and delighted in sleeping in the bay window of my Spruce Street studio apartment overlooking tiny, cobbled South Alder Street. The second movement, Sexton in Central Park, imagines the poet alone with her thoughts on an autumn afternoon. Next comes Rain Through Café Windows. I began this movement in July of 1981, while living in Madison, Wisconsin. Begun as a setting of an original poem entitled "Nineteen to Twenty," it was composed in the (now long gone) Ovens of Brittany café on State Street while watching the rain fall outside. The finale, Oranges & Chocolates is marked "merry" and contrasts two ideas — one tart, the other creamy. It is a musical memento of an excellent dessert enjoyed one afternoon in the dining room of the Barclay Hotel on Rittenhouse Square.

Wind Songs was completed in January of 1982 in Philadelphia for three fellow pupils at the Curtis Institute of Music — Katherine Greenbank, David McGill, and Shelly Showers — who together performed it for the first time on 6 April 1982 in Curtis Hall. The little four movement suite lasts about nine minutes.