Over the past two decades I have composed dozens of brief musical portraits of the people and places I have known and loved. This suite collects six of these impressions: Yaddo, Summer of 1988 is a portrait of the artist colony known by that name in Saratoga Springs, New York. This movement was written at the parlour piano in West House one rainy afternoon and shared with close friends after dinner. Lake Mendota, Summer of 1981 composed in Madison, Wisconsin while I was a student there. It seeks to evoke my life living beside, sailing on, and swimming in that lake, the summer before I moved to the east coast. Saint Mark's Place, Autumn of 1990 was written in a fifth floor walk-up apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that I shared with my cat, Clara, for a few years. This movement is meant to capture an early-morning stroll eastwards along Saint Mark's Place at that time, towards Tompkins Square Park. Mount San Angelo, Winter of 1988 is a snow scene set just outside of Lynchburg, Virginia, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, on a large hill called Mount San Angelo. One morning while working there, I awoke to the glittering sight of every tree and building on the farm sheathed in ice. Delancey Place, October of 1983 is an evocation of domestic life at 2214 Delancey, a beautiful old brownstone in which I lived as a student in Philadelphia. The light, as it streams through the sycamore trees in that city, is something I'll never forget. The final movement, The Dakota, October of 1990 is a little elegy composed that October in memory of Leonard Bernstein, who kept a home in that apartment house. There are echos of LB's music in the movement, of course, as are the recurring final pitches A-C — the initials of his mentor, Aaron Copland.

Each movement was composed at the time and in the place noted in the title, assembled and orchestrated during July and August of 1996 in New York City and completed on 17 August 1996. The suite was co-commissioned by the Waukesha Symphony Orchestra and the Oakland East Bay Symphony and first performed by the Waukeska Symphony, conducted by Richard Hynson, at Shattuck Auditorium, in Waukesha, Wisconsin on 15 October 1996 and by the Oakland East Bay Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Music Director Michael Morgan, in Oakland, California on 15 May 1998.