Program Note:

Rarely has a young composer been blessed with such extraordinarily gifted players. All three are now leaders in their field. When I knew them in 1982, we were all kids. I composed for them a suite of miniatures collectively titled Wind Songs at the request of David McGill. The result was more than a devoir.

The first movement, Clara Asleep, marked "like a subdued organ prelude," was a 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.

Sexton in Central Park is a portrait of me waiting for a lesson at Ned Rorem's apartment in Manhattan, reading Anne Sexton's poetry — which I was setting at the time as a large orchestral song cycle called Days Without You for soprano Karen Hale. 

I began Rain Through Café Windows in July of 1981, whilst an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, sitting in a café on State Street called the Ovens of Brittany. Musical DNA from this piece has ended up over the past thirty years in pieces as divergent in intent and effect as Postcards from America for orchestra and the opera Shining Brow.

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 with Gian Carlo Menotti and Norman Stumpf. 

I am moved that the little triptych has become a perennial on graduate wind recitals over the years. It was completed in January of 1982 in Philadelphia and first performed on 6 April 1982 in Curtis Hall.