The Door, for E-flat Clarinet and Smallish Orchestra (2019)

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In 1939, E. B. White, having attended some kind of exhibition of (then) modern interior design while feeling rather unwell, returned to his office at The New Yorker and composed a brief essay entitled The Door. This work is less remarkable for its subtext (a generic and unexamined anti-modernism of a kind that was fashionable at that time and in that venue) than for its prose style, which is hallucinatory and free-associative without being self-consciously obscure. As such, it defies metaconvention (optional) as well as convention (mandatory).

The same imperative to defy metaconvention motivated the composition (during August 2019; revised 2022) of this musical work, which has a concertante solo part without being a "concerto". It is a fantasy, within which a "scherzo" and a "slow movement" may be identified -- or not, as you wish.

The solo instrument is accompanied by four horns, snare drum, and strings.