Duration: 17:30
Instrumentation: clarinet in B-flat, violin, cello and piano
Commissioned by the Kentucky Center Chamber Players for their final concert in 2015. Ralph Waldo Emerson summarized music, without trying to, when he wrote in his 1841 essay, “Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.” Through this lens these Variations came to be. Owing debt to Wallace Stevens’ Variations on a Summer Day for structure and motive, these twenty (short) variations were composed during the winter of 2014/2015.
