Ten Minutes for clarinet, string trio and piano Op.125 (2013) c.10'00"

I. A Minute Alone
II. A Minute Before Parting
III. A New York Minute
IV. A Minute of Regret
V. A Minute of Reflection
VI. Minute Waltz
VII. A Minute of Silence
VIII. A Minute Under The Stars
IX. Quodlibet (A Venetian Minute)
X. Last Minute

Commissioned by Louis K. and Susan P. Meisel

First performed on May 28, 2014 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City by the Israeli Chamber Project

ABOUT

Ten Minutes Op.125, for Clarinet, String Trio and Piano was commissioned by Louis and Susan Meisel for the Israeli Chamber Project. Scored for the same instrumentation as the composer’s Quintet Op.26 (written twenty six years earlier) Ten Minutes is, as its title suggests, a ten movement work with each movement a minute long. (Only the movement titled A Venetian Minute is longer…)

I was fascinated in writing the piece to setting myself a minute time-limit for each movement and explore the difference of time perception as it was affected by the musical content or density of each movement. Like most of my music the movements (save for one) were composed without any extra-musical associations:  the subtitles were added later. A couple of the individual movements warrant explanation: the fifth movement (A Minute of Reflection) is a palindrome, repeating backwards from its center point; and the ninth movement was inspired by the perhaps apocryphal story of the musicians who were asked to play a Bach Chorale at a funeral, but instead played the Barcarolle from the Tales of Hoffmann.  This movement is in the form of a Quodlibet, where the Bach chorale Alle menschen mussen sterben is heard in the piano, overlaid with quotations from iconic barcarolles by Chopin, Mendelssohn, Faure and others.