Five Drawings
for solo clarinet

Work no. 256
2023

The concept of this work is related to the guitar and crotales piece ...au double regard et sept baigneuses, which was almost the first time my lifelong interest in visual art has manifested itself in my music. A Portrait was inspired by some of Picasso's Ingres-influenced drawings in which the model's head and face would receive the most attention, while the rest would be done in outlines. The music started out as a simple diatonic melody, parts of which were then heavily worked by adding chromatic ornaments. The other pieces were produced with similar visual ideas in mind: a Max Ernst, a Monet, maybe a Mondrian; I didn't have specific drawings to work from – just a general idea of what kind of inspiration I was going to use.

Composing these pieces was supposed to be a simple affair, to rest after the complexities of Bitterness Is Best Declined as a Companion and to convalesce after an illness. It ended up to be much more complicated than I wanted it to be – this seems to happen every time I want to make something simple. This time, life imitated art to a tee: I got sick again while working on these, and I discovered Bitterness... proved to have problems I still had to find a way to rectify.