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Claremont Suite was composed for the 2011 Claremont Clarinet Festival, where I was Composer-in-Residence, and premiered by the festival’s clarinet choir. The first movement is an arrangement of a wind octet I wrote earlier in 2011 (2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns), which was composed as a companion piece to Mozart’s C minor Wind Serenade. I sought in this work to combine the clarity, resonance, and sense of drama that characterizes Mozart’s “Serenade” with my own expanded harmonic palette and driving rhythms. Movements 2 and 3 are arrangements of tunes I originally wrote for a klezmer band. It was challenging but also a lot of fun to take these tunes, both of which have very free, improvisatory sections, and arrange them into fully notated music for clarinet choir. The resulting three-movement suite takes full advantage of the vast range of colors and characters that the clarinet choir can produce, ranging from the thick chords of the opening to the jazz and klezmer riffs of the second movement, to the driving dance rhythms and virtuosic runs of the final movement.
