Quartet for Four Clarinets

I wrote Quartet for Four Clarinets for my undergraduate senior thesis. In it, I wanted to achieve a synthesis of many of the fundamental skills I had been working on as a student. As my compositional thinking tends to be very harmony-based, I especially wanted to try to develop my contrapuntal chops. I studied a good deal of Bach while working on the piece, which strongly informs the highly contrapuntal middle movements. Another important influence was jazz music, especially the work of Charles Mingus. The improvisatory spirit, the singing, human melodic lines, and the vitality and energy of jazz was a breath of fresh air for me at a time when classical music was feeling stale. The spirit of Mingus is most obvious in the outer movements, with their swinging, jazzy melodies, but what I learned from studying jazz harmony pervades the entire piece.