alto saxophone and piano
14 minutes
2003

Written for Ken Radnofsky and John McDonald, an unusually extroverted composition—for me. Built out of simple gestures and a fluid kind of dynamism, the first movement revels in an athletic sort of interplay between the instruments. Reflective, even plaintive, the second movement offers a brief repose. A sort of neo-proto-fugue, the final movement is so very serious—angular and pompous, but also, hopefully, unexpectedly engaging. It ends, as so few of my pieces do, with a punctuation mark (in this case, probably an ironic exclamation point).