A recent holiday in Morocco, and in particular Tangier with its crumbling remnants of grandiose mansions, distilled some of the essential inspirations behind so many of my compositions.
Therefore decay is a major feature of this mini clarinet concerto – the clearly etched textures of the opening becoming more opaque in later transformations and the clarinet soloist moving away from a limited collection of pitches to much darker (chromatic) areas.
Another essential preoccupation of the piece (the reverse of the above) is the idea of the darkroom in photography where an image comes into focus. The two opposing types of material heard at the start abruptly alternate and never quite resolve but on each appearance becoming fuller and more extended.
Morgan Hayes
