The Rainy Season

for clarinet in Bb + euphonium + percussion

Commissioned by and dedicated to Jake East.

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Duration: 9'00"

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Premiere: July 19, 2017 | Hazard, KY | Amanda Martin (clarinet), Jake East (euphonium), and Gloria Yehilevsky (percussion)

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In The Rainy Season the percussion is the primary voice which informs the content which the other performers play. Each of these percussion interludes focus on a distinct texture, ranging from more sparse musical content (such as at the beginning of the work), to more pulse-oriented music. Each section features a kind of crescendo, then decrescendo, and the piece repeats this pattern a number of times, as if emulating the rains which come each day in a rainy season.

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The title of this piece comes from Part 4 of David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jaco De Zoet, which is also called The Rainy Season and is set at the Dutch trading post of Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan at the turn of the 19th Century.