These are neither Classical nor Romantic – they’re the real Jim, and each of them is autobiographical in its way. They can be played either on the natural or the valve horn. If performed on the valve horn, I absolutely encourage the player to creatively experiment with and use stopped and muted effects on the chromatic notes. You will be narrating stories with stifled words which your audience can only guess at; be free and dramatic in your delivery.

I could almost call this “the anti-concerto”. Of all the things I ever wrote, this is the most personal: a stream of consciousness evoking a time, a place, faces from the past, fragments of Orthodox hymnody, nature noises, and with a most unusual cadenza/soliloquy at the end.

In the spring of 1984, both Rick Seraphinoff and myself were contestants in the Erwin Bodky early music competition in Boston (I in the string division as a cellist). I kept teasing him that they were never going to let a lowly horn player win the wind division, and he responded “Well, they’re not going to let some FLUTE player win” (ironically, he now plays the Baroque flute). Somehow we ended up making a bet that if he did win, I would have to write him a concerto. Of course he ended up winning. Rick wanted a classical concerto of a Mozartian bent, but my reaction was that I was done with Mozart horn concertos (having already done a first completion of the fragments in 1980), and that a gap in the repertoire needed to be filled, in the form of an early 19th-century piece – say, “what if Schubert had written a horn concerto”. I literally told him, and I remember the quote to this day: “Just a little piece – and it’ll start with a scale”. It started with a scale, all right, but turned out to be a half-hour long and I had the horn (with no crook changes) playing in all 24 keys.

40 years later, neither one of us can remember if I said “a lowly horn player” or “you playing that piece of plumbing”, but otherwise the story is accurate!

Rick Seraphinoff in the summer of 1984, right at the time I was working on his “little” concerto. He made a silver horn for the occasion of its première.

Remembering Ian Tenney, Cathy Goetz, Bill Conlan, Brian Stevens, Matthew McDonald, Scott Cornelius, and the many other heroes I’ve known through the years.