Wes Warnhoff, clarinet soloist, University of Missouri Percussion Ensemble Megan Arns director.

Night Wanderings scored for clarinet solo and percussion ensemble is a musical fantasy about traveling through space. The piece tells the story of a solo space traveler who maneuvers through the wonders and perils of deep space. The traveler has many amazing experiences ranging from floating past beautiful planets and their moons to maneuvering through a dangerous field of meteors. There is a gradual tempo accelerando though out the work that ends with the space ship entering Warp 5 and beyond. Night Wanderings is written for the virtuoso clarinetist, Kliment Krylovskiy and the UCF Percussion Ensemble. The structure of the piece is in three sections with a duration of ten minutes. My aesthetic goal for this work is to compose a piece, which explores all aspects of clarinet playing from highly expressive and lyrical to extremely virtuosic. The first section is slow and dream like using the percussion ensemble to create a mysterious and atmospheric background for the clarinet. The instruments work together in a homogeneous manner to produce colorful and intricate colleges of sound. The second section is in a more playful mood where dialogue between the clarinet and percussion instruments occurs. From the beginning, the piece gradually gets faster and faster finally leading to a more aggressive and virtuosic third section that includes a cadenza for the clarinet and also one for the percussion ensemble. This builds to an exciting and virtuosic conclusion.