IT WAS IN 1949 that I composed a work that several years later would bring me my first major recognition as a most promising new talent, as a composer of considerable significance. Thus spake some of New York's most respected and powerful music critics about my Symphony for Brass and Percussion in 1956. Prior to that, all the music I had written in Cincinnati and then in New York had either never been performed at all or only in private, among a small circle of friends and colleagues (as was the case, for example, with my Trio for Oboe, Horn, and Viola and Duo Sonata for clarinet and bass clarinet.)

Two thirds of the Duo Sonata, the second and third movements, were written under a threefold inspiration: (1) the artistry of clarinetist Jack Kreiselman, a freelancer in New York and, by coincidence, the son of my father's best friend in the New York Philharmonic, and of bass clarinetist Sidney Keil, a splendid young musician in the Met orchestra; (2) the little known Sonata for Two Clarinets by Francis Poulenc, and some brilliant early works by Jean Françaix; and (3) Stravinsky's wonderful Symphony for Strings in D Major. The first movement of the Duo Sonata, a very serious affair, is the real developing Gunther Schuller, probing increasingly into a highly chromatic, partly atonal language. At the time I couldn't quite carry that style into the other two movements, which clearly ended up in a more lighthearted tonal idiom. In that sense the piece is dichotomous, the experiment of a twenty-three-year-old composer who may have been a bit impatient, unwilling, or unable to give the effort enough time. It is ironic and amusing to me that, to the extent that the piece is played at all, especially on university and conservatory student recitals, it is precisely because everyone really enjoys playing the last two movements, which are quite tonal and, respectively, Poulencish and Stravinskyish.

I have already confessed that, as a high school dropout without any formal musical training, self-taught and learning mainly by imitation, the occasional paraphrasing of some music that I particularly adored was my way of learning—without engaging in any direct plagiarism or outright duplication. I have always had a soft spot for many pieces by those two devilishly clever, artful, instantly accessible French composers: Poulenc and Françaix.