<center><table border=1><tr><td>Elegy for Clarinet and Strings
Elegy.not (296.0 k)</td></tr></table></center>

This is a pastoral elegy for clarinet and strings - I wrote it last month, far too quickly, originally as an exercise in the genre: as such, it is, I must admit, a bit unbalanced and unpolished. Two slow outer movements, with a rhapsodic English pastoral type of piece stuck in the middle. The outer movements sound too much like the opening of Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, and the middle section sounds like a poor imitation of Vaughan Williams with a hangover!

I live in a old stone-clad-cottaged English village (Moulton, in rural Northamptonshire), and so I don't really apologise for writing an English pastoral. From my study window as I type this on a crisp Tuesday morning, I can hear dunnocks and sparrows singing outside, and a robin is looking at me from a fence. And beyond the fence, between the stone cottages, I can see a patchwork of brown and green fields, waiting for the spring to come and stir them like a spoon in tea. Yes such places do still exist.

So why an elegy? Well, although I wrote it originally as an exercise in the genre, I conceived of it it ultimately as an anthem for a time that seems past for me now - perhaps for I am beginning to feel old. Ooer!

Be it as it may be - the piece is dedicated to my beautiful 14 year old daughter, Rosemary, who is, more and more, becoming an English rose.