Ocean Scherzos is a sextet for piano and woodwind quintet that explores textures and rhythms I associate with the sea. The movement titles are suggestive characterizations. Whitecaps are short choppy "surface" waves resulting from high winds, inspiring a capricious rondo in 3/4 time. Swells are slow, deep tidal undulations. Bass clarinet and piano "pizzicato" provide a special effect. Riptides are treacherous cross currents known to have deposited at least one swimming composer miles from his point of origin.

Backstory…
Originally commissioned by Pacific Serenades and intended as my doctoral thesis, Ocean Scherzos was rejected by my Harvard teacher/thesis advisor Leon Kirchner and deemed initially unplayable by the Pacific Serenades ensemble. Not so auspicious a start. During this time, I had purchased my first Macintosh and was just learning computer notation. I had a hunch that the real difficulty for the players was reading my manuscript and not the notes themselves. So I spent the necessary time to enter Ocean Scherzos into an early notation program called Professional Composer and mailed the new computer-notated parts to the ensemble. I told them the computer version was a major revision, when I hadn’t changed a single note. A week later the ensemble finished a rehearsal with the new music and told me the “new” version made a huge difference, that it was well suited to their instruments. I thus learned the power of legible notation! And after the premiere, I did in fact make a major revision and held a performance in Boston with a different ensemble. When I played a recording of that performance for Leon Kirchner, he surprised me by saying he may have been mistaken about the piece!