I composed this piece when I was 18 years old, I felt obliged to enter a piece in the composition class of the local Kiwanis festival. I felt proud of my first "official" composition. When I attended my adjudication though, the presiding composer accused the piece of being "too ethnocentric". It took me a few years of expanding my musical horizons and further compositional experimentation to realize what he was talking about. What I had thought was authentic "Middle Eastern" influences was really just a western-19th century-romanticized-Scheherezade musical ideal.
But listening back on it, I'm not ashamed of the result. What I can also hear are lyrical melodies from the bassoon that convey a melancholy timbre. I also hear chord charges from minor to major and back to minor that creates subtle mood changes, somewhat reflective of the personality of that teenage composer back then.
- Frank Horvat, November 2006
