Diversions (score & parts) - OB/CL/BSN

I. Bath

II. Billiards

III. Bar

Diversions began as a fragment in one of my sketchbooks, written in Aspen, Colorado during the period I was hanging around there in the summer enjoying the country and the music (although I was a student here one summer, and taught there another, I spent several summers in between writing and roaming; I would get together a humorous concert or two to benefit the scholarship fund in exchange for a free pass to the concerts). But the catalyst that caused the completion of the work was one of the nicest commissions I have ever received: a friend of mine had head and liked some of my music, and had a wedding anniversary coming up, and he asked if fifty dollars could get him anything in the way of a present for his wife. What the hell, it was too nice to resist, so even though it was not much more than part-copying money I finished the piece, wheedled some free time out of the recording studio at the Juilliard School of Music (where I was then teaching), and cajoled three of New York's top free-lance instrumentalists into laying it down on tape for peanuts. 

The first movement is contemplative, which is the way the composer gets when bathing; the second movement plays with sound equivalents of the way in which billiard balls set each other in motion; and the last movement is bustling, which is the way the West End Bar was, and probably still is, at least until the wee hours. 

-Peter Schickele