New Year's Suite by Barry Ulman for Clarinet and String Quartet. From the composer: "The New Year’s Suite for Clarinet and String Quartet was composed for a party that never happened. Some musician-friends of mine would host a chamber-music party every New Year’s Day. It was great fun; everybody would bring their instruments plus any music they would like to play plus a pot-luck item to share, and we’d spend the whole day eating and playing music. But there was one problem as far as I was concerned: The party hosts were all string players, and so the music they had was heavily weighted toward the strings. So I thought, “Hey, I gotta give myself something to do.” So I wrote this piece for clarinet and string quartet to get myself involved with some of the string players. Little did I know at the time that there would be no more New Year’s parties due to various crises that came up with this family. But I wanted to retain the title of this piece to honor its original intent." In four movements: Moderato, Adagio, Allegro con brio and Allegro moderato.

Instrumentation:

• (Bb) Clarinet
• Violin I
• Violin II
• Viola
• Cello