Lunatic, The - Bass Clarinet Unaccompanied

Program note from the composer:

The Lunatic, composed for solo bass clarinet, is inspired by the current American social/political conservative movement and its seemingly strange and rapid descent into the bigoted, enraged, anti-intellectual hysteria of extremist ideology.  The work's conception came from two questions I kept asking myself: What if one of these lunatics could play bass clarinet?  What would it sound like? The Lunatic attempts to answer those questions.  In the end, the piece does not represent a single person or identity, but rather reflects a more general sense of the hysterical right-wing communicator found in any age, time, or place.