Clown Car

When I met Dr. Adam Estes for the first time, we were deep in the mountains of North Carolina at the Glickman-Popkin Bassoon Camp. Years later, in 2025, he wrote to ask me if I might be interested in someday writing for saxophones, and he asked if I’d be alright with him arranging one of my bassoon sonatas for the melodic Baritone. I said YES to both, we met up at Bassoon Camp again and shook on it. Songs for Wicked Children entered the Bari Sax repertoire thanks to his fine arranging skills, and Clown Car came about through funding granted by the Mississippi Arts Commission, for the Assembly Quartet’s Pedagogy Project.

I never know what’s going to happen as a piece takes shape. Sometimes there are wild surprises that I never see coming, and while I wanted to take advantage of the saxophone ensemble’s ability to groove, I also wanted to incorporate lovely melodic material—and therein lay the surprise. As if it had dropped from the heavens, the melodic chorale theme just leaped out of my fingers and onto the computer screen fully formed, leaving me shaking my head in amazement—how the heck did THAT happen? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m sure glad it did. It’s my favorite part of the piece.

I was plagued while writing with a persistent mental image—clowns, with their car, undergoing both happy and sad melancholic moments. (Life is the real circus, straight up.)

It was an easy and obvious jump to take Clown Car for a ride into the bassoon world, where quartets are valued, loved, and enjoyed, and the groove and emotionality of this piece will be appreciated. Enjoy the journey!

— Amber Ferenz, Asheville NC Jan. 2026