TILTING AT WINDMILLS refers to a timeless image in Cervantes’ Don Quixote where the enchanted errant knight sees some gigantic windmills that he alone believes are real, no matter what others might think or say. It’s a testament to the power of creativity, the essential belief in one’s own imagination, regardless of internal doubts and external challenges, and the aesthetic-existential imperative in both art and life of individual choice, commitment, and affirmation, deliberately reaching for, tilting toward the genuinely authentic. This is what I’m trying to do in this particular collection of original compositions and arrangements as a vehicle of quixotic enchantment and self-discovery.

Tilting at Windmills also incorporates the functional nature of woodwind instruments and the music they make deriving from wind. The breath turns the musical mill. Unlike the uniform power and integration of the string quartet, the woodwind quintet is a complex confluence of distinctive musical voices engaged in contrapuntal conversation, a kaleidoscope of variable sounds like a turning windmill, shifting continuously between different levels of homogeneity and heterogeneity. I am fortunate to collaborate in this musical endeavor with the preeminent Dorian Wind Quintet, magicians of the flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon.