Copy Cat for E-flat clarinet and piano Copy Cat was composed for clarinetist Diego Vásquez as part of a recording project documenting the complete works for clarinet by Mark Olivieri, recorded in the fall of 2025. The work's three movements: I. Fetch, II. Letting Go, and III. Relics and Discoveries, form a continuous narrative bound by processes of transformation and recollection. The title reflects the compositional technique at the heart of the piece: material is continually revisited, re-contextualized, and reimagined. Within each movement, passages echo and evolve organically, as musical ideas are retrieved, altered, and redeployed in new harmonic and rhythmic environments. This process intensifies across the span of the work, with gestures from the opening movement resurfacing in Letting Go and Relics and Discoveries, creating a web of motivic memory that deepens with each return. The relationship between clarinet and piano embodies the work's formal imitation. The two instruments engage in spirited dialogue, sometimes mirroring one another in playful antiphony, sometimes driving forward in rhythmic unison. Yet this is no mere call-and-response: the piano frequently shadows, anticipates, or fragments the clarinet's melodic line and rhythmic ostinati, suggesting a more complex interplay—one of pursuit, reflection, and transformation. The choice of E-flat clarinet, with its brilliant, penetrating timbre, adds a distinctive color that cuts through the piano's texture while remaining agile enough for the work's rapid shifts in character. Copy Cat invites listeners into a world where musical ideas are living entities—fetched, released, and rediscovered across the architecture of the piece, each iteration revealing new facets of a singular creative vision.
