Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs

The piece runs in three connected sections, played without a break.

Prelude: bright, syncopated brass fanfares open the piece, setting a confident, strutting tone built from short repeated rhythmic cells rather than a long melody.

Fugue: the saxophone section takes over, trading a single winding tune back and forth in overlapping entries, the way voices enter one after another in a classical fugue, but swung like a big-band chart.

Riffs: the full jazz ensemble joins, piling up short repeated phrases, or "riffs," that pass between sections of the band while a solo clarinet spins increasingly wild, virtuosic lines above the groove, driving to a hard-swinging close.

Listeners can expect a steady pulse throughout, closer to jazz drumming than to a symphonic beat, and a soloist who sounds improvisational even though the part is fully written out. The clarinet writing ranges from bluesy slides to high, fast passagework, so the instrument itself becomes a kind of tour through jazz clarinet styles. The ending arrives suddenly, without a slow wind-down, in keeping with the big-band tradition Bernstein was drawing on.

Bernstein wrote Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs in 1949, commissioned by bandleader Woody Herman for his big band. By the time it was finished, Herman's band had disbanded, and the piece went unperformed for several years. Bernstein himself conducted its concert premiere in 1955 on a television broadcast, with Benny Goodman as clarinet soloist, and Goodman's involvement helped cement the piece's identity as a clarinet showcase. It stands alongside Bernstein's other early works as an attempt to fuse jazz idioms with concert-hall forms, and it has since become a popular vehicle for orchestras and jazz ensembles wanting a compact, high-energy piece featuring a virtuoso clarinetist.