Gary Graffman and I have been staunch friends since we met as students at the Curtis Institute in 1943. The notion of pooling our talents, however, arose only when we returned to that Institute nearly five decades later, Gary as director, I on the faculty. Now Gary, who has not made professional use of his right hand since 1980, felt an urge to expand the admirable but restricted literature of left-hand works (most of them composed long ago for the elder brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), and so invited me to write something that would exploit the current student orchestra of his famous school as well as his own left hand. The result is my fourth Piano Concerto. But perhaps Concerto is too grand a title, connoting as it so often does a virtuosic struggle between soloist and orchestra. Rather, this is an "entertainment" shaped like a suite.

The title—Eleven Studies for Eleven Players—specifies eleven players, not eleven instruments. The flute changes to piccolo, the oboe to English horn, and the two percussionists between them bang on fifteen different surfaces. Not all players are in all movements. There's a duet, a quintet, a nonet, and a number of solos. The subtitles "Bird Call" and "The Diary" come from the play Suddenly Last Summer, for which these sections were first intended. "Contest" was first heard in another play, Motel, and represented traffic. "In Memory of My Feelings" is a poem by Frank O'Hara.  - Ned Rorem