In early 1994, my father John Canfield, then conductor of the Bloomington Pops Orchestra which he'd founded a couple years prior, asked me to orchestrate two short works for double bass and piano, Intermezzo and Tarantella by Reinhold Gliere, so that Indiana University Jacobs School of Music faculty member Bruce Bransby could perform these with the orchestra. I undertook the assignment gladly since I wanted to help out my father, little realizing that doing so would eventually launch an extended series of what I came to call "After" works for instruments in the style of older composers never wrote for certain instruments. The present work was expanded in 2007 into my Concerto after Gliere for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra, which became my most-performed work. Upon hearing my orchestration of Intermezzo and Tarantella, my father predicted that I would eventually be able to "do something with it," beyond the performance that was given in 1994, but neither he nor I suspected what that might be.
