In the summer of 1968 I was learning German at an institute in Bavaria. One of the other students was a very nice young man from Japan - I unfortunately don't remember his name. He explained to me the form of the Haiku. Realising that 5+7+5, the number of syllables in a Haiku, means 12+5 and 5+12, I immediately conceived and wrote a composition of 5 short pieces for baritone + 7 for clarinet + 5 for baritone, each a palindrome, in which the first and the last 12 notes would be a twelve-tone row, the one a retrogradeinversion of the other.

It was premiered in 1994 by the baritone William Pearson (1934-1995)