When I first started piano lessons at the age of twelve I was already an avid improviser. I was lucky to have a piano teacher who encouraged me to compose and improvise. Even better, she also gave me simple pieces by Bartok, Ross Lee Finney, Leon Kirchner and Arnold Schoenberg to learn, alongside music by Bach, Mozart, Hadyn and Beethoven. I never had to practice a dull piece. This instilled in me a conviction that there is no such thing as "children's music" per se, that "children's music" is simply good music that is playable by children. If music isn't interesting to adults, it isn't interesting, period. By the same token, composers who bring their intensity and original way of hearing and thinking into a child's life--the way Bartok did in his teaching pieces, or György Kurtag does today--are immensely rewarded, by making a deep connection with a budding young musician.

Among my most gratifying experiences as a composer was writing Suite Parisienne for my daughter Annie (now twenty, and a sophomore studying science at Harvard). At the time of composition Annie was nine and had been studying piano since shortly before she had turned three. She was tremendously musical, but like most people (of all ages), had to be coaxed to practice. A photographer friend of ours was making a book of photographs of fathers and daughters and took one of the two of us. She asked that I write a paragraph to go on the facing page, but I felt that simply writing a piece that Annie and I could play, and having it reprinted on the page facing our picture, would express more, and suit me better than a written statement.

I wrote a languid, slow waltz for piano four hands, with an easy upper part in octaves in which the hand positions did not change for the duration of the movement. My model was, of course, the Stravinsky four-hand pieces with easy upper or lower part, or his Les Cinq Doigts. This piece later became In the Tuileries Gardens, the second movement of my Suite Parisienne. The delight of playing the piece with Annie made adding further movements a natural thing to do.

Having detected a French flavor in the original "valse lente," it seemed almost inevitable to create from this starting point a series of "Parisian" vignettes. In fact, from a familial point of view, celebrating Paris had at least three meanings. My parents--Annie's grandparents--had spent their honeymoon in Paris in 1929. They had stayed for six months, and my father had supported them by playing the piano in a restaurant every night. It turned out to be their only trip to Europe. As a student, from 1970-72, I myself had lived in Paris for two years, studying composition with Nadia Boulanger (then in her early eighties). I had so longed to return there that, even though I am almost as reluctant a traveler as my parents turned out to be, I went there with my daughter in 1990. So Annie knew the places Suite Parisienne depicted: "The Cathedral of Notre Dame", "The Eiffel Tower", "The Champs Elysée," "Montmartre".

I modeled all of the movements after the principle of the first--using different types of scale patterns and hand positions for each movement. But what was most wonderful was that Annie really practiced them. And she played them as a complete musician. After all, they were hers.

In the end, of course, the Suite was not about a far away place but about a fleeting moment in the life of my daughter and myself--the brief moment when she could sit next to me and play duets especially written for her. This one experience made being a composer worthwhile.

Allen Shawn