During and after composing Partita, commissioned by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony, I kept wondering what its title should be, since my musical intention was to present the many changes and oppositions of mood that make up our experience of life. In general, my music seeks the awareness of motion we have in flying or driving of a car and not the plodding of horses or the marching of soldiers that pervades the motion patterns of older music. At the time I was reading poems of the English Jacobean poet Richard Crashaw, and was fascinated by his 157-line Latin poem Bulla (Bubble), which at one point personifies a floating bubble that has this to say:

At first I thought of this last line as a title, but then decided on a more conventional one, Partita, which in modern Italian can mean ‘game,’ because like all games this piece adheres rather strictly to certain laid down rules within which it presents a large expanse of action and expression.