Clown Car (sc/parts) - SAX4 (AATB)

Clown Car
for saxophone quartet - two altos, tenor, bari, (w/optional soprano sax instead of alto 1)
by Amber Ferenz (b. 1973) - American composer and bassoonist

This is the printed music.  For the PDF download, click HERE.

ABOUT THE MUSIC

Clown Car Program Notes

When I met Dr. Adam Estes for the first time, we were deep in the mountains of North Carolina at the Glickman-Popkin Bassoon Camp. Years later, in 2025, he wrote to ask me if I might be interested in someday writing for saxophones, and he asked if I’d be alright with him arranging one of my bassoon sonatas for the melodic Baritone. I said YES to both, we met up at Bassoon Camp again and shook on it. Songs for Wicked Children entered the Bari Sax repertoire thanks to his fine arranging skills, and Clown Car came about through funding granted by the Mississippi Arts Commission, for the Assembly Quartet’s Pedagogy Project.

I never know what’s going to happen as a piece takes shape. Sometimes there are wild surprises that I never see coming, and while I wanted to take advantage of the saxophone ensemble’s ability to groove, I also wanted to incorporate lovely melodic material- and therein lay the surprise. As if it had dropped from the heavens, the melodic chorale theme just leaped out of my fingers and onto the computer screen fully formed, leaving me shaking my head in amazement- how the heck did THAT happen? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m sure glad it did. It’s my favorite part of the piece.

I was plagued while writing with a persistent mental image- clowns, with their car, undergoing both happy and sad melancholic moments. (Life is the real circus, straight up.)

-Amber Ferenz

Asheville NC Jan. 2026

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Amber Ferenz is a nonbinary, queer bassoonist and award-winning composer and arranger. Inspired deeply by the beauty, magic and mystery of the natural world, they often write pieces that weave together melodies and healing songs given by Nature with their own musical ideas. They also delight in tackling emotionally challenging material, and feel that music is a vehicle for the universal energies of transformation, catharsis, and healing.

Amber is a founding member of Elektra Winds and Queen City Winds as well as the bassoon and harp collective Voices In the Wood. They are second bassoonist with the Asheville Symphony and the former third/contra bassoonist for the Greensboro Symphony. They serve on the Board of the Bassoon Chamber Music Composition Competition (BCMCC) and have been the Camp Coordinator for the Glickman-Popkin Bassoon Camp since 2007. TrevCo Music publishes Amber’s entire wind music catalogue.