I wrote Invisible Lilacs in 1991 for Young Uck Kim (who commissioned it) and Emanuel Ax. They premièred it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years later. Since that time, Bobby MacDuffie has taken up the piece. He plays it dazzlyingly. Just before I began composing Invisible Lilacs, I had read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. A sentence from it captured my imagination and I wanted to respond to it in this piece: ’When, on a summer evening, the melodious sky growls like a tawny l...