In an autobiographical study penned in 1939, Koechlin noted of his series of chamber works, begun in 1911 and continuing into the 1920s, "In general, one can see in the works of this period either a constant light (as in the Flute Sonata, the First String Quartet, the Sonata for two flutes, the clarinet sonatas, and the cello sonata—even in its nocturnal Andante), or a gradual illumination...." Wilfrid Mellers, in a revealing article about Koechlin in 1942, demonstrated that the sensation of light is generated by essentially consonant harmonies aggregated of open fifths and fourths. During the same years in which Schoenberg was busy with "the emancipation of the dissonance," Koechlin was exploring a liberating demesne of fantasy in the cultivation of consonance with ramifications as radical, if without "revolutionary" self-advertisement. "Thenceforward polytonality and atonality have their place," he observed, characteristically adding, "even when they are not noticeable...." But the First Clarinet Sonata, composed in August 1923, is atypical in several ways. The jauntiness of its first movement—Allegro, bien décidé et animé—asserts a close kinship with some of the more smartalecking productions of Les Six without resorting either to jazz or to exotic dance rhythms. "In reality, the two clarinet sonatas are very different with the first being less idiomatic and rewarding from the clarinettist's point of view," Koechlin's foremost expositor, Robert Orledge, wrote. "Overall [the Second] is less dissonant and homophonic than the First Sonata, whose reliance on slow-moving perfect fifths all too often anchors the bass line and negates the soloist's surface activity." That is one way of hearing it, though one suspects that a certain sense of dissociation is exactly what Koechlin strove for. In the second movement (Andante, bien calme), piano and clarinet seem to wander, together and apart, in a shadowy penumbra encountered before in Les Heures persanes (1913-1919), coaxing back the veil separating waking consciousness from the bourne of dreams. The third movement's Allegro moderato begins with some spirited piping in Koechlin's familiar pastoral mode to become progressively more atonally raucous, as if to confirm that the sound world of the previous sonatas is being willfully distorted, effecting less a "gradual illumination" than constantly increasing glare. As Elise Kirk noted, the clarinet sonatas "represent a prologue to later works rather than an epilogue to the past." The First Sonata's premiere was given on June 20, 1982, by Robert Fontaine with Hatsune Kawamura on piano at a Koechlin Festival at the Chateau, Ville d'Avray.

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