ClariNez was written in 2005 for the Aviv Competition in Israel, as a mandatory piece for the clarinet contestants. The nature of a competition piece is to present great difficulties to the performer, and indeed ClariNez makes use of extended techniques, fast virtuoso passages and large melodic leaps and skips. But my aim for these technical difficulties was to serve a higher musical goal: turn the clarinet into a multi-layered, polyphonic instrument, and create simultaneous sonoric plains, which would demonstrate the instrument's many colors and (to my taste) humorous character.ClariNez was commissioned by the Adele and John Gray Fund for the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.

Clarinetist Gilad Harel plays Jonathan Keren's ClariNez (2005).