PROGRAM NOTE

Flash Fiction takes its title from a term that has come to represent the form of the short story. In this mindset, the work is a set of musical stories drawn from popular culture and literature. Each movement is titled to parody several of the composer’s favorite fictional stories from comics, television, novels, short stories, cartoons, and cinema:

1. 221B, the famous door number of Sherlock Holmes,

2. Modus Operandi, a kind of homage to detective soliloquies of Dick Tracey and Columbo,

3. Whodunit, a short musing with seemingly unconnected lines (Agantha Christie’s Poirot mysteries)

4. The Outer Zone, a combination of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone,

5. Trouble with mice…from Steinbeck’s Of mice and men,

6. Fantastic Five, after Marvel’s Fantastic Four comics and

7. Stirred, not shaken, a homage to the spy-chases in Ian Flemming’s 007 novels (often quoted as “Shaken, not stirred”).

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

April 10, 2023: Spring Wind Quintet (Chamber Music Hawaiʻi), St. John's Lutheran, Kailua, HI

April 8, 2023: Spring Wind Quintet (Chamber Music Hawaiʻi), Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu, HI

July 30, 2015: Bowdoin International Music Festival, Brunswick, ME

March 24, 2014: Western Wind Quintet, Chicago, IL, USA

October 13, 2013: Western Wind Quintet, Kalamazoo, MI, USA