Over the last several years I have written a lot of chamber music, especially for chamber orchestra. It occurred to me this past year that I had not written a work for full orchestra in almost a decade, and thought it was time to return to the genre. Having been away from the orchestra for so long, I didn’t want to attempt a large work, so decided that a brief, fun and colorful overture would be just the place to start.

Even with this seemingly modest goal in mind it was a challenge getting started, and I found myself repeatedly abandoning my ideas and starting from scratch. It was in the midst of this that I happened to see a television program about all the different flying machines human beings have conceived of over the centuries, some of them brilliant, some of them hilarious, but all of them rooted in a single desire: to become free of the earth.

It occurred to me how much writing a piece of music was like this process, and it became a narrative that underlies Flights of Fancy: you start out with a concept and begin developing it. An idea comes, and then another, but none of them seem to be going anywhere. You pick the one that seems least likely to fail and start to develop it, yet when the moment of truth comes, it just doesn’t work.

So you go back to the drawing board and ruminate. And just when you’ve given up hope, you realize that you had the right idea there all along, buried underneath all the others – you just hadn’t followed through. In great excitement you rummage through your notes until you find it, and start again. Everything falls into place, and when the moment of truth comes this time, the damn thing flies.

Flights of Fancy is dedicated to George Hanson and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra.