Update Title: 99C9B1B3-6B89-45EC-896C-F297E705338B

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"Santa Barbara Overture" was written in early 1995 for Gisele Ben-Dor and the Santa Barbara Symphony for the 1995-96 season. Maestro Ben-Dor asked for "happy, beautiful" music, and the overture definitely has the former of these two attributes.

The work is an exuberant concert-opener. There were a number of ideas and reflections that I wanted to express in writing musically about Santa Barbara. Here are some of them:

* An opening, rhythmic crescendo leading to a loud and joyful theme of "deliverance," reflective perhaps of seeing the Pacific Ocean and Santa Barbara for the first time after crossing the desert and enduring the clogged freeways and smog of Los Angeles,

* Transitional material using pentatonic scale figures vaguely reminiscent of Asian music,

* Intimations of ragtime filtered through a honky-tonk piano in a gold miners+ saloon in a Hollywood movie,

* A Native American melody done up in a brief jazz setting,

* Musical puns on Spanish and Mexican music,

* The bells of the Old Mission of Santa Barbara (only A,F#,E are used because those were the most frequently-heard pitches played melodically on my stake-outs at the Mission during the summer),

* Organum in 4ths reminiscent of the imagined friars of the Mission (imagined because they did not sing organum but rather music more in the style of Schubert).

That may be quite a lot to put into one 9-minute piece, but I wanted to express musically at least some of the diversity of the wondrous city of Santa Barbara.

"Santa Barbara Overture"  was recorded in 1996 by the London Symphony on the MMC label. --Emma Lou Diemer

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