Butterfly Dancer

Composer Notes... "Butterfly Dancer" came about as I was reconsidering a presentation made by Tom Collins at the Midwest Regional. Tom said that as a professional listener, he liked a piece with a strong melodic line as opposed to atonal. One day I was sitting at the practice keyboard and started playing broken chords in the style of Matthias vanden Gheyn, trying to find an interesting key. Starting with C major I thought "no" - vanden Gheyn already has several preludes in C. I then went to D major and then to E-flat. Maybe I am going the wrong direction? I went down to B-flat and slowed everything down, still playing B-flat, F, D, B-flat and then dropped the D (so there would be no conflict between major/minor) and played the D in the pedal. Just doing this I shortly had over 16 measures. Considering further, I remembered that Tom had been a dancer so I added a short waltz section. After this was complete I returned to the original theme and there was the entire piece. This is one of those instances where a piece just appears almost without any thought on the part of the composer.