In the summer of 2020, in the midst of COVID, I desperately felt like I needed to write something joyful. So I started writing, and after about 24 measures, I had this terrible feeling - not uncommon for composers - that maybe the piece I was writing had already been written. And in this case, I feared that I had just plagiarized Frank Ticheli. I sent the opening to Frank, who was incredibly gracious in his response. He said that he had NOT written this tune - although it's clear that could have. This is a Ticheli-esque tune if ever I had written one! It turns out that if I think "let's just write 3 minutes of joyful fun," my brain jumps to "you mean Ticheli with an excessive amount of snare drum and a few extra wrong notes. Thank you to Frank Ticheli - to whom the piece is dedicated - for his inspiration.
