Instrumental.

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Welcome to the summer of 1988! I was subletting an apartment near the corner of University and San Pablo, working a part-time job in San Francisco. I was fooling around one afternoon (or morning, I cannot really remember) with my Fostex X-15 four-track and came up with the bass/drum/organ/piano part of this. Quite possibly the fruitiest piece of music I have ever written, the original version of this was for a long time the musical background to my incoming answering machine messages.

It sat for more than a decade. In 1999, after graduating from Georgetown, I started working on it again, hoping to do something more substantial with it. In XGWorks, I came up with the saxophone parts and some other additions that haven't survived. But nothing else worked at the time. So, it sat for another 10 years.

Early this summer, I started fooling with this in GarageBand. The syncopated drum part works well (better than the part I wrote in XGWorks -- I cannot write drum parts), but as I was putting this together, string arrangements started coming and going in my head. I spent two weeks toward the end of the spring semester trying to remember various string parts, but what I came up with when I actually arranged them was far better than anything I actually imagined. This has gone from a fruity answering machine message to the wanna-be theme for a Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedy from, say, 1959 -- the music you'd hear to the DePaite-Freleng animated intro (think "I Dream of Jeanie"), something Ferrante and Tiecher might play a year or two later in-between "Moon River" and Pat Boone's "Exodus Theme." I haven't the slightest idea if that's a good thing or not.

It's still fruity, though.

Oh, this didn't have a title for a long time. John Hartwell suggested I call it "Waltz of the Mice," but that seemed far too silly. I do not know when this became "Introduction to the Short Course," but the short course in question was a book, allegedly authored by Joseph Stalin, on the history of the Soviet Communist Party. No, I have no idea why that title seemed appropriate at the time.