I wrote this piece while on tour with “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” in 1996 and was the first piece I wrote in my head without the use of a keyboard (on the tour bus).

The original idea of this piece was to write a few simple and fun themes and see how much could be made from them.  Even the harmonic material developed out of these few melodies and eventually began to over-saturate the piece.  Thus the title “Too Much of a Good Thing.”  This Fantasy for orchestra is about 11 minutes long and features large masses of tonal material that gradually overlap, creating poly-tonal textures and eventually winning out to push the piece forward.

The excerpt here is the climax section, coming just before the coda.  It features all of the themes from the piece in various textures, harmonies, and melodies.

In 2000 I was fortunate enough for my friend and conductor, Benny Hudson to gather a pickup orchestra to record this piece in Melbourne, Australia.  Unfortunately that recording is not the best quality so the clip you hear is my own mockup created for use in my textbook “Now Hear This”.