This piece is a product of the early days of the Minnesota Composers Forum, an organization founded in 1973 by a group of University of Minnesota graduate students and which later became the American Composers Forum. In those days a small choir, the Forum Chorale, was also assembled for the purpose of performing new choral works by local composers. The group was led by our director, Monte Mason, and it also included one of our current singers. The composer of this piece, Patricia Hurlbutt, is currently the Director of Music Ministries at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Woodbury. She has written many choral works, as well as music for handbells and for organ. While most of Ms. Hurlbutt’s music is for the church, this earlier work is distinctly and weirdly secular. The poem, called “The Fly” by its author, Theodore Tilson, became quite well known soon after it was published in 1859, and it was included in children’s books for many years. It was written for the author’s daughter, but it was also intended to improve children’s knowledge of biology, which the author decried as woefully inadequate at that time; illustrations showed insects with eight legs and foxes climbing trees. Tilson, writing in the 1890s, commented: “A children’s literature – fanciful, poetical and beautiful – but, at the same time, correctly based on a solid foundation of truth to nature – has grown up mainly within the present generation. Such a literature did not exist – at least, it did not abound – when “The Fly” was written. The trash and balderdash which “The Fly” was meant to offset would not now be tolerated.”