I also mentioned to Henry Brant that I had studied with Sylvia Marlowe, who I knew (thought) he had been friendly with. "Oh, Sylvia", he said, "she fired me, you know." I said I couldn't think why; he said "I wasn't commercial enough for her." This version (in 4/4 time) of Boccherini's famous Minuet might give us some context for that remark. [The original scoring was for harpsichord, piano, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, drums and bass.] Brant, interviewed in 2002 by American Mavericks, explained that "During the 1920s there was a fair amount of experimentation among American composers to write unusual music in various ways...Then came the stock market crash of the Depression, and it became difficult to get any non-popular music played at all. So the choice among composers was: write a more easy-going kind of music, or a conventional kind of music, or stop writing, or find some third way out of it. Composers like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson found a good way. They got interested in American material and found ways to simplify their music in such a way that this could be incorporated in it without using the clichés of 19th century concert music by doing it. That was one way and they did it with success. Now, I found there was another way. I could use satire or caricature. That was acceptable. Nobody objected to that..."