Like Gentle is Heaven Today, Konecinu began life as a requirement for my DM Degree from Indiana University. As a part of the final doctoral exams, I was given the instrumentation of trombone and string quartet by my teacher John Eaton, and one week to write a work for this combination. Partly because of Eaton's renown as a composer of microtonal music, as well as my own interest in them, I made rather extensive use of quarter tones in this work, facilitated by the slide on the trombone, as well as the relative ease of executing these on string instruments. This remains my most extensive use of microtones in any work, although I have used them in certain subsequent works in coloristic fashion. The premiere of the work was given by Dr. Kent Kidwell and his faculty colleagues at the Univeristy of Central Oklahoma during a festival of my music given there in 2001. The title, which I came up with on that occasion, is drawn from the first two or three letters of the name of the University in retrograde spelling. Given the Native American influence in this state, I thought the title sounded as though it could be from some such language.
