Skitter was one of a series of pieces I wrote for a cat my wife and I owned at the time. He was a tiger-striped cat who came with a house we'd purchased, and was a feral cat (i.e., a real fraidy-cat), a fact that I tried to incorporate in this work with its scurrying figuration. Like my other orchestra cat pieces, this one was originally composed for piano as part of my Five Kitty Sketches, and then orchestrated for performance by the Bloomington Pops Orchestra. It was premiered by that orchestra, conducted by Robert Stoll, on October 14, 2000.
