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"Having studied at Yale under the Hindemith influence in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, my concept of composing is to some extent the Gebrauchsmusik approach," Diemer wrote in The American Organist in September, 1982. In The Piano Quarterly, Spring 1985, she wrote, "Most of my music has been produced within a certain context: composition student, composer-in-residence, organist/choir director in various churches, university professor. If I had been apprenticed to a ballet company, a symphony orchestrao an opera company, I would have written music for that situation... I have little affinity with the composers who write only for their fellow composers. Some of history’s dullest, most ephemeral music has been produced for that reason."
lt is precisely this grassroots quality that has made Diemer one of the most widely performed composers in America today. Hers is music to be used, much of it (particularly a vast output of choral music) written to fill a need. Yet, even at its most conservative, it is substantial, innovative, sometimes whimsical, and always enduring.
About this piece, Diemer notes: "Fantasie was written in 1958 at Eastman when l was working on my Ph.D. in composition. I remember writing it in one of the practice rooms and feeling quite happy about the fugue subject, which came to mind in an especially free frame of mind." (The performer senses Buxtehude’s approval.) "The piece originally had a slow middle section based on the 4-note idea that the whole work is based on (short-short-short-long), but Oxford eliminated it. The beginning and ending are improvisatory with the more structured fugal section in between."
Oxford University Press published this piece in 1967, as catalogue number 93.107.