Despite living less than two hours away from the place, I’ve never actually been up to Santa Barbara, which means, at least according to today’s composer, that I am Missing Out. Emma Lou Diemer describes the joyous theme at the start of her Santa Barbara Overture as reflecting what one might feel after “enduring the clogged freeways and smog of Los Angeles”, to which I can only rejoin “Yeah, no, that sounds about right.”. Diemer was born in November 1927 to a very musical family (she had learned piano by the age of five, and family road trips would often involve sing-alongs accompanied by her sister on flute and one of her brothers on trumpet. I can’t decide if this sounds amazing or horrifying.)