The title The Best of Both Worlds came to me while I was thinking about the genesis of the opening motive—a falling tritone followed by a rising perfect fifth—which figures prominently in the piece. I was minding my own business at the dining room table when I happened to hear a sequence of four notes plucked on my children’s out-of-tune ukulele that compelled me to write them down. I thought about the way that my home life as a wife and mother interacts with my work life as a composer and professor. Some days, I think I have the best of both worlds. Some days, I think I have the best of neither of those worlds, as I frantically run from one thing to the next, wondering if I do any of it well. Many people have similar different worlds that they inhabit, and there are many pairs of worlds in this piece. The slow, lyrical first section clashes with the bluesy, aggressive nature of the second section. The scales used share similar collections of notes, but change color when the emphasized tonic shifts. These conflicts play out in different ways as the piece progresses, reaching a cautious resolution by the end. It was a pleasure for me to write this piece for the two instruments whose worlds I inhabited during my musical training. Many thanks go to the Ohio Music Teachers Association, who commissioned the piece for their 2017 conference, to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the place where I could escape from one world into another to complete the work, and to Suzanne Newcomb and Steve Wedell, who gave the premiere performance.