In a Blue Moon is subtitled "A Temporatropical Fantasy." Conjoining the words "tempo," "temperate," and "tropical," I chose "temporatropical" because the piece borrows mercilessly from a wide variety of influences including blues, Balinese gamelan, Medieval hocket, and Latin American rhythms, and it subjects them to various metrical transformations. Following the rhetorical principles of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, the diverse borrowed elements fuse together to form a music that is like none of them. The title, "In a Blue Moon," seeks to suggest this temperatropical fusion, but the composer wryly admits that it may only be an indication of how often the piece will be performed.