This dubious affair is the result of a conversation I was having with James Gilchrist following a recital of his in the summer of 2024. To my pleasurable surprise, he asked me when I was going to send him some more of my songs. I think I must have responded that I imagined I’d already sent him too many, because he assured me that the problem was not the songs themselves, but the wishes of concert promoters; members of this species invariably wanted a ten thousandth performance of Schubert’s Winterreise, not the discovery and revelation of something recent, neglected or both. James commented that the stock response to anything in the latter category was “can we not have that?” At this point, one or other of us voiced the fatefully flippant idea that maybe that phrase should become the germ of my next piece… The consequence, a couple of months later, is the unclassifiable number presented here. All that was needed was the knockingup of some pertinent lines of doggerel, followed by some muzack to match. In compositional and literary terms the results lay claim to no merit whatsoever, but I can confidently assert that they fall triumphantly into the promoters’ can we not have that category. I have subtitled the piece an encore, for the simple and unarguable reason that the only possible course of action by singer and pianist afterwards must be the hastiest of exits in a waiting car: as the Bard puts it in Macbeth, ‘Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once’. For convenience, the piece boasts an abbreviated title: “Not THAT!” It consists of a verse and refrain, both of which are repeated with new words and some degree of musical variation. The entire ordeal should be over within about six minutes.