Sometimes you hear a melody and you really fall in love with it.  When this happens to me, I usually end up humming it for days and coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas and variations based on it. After going to a concert with Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, I got absolutely hooked on this melody from the finale. This was also around the time a major mutual fund company was airing a commercial with it as the music, and a local business had used it for a radio ad. It was utterly inescapable. 

​

After walking around humming it and dreaming up all sorts of silly variations on it, I realised some of the things I was coming up with was actually quite good and that I should probably write them down.

​

Rhapsody on a Theme of Rachmaninov was first performed by Latasha Thomas at the University of Central Arkansas.