Let’s face it. Brevity and wit are not always qualities one associates with new music.

But today we offer a sample: this comic overture is less than 5 minutes long, and opens, as you just heard, with a Fellini-esque duet for piccolo and contrabassoon.

The overture is entitled “Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark,” and is purportedly a rather burlesque celebration of modern theoretical physics. Its alliterative title evokes those subatomic particles known as “quarks” that, we’re told, make up our universe. And, since this music changes its changes time signature so often, perhaps Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” is thrown in for good measure.

Its composer is an American, Marga Richter, who was born on this date in 1926 in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. Richter received her early music training in Minneapolis, and then moved to New York’s Juilliard School for further composition study with two distinguished American composers, Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma.

Marga Richter has written over 75 works including an opera and two ballets, as well as two piano concertos and a variety of solo, chamber and symphonic works, including the 1991 overture “Quantum Quirks of a Quick, Quaint Quark.”

"Composing,” says Richter,” is my response to a constant desire to transform my perceptions and emotions into music. Everything that touches me, everything beautiful, or mysterious, or painful, or joyful, or unknowable becomes an immediate or eventual source of inspiration. Music is the way I speak to the silence of the universe."