Sinfonia muta

•Charles Shere: Sinfonia muta, for voice, violin, and percussion; duration ca. 1:30. Healdsburg: Ear Press, 2015 Full study score, 5.5x8.5, 2 pages

Eastside Road, April 7, 2015—

WE WERE IN MILAN in late November, 2008, having dinner in a trattoria a day or two before flying home — I've looked at my notes, but I can't identify the restaurant.

Doesn't matter: the only thing memorable at the place was the waiter, an engaging fellow, in his fifties I'd say, who eyed me closely, then asked what I did. Pittore? Scrittore? Yes, scrivo un po' , I write a little, I said, and I compose a little music.

I thought it was something of the sort, he said. I'm a poet: and he handed me a little poem printed on a slip of paper. Here's something to make a song, he said:

Sinfonia Muta

il silenzio sta come un orco enorme
pronto ad ingoiarmi
non gli doretta e lo strangolo
col mio canto d'amore per te

I set it aside but glanced at it from time to time during dinner, and with my postprandial grappa sketched out a setting for voice, violin, and percussion on the menu, leaving it behind as a little gift for the waiter.

Here's the translation, as far as I can supply it — there's a word in the fourth line makes no sense to me. "Doretta" may have been my misreading, or it may be dialect…

Mute Symphony

Silence stands, an enormous whale
ready to swallow me up
don't… and I'll strangle it
with the lovesong I've made for you

On returning home I quickly transcribed my sketch at the computer, but the photo has since been mislaid, so I can no longer verify the text…

If you can supply a better translation, leave it as a comment, and I'll send you a print copy of the score.

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(A few days later:) As I hoped, my luddite friend Stimato Fabbrò, who does not like to leave comments, sent me another kind of message, clearing up the mystery. In the fourth line two words had been run together: it should read non gli do retta e lo strangolo, meaning "I pay [him] no heed and I'll strangle him…". So the poem translates, roughly,

There's Silence, an enormous whale
ready to swallow me up
he doesn't scare me
i'll strangle him with the lovesong I've made
for you

Carel

Eastside Road, Feb. 9, 2015—

THIS IS ONE of my very favorite paintings: The Goldfinch, as it's known in English, painted probably in 1654 by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius. I have written about it here before, but it's on my mind again because I just finished (in the sense of having definitively stopped working on) a short piece of music suggested by the painting. It's called Carel, like the painter, and come to think of it like me, and my father, and my grandfathers…

In fact it was suggested by my friend the painter Patrick McFarlin, who we visited last June in his Santa Fe studio, where we saw a number of canvases he was working on in homage to Fabritius's painting. He calls the series The Goldfinch Variations, and he asked me if I'd like to supply a piece of music to be played in an eventual exhibition of the series — an exhibition projected to include works in similar homage by other painters he knows.

The opening measures of the piece came to mind immediately, but I'm sorry to say they stayed on a back burner for an indecently long time, in spite of occasional polite suggestions from McFarlin. Finally, though, I realized my stumbling block had been the unusual instrumental ensemble the piece seemed to want: and then I simply went ahead and wrote the piece out.

My mother disliked the oboe. Many people do. I suppose many would say four oboes in one place is four oboes too many. But I like the oboe, which I think apposite to a meditation on Fabritius's goldfinch, not only because the oboe can be made to sound like a finch, but also, and more, I think, because its reed looks like Fabritius's finch's wingfeathers.

Those wingfeathers are amazing. The whole canvas, about the size of a sheet of typing paper, is painted illusionistically. There are those who think it was meant to hang, perhaps without a frame, on a plaster wall the color of that forming the background of the painting. Seeing it so displayed would be a real treat: especially when the viewer's eye would be directed closely to that wing, which is not painted illusionistically at all — it's very painterly; the yellow is troweled on, then scratched through with the end of the brush. In a tiny area of a seventeenth-century painting Fabritius looks forward to de Kooning.

Fabritius was born in February 1622 — nearly four hundred years ago! — in a new village, Middelbeemster, in the middle of a new polder, Beemster, the first polder ever reclaimed from a Dutch lake, in the province of North Holland. The province is noted for its seaports (most now cut off from the sea) and its cheeses; Beemster is still a favorite cheese of ours. His father was a painter and a schoolteacher named Pieter Carelsz. — the surname is an abbreviation for "son of Carel," and our painter was probably Carel Pietersz.; no doubt the names Peter and Charles had alternated for generations in the family. He became known as Fabritius, though, because as a youth he worked as a carpenter: fabricius is an old Roman name deriving from fabr-, "make" [things out of wood or stone]. Names were in flux in those days, and you wanted a distinctive one if you wanted to make a mark in the world.

In his early twenties our painter was in Amsterdam, studying in Rembrandt's studio, but by ten years later he'd settled in Delft, where he developed his own quite personal style — whose illusionism would quickly influence Vermeer. It's too bad, though, that he chose to settle in Delft: two years after he joined the Painters' Guild there he was badly maimed in the great Gunpowder Magazine explosion, and died shortly afterward of the wounds. Only nine or ten of his paintings are known to survive to our own time.

Anyhow: I finished the score a couple of days ago. I have in mind four oboists standing in corners of a gallery, perhaps unseen, or in any case not particularly on exhibit themselves. The music is meant to be heard, but not necessarily in silence: it's what Erik Satie calls musique d'ameublement, "furniture music", background music. The oboists may turn their backs to the audience when playing at mp or quieter, and lift the bells of their instruments, facing their listeners, when playing at f or above, if they like.

And if four oboists aren't to be found, why play the piece with flutes, or violins, or maybe even soprano saxophones. But I would like to hear it with oboes.

You'll find an mp4, if you're interested, at http://www.shere.org/CS/CSsoundfiles/Carel.m4a . It's only a synthesization, of course, but it'll give you an idea. You can see (and download) the score at http://www.shere.org/CS/CSscores/carel.pdf

Lullaby and Finale

Eastside Road, November 8, 2014—

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT there was no particular reason to write any more music — in July, 2004, to be precise — Eliane Lust asked for a new piece. She was planning a recital program of lullabies and thought I’d like to supply one. She’s a favorite of mine; she did such a splendid job with my piano sonata Bachelor Apparatus , even consenting to play it in costume seated at a piano perched on a cart being hauled across the stage by a strongman in Margeret Fisher’s amazing dance/theater piece drawn from our opera together.

And, by coincidence, I’d just bought a new piece of notation software which made it easier than ever to print music, and even to synthesize it somewhat suggestively; and I’d installed it on a new laptop, a tiny one that I’d taken with us on an annual week in Ashland, where we like to go to see Shakespeare (and other plays), and where we were when Eliane’s e-mail request came.

Partly to learn the software (and to demonstrate it to a friend who was among those spending the week with us), partly to see if I could write a lullaby, I quickly composed this piece. The next day, after the computer played it to us and I discovered how incredibly long it is and how somniferous, I decided to add a Finale, partly to awaken the audience, more really to awaken the performer.

The pieces have something to do with the music in the Trio for Violin, Piano, and Percussion. The same chromaticism is there; the deep clusters; the insistent repetition. I don’t think these have much to do with Minimalism; to me they are more closely related to the hermetic poetry of Gertrude Stein. But I could be wrong about that. In fact, Lullaby is a sort of by-piece to the much longer Sonata 2 Compositio ut explicatio.

Eliane introduced both movements in a program of lullabies and barcarolles given at The Dance Palace, Pt. Reyes Station, California, Oct. 17, 2004.

click here for synthesized performance (.mp3)

click here for score (.pdf)

String quartet: En balançant; Screen; Vie lactée

En balançant, for two pairs of bowed instruments (first half of the score)

Screen, for four to six bowed instruments

Vie lactée, for any four bowed instruments (first half of the score)

I HAVE WRITTEN ONLY one string quartet. ("So far," I suppose I should add; but I think it unlikely I will ever compose another, unless it is a re-notation of this one.) But even a simple statement like this is misleading, for my String Quartet is in three movements, each of which was originally written to stand alone, and was conceived for a different kind of instrumental configuration. The three movements were only gathered into a single unit a few years later, when I needed a string quartet: and the performance I heard on that occasion so pleased me that I now find it difficult to think of the three movements as separate entities.

Throughout the late 1960s I was concentrating on the quartet idiom of instrumental concert music. Conventionally this idiom has reached its apex in the string quartet, as it developed from Haydn through (at that time) Bařtók, Cage, and Feldman. What fascinated me, in the quartet, was the ability and the necessity of each of the four musicians to remain independent, focussed on his own material, but aware of each of the other three and of the evolving product of their simultaneous work.

As you see, the music is written out in "graphic notation," which was en vague in the 1960s. I was not particularly concerned with pitches at the time I composed them: I was thinking of representing the sounds of the music as elements in a spatial analogue of the psychoacoustical dimensions in which music is heard, freeing the music from the constraints of conventional melody and harmony as they are attached to a system of pitches, allowing them to become present as the musicians more or less intuitively are led to produce them.

As already noted, Screen was the first of these three movements to be composed. The title refers to the idea that the piece could be performed simultaneously with other compositions, and heard by the audience as a sort of acoustical screen through which the other music would be filtered. Although I intended the piece to succeed if standing alone, I did in fact combine it with other pieces; it appears as an aural ingredient in the early From calls and singing for chamber orchestra and in the opera The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even and with the Variations for harp with optional chimes in another chamber piece, Voie lactée.Screen was thought of as a string quartet, but I was drawn to the string sextet configuration as well, and from the beginning intended it to work for any four to six bowed instruments. The other two movements, though, were quite specifically written for four and only four instruments, though the specific instrumentation is not determined. (On the performance whose recording is linked to this post the three movements are played on violin, viola, cello, and contrabass.)

The titles of the outer movements refer to passages in Marcel Duchamp's great painting on glass, La mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, which — together with the verbal notes Duchamp assembled to accompany the painting — form the subject of the opera alluded to earlier. En balançant describes the physical state of an important part of Duchamp's upper panel, which represents the Bride as a "pendue femelle"; Vie lactée was my unintentional pun on the voie lactée (Milky Way) which spreads across the top of his painting, representing the Bride's aura.

While Screen is quite free, its ten pathways playable in any order, left to right or reversed; the outer movements are more directed. They are to be played in sequence, left to right only. En balançant presents only two pathways, and is meant to be played as a canon, the second pair entering whenever they desire. The balancing act is meant to be performed by each pair, and by the pair of pairs.

Vie lactée is even more conventional, requiring the quartet finally to play in tight ensemble, free as to the specific pitches and the relative loudness and tempo but determined by attentiveness to the score. The three movements therefore represent a sort of catalogue of quartet possibilities, ranging from the equipoise of the opening movement, through the loose lyricism of the second, to the coherent expression of the third.

I have heard a number of performances of the quartet (though many more of Screen), and I've been pleased with all of them. My favorite, though, both for its performance and for its instrumentation, is the one linked to this post. It was in fact the first performance, played in 1971 I think. I no longer have a program from the performance, which probably took place in the Berkeley concert hall 1750 Arch; and I'm not even certain of the personnel. I know the late Nathan Rubin played violin; I think Ron Erickson played viola, Tressa Adams cello, and Jedediah Denman contrabass. Perhaps someone reading this will know.

I listen to this recording every night as I fall asleep, and am surprised at how often its sounds fall together in configurations that seem new to me. This was of course the intent: to provide notation that would allow musical sounds to develop, combine, separate, adopt changed configurations, and exist completely free from anyone's ego-expressive intent. Perhaps falling asleep to the music explains my fairly rich dream life.

You can listen to it too: just click on the titles under the score pages. Let me know if it puts you pleasantly to sleep.

That second sonata

Profiting from an early rise, while we still have unlimited bandwidth, I've uploaded sound files to my second piano sonata, Sonata compositio ut explicatio, to my website, and you can hear the whole piece now by streaming it.

It's an undertaking, for the sonata is an hour long. I've written about it here before, and won't add anything more here.

The three movements are available separately, but of course I'd prefer you listen to the whole thing, perhaps as background music…

First movement (32:15)
Second movement (5:21)
Third movement (20:04)

You're welcome.

Requiem with oboe

•Charles Shere: Requiem with Oboe. Healdsburg: Ear Press, 2014 Full study score, 6x9, 48 pages Available at Lulu.com, $9.99

FINALLY PUBLISHED: the full score to my short Requiem Mass, with the interpolation of two poems by Wallace Stevens, set for eight solo voices (or double chorus) with obbligato solo oboe.

I composed the music in 1985, shortly after the death of my mother, just short of her seventy-fifth birthday. You see her there at the left, probably about eight years old, one sock up, the other down, in an old snapshot taken I suppose in Shanghai where she spent her first twelve years, the third of nine children born to a high-school teacher from Sonoma county, in China to avoid a mother-in-law who was apparently giving him trouble. (The family returned to Berkeley as soon as she died.)

My mother admitted freely that she had a tin ear, and I never heard her play the violin, or any other instrument. Or sing, now that I think about it. She recited poetry, sometimes in German, but she was not what you'd call musical. My father was: though he never finished grammar school, he was an intelligent man and a constant reader, and fond of singing, and could play any instrument put in his hands (though I never put a bowed instrument there). But my mother, no.

In her middle years, when she'd returned to college to get a teaching credential, she most improbably signed up for a music-appreciation course. She had her own way of memorizing themes she was supposed to recognize at exam time: I remember her chanting

see the hor-ses run-ning up and down and up… and… down

to a frisky tune in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, for example. But she never really cottoned to the standard repertory. I can't recall her ever going to a concert. Dad did, once, when I was sick in bed, and couldn't get to a performance of the Santa Rosa Symphony; for some reason he went in my stead, and found it lengthy but occasionally rousing, and even brought me the program, autographed by the night's soloist; who, I don't recall. But my mother, no: she wasn't interested.

The only music I ever heard her approve was, for some reason, Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. I had an ancient recording, conducted by the composer himself, with Erica Stiedry-Wagner sprechtstimming the solo part, and she used to listen to it every now and then, with a determined look in her eye. She said she liked it because it didn't fight with itself, by which I think she meant the lines were clear. I wonder how many of the lay public would have agreed with her. I never thought to ask precisely what it was in the piece that interested her: now that I think about it, it may have been the poetry, written originally in French, translated for Schoenberg's purpose into German — both languages she'd studied, how thoroughly I never really knew, in school, in China.

At any rate, my Requiem. It was commissioned (though no money ever changed hands — a common procedure in those days, at least in my experience) by Christopher Fulkerson, a composer of determinedly modernist bent himself, for his chamber chorus Ariel. This was a vocal octet, the conventional SSAATTBB configuration, but comprising eight very good singers with experience with modernist music, good ears, quite clear diction, and supple phrasing. Chris was a good conductor, too, shaping the lines well, maintaining the pitch, balancing the dynamics, bringing out the poetic heart of the texts.

(A few months earlier, Chris had been instrumental — vocal, I mean — well, no, he didn't talk all that much, he was in fact instrumental — in the production of about a third of my Duchamp opera, at Mills College: he found and rehearsed the chorus, some of whom came from Ariel, and took a solo line himself, very nicely.)


Chris had asked for a piece for a cappella voices, but for some reason I wanted to add the oboe. I wanted an aural emblem of a creature from another dimension, to bring the listener out of the contemplation of dying that any Requiem necessarily involves, and take the listener instead to a dimension we do not yet know, and an oboe in its highest register seemed appropriate.

Nor did I set all the usual text of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. The scary Dies Irae has become a cliché, and anyway death doesn't seem scary to me, in any case shouldn't be dwelled on, I think, as a thing to fear, since after all it is inevitable. And of course the parts about a personal savior don't comply with my own view of things, so I couldn't represent myself as agreeing with certain other components of the Ordinary.

For those parts I substituted two poems by a favorite of mine, Wallace Stevens, who I had reason to believe my mother had also liked, though like so much else his poetry was something we'd never talked about. Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself, with its window on "a new knowledge of reality," gave me a chance to introduce the high keening oboe, and "Of Mere Being," whose "palm at the end of the mind" seemed to promise a symbolic destination of sorts, provide me, at any rate, with a more spiritual, less sentimental, unearthly alternative to conventional ideas of afterlife.

I wasn't around for the rehearsals of the Requiem: as I recall, I first heard it at its premiere, oddly given in the old Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco's North Beach. I thought it went pretty well. I wish I had a better recording of it: the voices in the live recording made, I don't know whether at rehearsal or performance, seem a little off-mike.

I don't have a program of that performance, and I don't know who the eight singers were — a pity. The high soprano, whose coloratura takes her up to a high E, was really spectacular; the two basses were properly sepulchral; everyone in between negotiated the lines splendidly. And Marilyn Coyne — the one name I do know, apart from Chris Fulkerson's — handled a difficult oboe part with grace, drama, and total musicality.

And, while I agree with the painter Jack Jefferson, who told me once, about reviews, that if you agree with the good ones you've got to buy the bad ones too, I can't help liking the review that showed up a couple of days later in the newspaper:

A Program of Modern Works By the Ariel Choral Group

... The night's outstanding item was the premiere of Charles Shere’s moving “Requiem With Oboe” (1985). ...

Shere’s Requiem both uses and shuns the traditional Latin text. Two of its four sections use the Roman Catholic liturgy — “Requiem aeterna” and “Hostias et preces.” But the larger part of the work employs two Wallace Stevens poems: “Not Ideas About the Thing, but the Thing Itself” and “Of Mere Being.”

Shere’s Requiem begins with a trope, “Requiem (mater) aeternam” — “mater” being an insert. Bits of the Latin text turn up briefly within the Stevens poems as well. To all this, Shere added snippets of oboe solos (played by Marilyn Coyne — mostly in the high register) as a kind of genteel wailing (the piece is dedicated to his late mother).

Shere set all this in a devoutly simple style. The idiom strongly leans on 14th and 15th century principles of counterpoint. What is heard is something of the motet manner, only updated into a freely atonal idiom.

What emerged was a softly lamenting cantata, liberated from violence or threats. There is, for instance, no hint of the Last Judgment. Shere has produced a work of tenderness roughly comparable to the Faure Requiem in mood.

— Heuwell Tircuit, San Francisco Chronicle

You can get a copy of the score from Lulu.com for a measly ten dollars plus postage. (Of course the postage is a little exorbitant: be careful the sale site doesn't default to a next-day delivery!) I think you might even be able to download the score as an e-book, though I'm not sure about that. If you don't read music, buy a copy for your local library. If you sing in a chorus, or know someone who does, give it a look. It's not my favorite of my pieces, but I like it. I wouldn't mind hearing it again, maybe even sung by a full chorus. Besides, I've been thinking a lot about my mother lately…

Technorati Tags: My music

Bachelor Machine

IF YOU'VE VISITED this blog before you're no doubt aware of my long-running infatuation with La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, the chef-d'oeuvre Marcel Duchamp abandoned in 1923, which has since attained the status of legend within the annals of Modernism. He had worked on it for ten or twelve years; I worked on it longer, ultimately to an even greater degree of futility.

One of the by-products of this infatuation, in the category of musical composition, was my first piano sonata, composed mostly in 1983 and 1984 while working on the opera I was slowly finishing up. A long ballet dominates the middle of the second act, the center of the opera: it was conceived as representing the mechanical workings of the Bride and her Bachelors, with solo material given, respectively, to violin and piano.

This sonata is the piano material, lacking all other music (solo and choral singing and orchestral accompaniment) but fleshed out slightly with additional notes. (The violin material went into a concerto, about which I recently posted here.)

There are two intentions in this sonata: to make an extended, somewhat virtuosic piece of music for solo piano, and to retain the arbitrary, quirky, stiff characteristic of Duchamp's conception. The part of the bachelor apparatus that is most present is the "chariot" or "glider," a contraption that comes and goes in a reciprocating movement, sounding its "litanies" ("slow life: everyday junk: onanism: buffer of life") and actuating an elaborate train of machinery which ultimately fails to strip bare the bride.

The three movements are called Cadre, Desires and Frustrations, and Action and Inaction. I wouldn't mind finding an English word for the title of the first movement, but nothing quite does what the French cadre does: framework, context, grouping...

The music of the Sonata can also make a fairly substantial Piano Concerto, a Big Concerto to complement the Small Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, but it hasn't yet been notated, except as part of the Duchamp opera. Perhaps one day.

Sonata: Bachelor Machine was first played by Eliane Lust, July 25, 1990, in San Francisco, on a wonderful program also including Debussy's Hommage à Rameau, Bartók's Sonata, 1926, and Schumann's Davidsbündlertänze. What a night! You can watch the incomparable Eliane play one movement of the sonata online.

I've finally prepared what I think is a fairly decent edition of the score of Sonata: Bachelor Machine, available at Lulu.com: click here to order a copy.

Also online: you can hear and purchase an mp3 of the sonata, as synthesized from the score. (At that same site, you can now buy tracks of various pieces of chamber music; more about them in the future, perhaps…)

Violin concerto

I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED eccentric violin concertos, by which I mean those somehow standing aside from the standard repertory. Mozart's, of course; and the Sinfonia Concertante. Harold in Italy. The neglected ones by Schumann, Dvorák, Goldmark, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Lou Harrison; the familiar but still fascinating ones by Sibelius and Berg. In many of these concerti, it seems to me, the soloist stands somewhat apart from the orchestra, the composer's (and the performer's!) strategy for dealing with the differences between the collaborators in terms of dynamic and tonal range and, especially, potential weight. One doesn't like to attribute too much "meaning" to music, but it's hard to escape the thought that the soloist-orchestra dynamic recalls that between Self and Society, or — better, in my opinion, and certainly more representative of my own attitude — Self and Nature.

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From the middle 1960s forward for about twenty years I was absorbed in an operatic "version" of Marcel Duchamp's great painting La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même. The painting, on two sheets of glass, measures about nine feet high by nearly six feet wide, was begun in 1913, and was abandoned ten years later. (It's currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where, the last time I saw it, many years ago, it seemed to need a fair amount of restoration. Several replicas have been made, and are in collections of museums in Tokyo, London, and Stockholm.)

Marcel Duchamp: La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même

Duchamp preceded the actual laying-out of the painting, on its sheets of glass, with fairly elaborate verbal notes and drawings. The most elusive of these was a full-size drawing done in pencil, as I recall, on the plaster wall of an apartment he was living in in Paris in 1912 or so; it has disappeared. Others, though, on various scraps of paper, were carefully retained, and have been published in several editions. Of these perhaps the most important was the Green Box,translated in 1957 by George Hamilton and published three years later in an elegant small-format edition which I bought at the time and began making my own notes in, setting various pages to music. (I've written about all this in a lecture, How I Saw Duchamp, available as a booklet from Frog Peak.)

I was fascinated by La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même for the same reason that years before I had been fascinated by James Joyce's marvelous last novel Finnegans Wake, currently in the news thanks to a fine first-person reader's account by Michael Chabon, published in The New York Review of Books. Both of these masterpieces of Twentieth-century Modernism took their authors years to produce, and were even before their undertaking themselves products of further decades of what you might call internal preparation, in terms of contemplation of the position of man (and Artist) in the context of that epochal time.

And both La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même and Finnegans Wake have grown, since their creation, considerably beyond even that, incorporating huge amounts of critical commentary and subsequent work (in many media) by artists they have influenced. It's as if they — and other similar masterworks — were originally the product of some kind of fertile, prolific mycorrhizal organism. Or, to consider a less alarming, inorganic analogy, as if they were regional testimony to very extensive geological formations, only occasionally becoming visible through such surface evidence as hills and valleys, watercourses, presence of characteristic vegetation.

Man Ray: Dust Breeding

The Nazca plain

(Indeed, Man Ray's photograph of a section of Duchamp's painting, Dust Breeding, treats La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même as precisely that sort of phenomenon: the glass, onto which Duchamp had been gluing lead wires outlining the Chariot region of the work, had been stored flat under his bed, gathering dust; the resulting photo suggests an aerial photograph of the Nazca Lines in the Peruvian desert.)

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MUCH OF MY CONCERTO was composed in Europe: we used to spend a month or two there in alternate summers, taking leaves of absence from our jobs, sometimes touring by car or rail, on other vacations renting a house for a few weeks, or house-sitting when we got the chance. In the late 1970s we spent a couple of weeks on the Ile d'Arz, in the Gulf of Morbihan, near the alignments of Carnac, and there I spent a lot of time thinking about the center section of the opera I was writing to Duchamp's painting. At the center of the opera would be a long ballet, with some singing, which would in some way "depict," or at least somehow comment on, the actual workings of La Mariée mise à nu par ces célibataires, même, as Duchamp described (or at least considered) those workings in the notes published in the Green Box.

At the back of my mind, too, was Alban Berg's wonderfully eccentric Chamber Concerto for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments. I knew I wanted the dancers in this ballet to move among musical instruments. Two wind quartets and two string quartets would be on stage; also the piano. The lower half of Duchamp's painting — the "Bachelor Region," with its prominent central "Chocolate Grinder" — was probably the inspiration for my imaginary mise-en-scène; the Grinder suggested the piano.

Above, the painting represents the "Bride Region," with the Bride's "Halo" along the top, surrounding its three empty squares, and the "Hanging female thing" at the left. The lowest part of this Pendu femelle irresistably suggested a violin bow: very well: a violinist would be somehow levitating downstage center above the piano and its surrounding accompanying quartets, the rest of the orchestra in its pit between stage and audience.

Bride: violin; Bachelors: wind instruments; Grinder: piano.

The two concertos would be interleaved, movement by movement, only occasionally superimposed. A fair amount of the music was sketched that summer on the Ile d'Arz and elsewhere, and in 1985 I extracted the violin concerto component from the opera score so that it could be performed separately. Unfortunately, the first movement of the violin concerto, which depended heavily on two wind quartets whose music was notated graphically, resisted all my attempts at a conventionally notated realization, so it is omitted from the stand-alone version, and the second movement has been broken into two sections to provide the conventional three movements of the concerto form. (Perhaps one day I'll solve that notational problem.)

(As for the Piano Concerto, it has yet to be extracted from the opera score. The solo music for the piano has been, however: it's available as the Sonata: Bachelor Machine, completed in 1989; one movement of the piece can be seen, performed by the estimable Eliane Lust, here.)

In 1987, I think it was, the Cabrillo Music Festival approached me asking about any not-quite-finished orchestral pieces I might have, and I mentioned the Violin Concerto. Fine, they said, they'd like to see it. I handed it in, as it then stood, not quite filled out, and the original first movement still missing. After a few weeks I heard that they were intrigued by its "spareness," and that they wanted to give it a concert reading on a program devoted to new pieces perhaps not yet quite finished.

I had heard the San Francisco violinist Beni Shinohara, who had been playing chamber music with Eliane, and had been greatly impressed with her musicianship, tone, and intellectual curiosity. She agreed to take the project on, and somehow persuaded a friend, the pianist-conductor Joan Nagano, to help, by improvising a condensation of the orchestral accompaniment for solo piano, thereby extending the concerto's mycorrhizal network into a sonata for violin and piano — which I have neither seen nor heard.

The Cabrillo connection suggested a little joke to me, and I incorporated the snare drum part from Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra into my own score. Lou was a fixture at the Cabrillo Festival; I admired him and his Koncerto, as he preferred to call it; and it had itself been inspired by Alban Berg's violin concerto. So I lifted the snare drum part, exactly as it sounds in his concerto, at the original tempo and loudness and pacing. (This of course required my completely re-notating and thus considerably complicating Lou's original "spelling" of the music.)

Beni played beautifully, and it didn't hurt that she looked splendid, too. Much of the actual concert was a mess, with inept conducting and inadequately prepared orchestral parts, not to mention uninteresting composition. Daniel Carriaga referred to all this in his review in the Los Angeles Times:

…Saturday afternoon, five works from the California Composers Project were unveiled by the Festival Orchestra.

The players' patience was sorely tried with this event. Only Charles Shere's spare but gloomy Concerto for Violin and Harp, Percussion and Small Orchestra (1985) deserved such a showcase.

Shere's brooding and intense concerto, an essay in small, telling musical gestures, occupies its 15 minutes engagingly. It was performed sensitively by violinist Beni Shinohara, solidly accompanied by the orchestra led by Ken Harrison.

Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1990 (retrieved July 7, 2012)

For my concerto, though, the violist and assistant conductor Ken Harrison had accepted full responsibility, had learned the score perfectly, and conducted gracefully and effectively. The orchestra, too, seemed intrigued and appreciative. I remember the first trombonist, for example, thanking me for writing for alto trombone, an instrument far too neglected. (Its solo injections, i.e. at m. 35 in the second movement, owe something to Ravel's Bolero, to continue the thread of musical cross-pollination.)

After the performance Beni asked me what the piece was about. I'd refrained from any such discussion while she was preparing it, but was willing enough to hint at things now. The violin is Duchamp's "sex-wasp," I told her. I was a little embarrassed: well, it’s about the Bride being ready, and the Bachelors never quite engaging. I thought it was something like that, she said. (Beni's husband Katsuto is a respected urologist, who some years later, coincidentally, I was to meet in a professional capacity.)

I ran into Lou, too, who seemed intrigued by the piece, and I confessed I'd stolen the snare drum from his Koncerto. "Better you'd have lifted the violin part," he replied.

I wish I could share with you the recording made from the radio broadcast of the concert. The piece has not been performed since its premiere — all too often such premieres are in fact dernieres as well. I've finally got around to publishing the score, though, and you can now buy it online, and perhaps, if you're very clever, synthesize another performance — or even convince another orchestra to schedule it. I'll supply the orchestral parts!