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Sometime before Christmas 1999, Matthew Shlomowitz phones me to say some friends and colleagues at the University of Southern California (San Diego) will be forming an ensemble, and invites me to write a piece for their debut concert the following May. On 4 December I go to Strasbourg to give a recital with Chris Newman, and he makes me a present of a small "life in pictures" of Marcel Duchamp. One illustration particularly captures my attention, depicting Duchamp with Apollinaire and the Picabias at a performance of Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa at the Theatre Antoine. I had bought Rayner Heppenstall's translation of Roussel's novel in 1967, the year after it was published by Calder and Boyars. Roussel's techniques of developmental montage, variously juxtaposing and revealing extraordinary, unpredictable, and often disconcerting connections between apparently unrelated words, ideas, and symbols, obviously influenced my own writing at a formative stage of its development.
Early 1960s. Neither the school's Career Officer nor my family knows what "composer of serious music" means. It's not a job, even if it might be classified as a hobby, so maybe it's a "calling"-like the priesthood. They wisely recommend Teaching instead. I study hard, and am rewarded with dreadful and puzzling migraines. I also consider composition more closely and astutely: it seems to be all around me, all the time, in the street, in the classroom, on the playing field, everywhere-sound composing itself One just needs to listen.
I eventually have some time to assemble ideas for this piece in late February. One of the pianos will represent the Impressions while the other instruments (flute, trombone, cello, a second piano, percussion) will variously stand for Duchamp, Apollinaire, Gabriele Buffet, and Francis Picabia individually responding to Roussel's drama. I've agreed to ten minutes as the duration, and set about selecting eight episodes from the novel (not the play). Eight seems like the right number. Starting from the beginning (page 9), I then move forward approximately 50 pages (to 56/57), another fifty (to 108), and so on (to 156, 207, 256, 279, and 316). Most of the episodes, by chance, involve music. Two of them mention the character Marguerite (in Faust). The episodes appear as spoken announcements between the (as yet unwritten) eight sections of...