For solo guitar. Duration: c. 5 mins.

LISTEN

In 2007 the filmmaker George C. Stoney asked me to write music for a film he was making with David Bagnall about the French/American sculptor Gaston Lachaise. Over the next few months I worked with them both, adjusting whatever I wrote as the film progressed and changed shape. Flesh in Ecstasy, as the film was titled, was finished in 2008 with me playing the music. Later that year I created a concert version of the score that included music that hadn’t been used in the final version of the film. I gave it the title Gaston Amoureux because of Lachaise’s lifelong love for and obsession with one woman. The music is based entirely on the inversion of part of the opening of Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and the first full chord in that piece – a minor triad with an added sixth, which is also one of the Tristan chords. I premiered this concert version at a memorial for George Stoney at the Henry Street Settlement, New York in 2012. – Michael Calvert

Gaston Amoureux was recorded in 2015 by Matthew Marshall on the album Rhapsody on a Riff (Ravello Records RR7907).