Richard Felciano likes to quote Picasso's remark that "Beauty is not the problem in painting; the problem is the materials." In music, the material is...

Richard Felciano likes to quote Picasso's remark that "Beauty is not the problem in painting; the problem is the materials." In music, the material is sound, itself, and Felciano became fascinated with acoustics and the way in which traditional instruments and voices, as well as new electronic resources, if better understood acoustically, might yield newly beautiful composite sonorities in expressive forms, appropriate to them. Richard Felciano grew up in California's wine country, went to Paris to study with Milhaud and Messiaen, then to Italy to work with Dallapiccola. A Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, he is founder of the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies, an interdisciplinary facility linking music, cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, and architecture, disciplines which have informed much of his work. The composer writes: "Boccaccio's 14th-century Decameron was in many ways the first modern work, portraying not gods or princes or humans represented allegorically, but real people in real situations - people in all of their contradictions, aspirations, suffering, humor, idealism, and absurdities. And he presented them all with an affectionate humanist embrace, reflecting the Renaissance of which he was a part. While modern America may seem far removed from Renaissance Florence, it is precisely this characteristic which I began to sense in reading Studs Terkel's interviews; I then knew that I wanted to create the present song cycle. Throughout the process, Studs has been wonderfully supportive, both of the music's creation and its recording."