Robert Hughes

bass clarinet, contrabassoon, 3 gongs; Alternative: bassoon, tuba, and contrabass

Music for Geraldine was composed as a serenade for the newly arrived Geraldine Tiepolo, grandchild of Agnes Albert, head of Patrons of Art and Music for the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The work for gongs, bass clarinet, and contrabassoon transforms the tonal range of the bass clef into lyrical passages and lullabies and ends with a hearty signoff.

Describing the “unheard-of combo,” the San Francisco Chronicle music critic Robert Commanday called the work “The wittiest and best-fangled serenade ever dedicated to an infant . . . a genuinely musical treat. . . .  The gongs were dressed in shirts, then belts of wide  rubber bands, and finally they were placed face down on the cloth piano cover.”

 Commanday also divulged that the three-month old infant was not able to attend her special tribute, “The family advised us [the audience] that she had been hitting the bottle and was sleeping it off” (San Francisco Chronicle, February 2, 1965).

Alexander Fried of the San Francisco Examiner, reviewing a reprise performance of the work at the Palace of the Legion of Honor on February 23, 1965, hailed Geraldine, who “surely broke all records by being the youngest human being ever to be carried onstage for a concert curtain call” (San Francisco Examiner, February 25, 1965)