Catkin
1 sound
During our recent months of quarantine, I found great solace in almost daily walks along the beautiful Mystic river. The traumatic sense of isolation made it difficult to even think of composing music, but slowly, as the seasons inevitably unfolded, things that I saw and experienced along the riverbank began to suggest musical sounds. My short piece, Catkin for solo oboe, was the result. The plangent sound of the oboe evokes both solitude and a sense of the almost pastoral environment, and the music expands in ways that I hope will remind listeners of organic growth and the riparian landscape through which the Mystic flows.
Composer Charles Shadle (b.1960) has taught music at MIT for the last 30 years. He was educated at the University of Colorado, Tulane University and Brandeis University, and is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
