Perhaps we have come to Taliesin to meet the Great Man and Fire Music is his pitch to us for a new design — the incendiary ferocity of his rhetoric, the grandiosity of his language, the self-assurance bordering on hubris, of the man. I imagine Mr. Wright, hands on hips, daring us not to commission him. Those acquainted with Wright’s life already know the terrible role fire played in it: his Xanadu in Spring Green, Taliesin, was twice devastated, and it claimed the lives of his lover Mamah Cheney and her children. The first gesture of the piece may as well be an igniting spark and the rest of it the roaring of the flames.

At the center of the piece are three ideas: the first is is a four note cell, heard at the beginning, that grows into a snake-like worm, insinuating and ever-growing. The timpani plays the second idea &mdash a driving rhythmic cell. The harp, piano, vibraphone and marimba give the third idea — an ersatz Protestant Hymn that Wright’s own father might have taught him. The fourth idea is the theme that, in the opera, Wright uses to pitch his plan (while pitching woo) for what would become the Cheney House in Chicago to Mamah. In Shining Brow, he sings, in the words of Paul Muldoon, "Each room opens into the next, Mamah, so that one may follow one’s bent, as it were, from the living room through the den to the bedroom." The four ideas are presented in collage.

Commissioned by Dr. Frances Grover and the Long Beach (Ca) Symphony Orchestra and premiered by the LBSO on 22 March 1992 at the Music Hall, Long Beach, California, the piece is dedicated to the LBSO, and to their music director JoAnn Falletta, who conducted the first performance.