Charles Shere (born Berkeley, California, 1935) grew up in the Bay Area. He studied composition with Luciano Berio at Mills College and with Robert Erickson privately and at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He was Music Director at KPFA-fm, Berkeley, 1964-67, Lecturer at Mills College, Oakland, 1973-84, and art and music critic at the Oakland Tribune, 1972-88. He was the founding editor and publisher of the legendary new-music periodical Ear, and is the author of several books on music and on contemporary American composers.

Charles Shere's music includes works for a wide variety of media, including opera, orchestral and chamber works, vocal music, and incidental music for theater. He has worked extensively with texts by Gertrude Stein, including operas to Ladies Voices (1987), I Like It to Be a Play (1989), and What Happened A Play (in progress), several sets of songs to poems from Tender Buttons, and the in-progress Composition as Retrospect, for speaking voice and piano. His The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1964-86) is a full-length opera in three acts to texts by Marcel Duchamp; Duchamp texts also figure into his The Box of 1914 (1980) -- premiered by John Adams and the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble.