Beth Anderson
b. 1950
Minnesota Swale
No one can be
a composer unless he or she can take dictation on Schönberg's music and
get it right the first time. This was the prevailing attitude at the
University of Kentucky in the late 1960s, where Beth Anderson studied
piano performance. After a chance meeting with John Cage in 1968, Anderson
decided to leave Kentucky and eventually attended the University of
California at Davis. Anderson mastered the avant garde traditions
there, first writing twelve-tone music in the style of Schönberg and later
progressing to the minimalist forms of Cage and Terry Riley. Cage and
Riley were strong influences in other ways as well. Cage told her "Anyone
can be a composer," which contradicted her experience at the University of
Kentucky. During her graduate studies at Mills College in Oakland, Riley
assured her that tonal and modal harmony are not passé -- clearly a view
Anderson continues to hold today. "To make something beautiful," she
writes, "is revolutionary."
Anderson's
compositions span a wide range of musical forms, from vocal, instrumental,
and electronic compositions to off-Broadway musicals, dance scores, and
orchestral works. In the 1980s her music took on a post-Romantic vein,
with pleasant harmonies and melodies appearing in unconventional ways. She
has titled many of her recent pieces "Swales," a term used to describe a
marsh where diverse plant species grow and thrive together. Anderson's
swales are musical collages -- diverse themes, tempos, or harmonies follow
one another, changing "with the speed of e-mail," as composer Frederick
Rzewski commented. But the result is not to jar the listener with clashes
of incompatible sounds. Rather, Anderson's diverse musical materials blend
like flowers and greenery in a beautiful bouquet.
Minnesota
Swale was composed in 1993 at the request of Jay Fishman, conductor of
the Minnesota Sinfonia. The work was premiered in 1994, with Fishman at
the podium. Afterwards the Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote, "It's
music that's easy to like, even though, because it refers to an earlier
idiom, it probably seems less original than it is." The music begins with
a gentle string chorale, then a lyrical melody is introduced by the
glockenspiel. Suddenly the trumpet introduces a new theme in harmonic
minor as the cellos play a rhythmic bass ostinato. The musical character
continues to change like this every few moments, as tonalities shift
between natural and harmonic minors, to Locrean, and even pentatonic
modes. At one point, the music appears to be swept away, perhaps by an
unexpected breeze, after which the oboes return to the trumpet's theme as
if nothing happened. The clarinet plays a brilliant "Klezmeresque" solo
over the now-familiar cello ostinato, followed by an improvised percussion
cadenza (featuring, in today's performance, a thunder sheet, duck calls,
and recorded crickets). A few more changes in musical character follow,
then the two opening themes reappear and the music peacefully fades away.
September 27, 2003
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