Program Notes Beth Anderson 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. --George Yefchak
Program Notes
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.
--George Yefchak
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