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In the gentle pun of
his title Allen Anderson hints at
expansive, ambitious themes: the mutuality of ordinary
and extraordinary experience, the capacity to transform
dailyness through imagination, and the complementary
capability to recast and dramatize this process through
art. Drawn From Life--The title begs big questions: is
the compositional process one of "drawing out,"
"extracting"?; or is it "sketching,"
"observing," "displacement"? Or is it
both? The mix of explicitness and ambiguity, modesty and
expansiveness, in Anderson's title seems entirely apt,
for his artistic sensibilities are at once dramatic and
reserved; they're strongly affected by a self-aware
appreciation that the art/life negotiation is delicate,
that it can involve subtle interactions of observation
and feeling, revelation and convention.
To my mind, Anderson's astute, impassioned, reflective
musical transactions of life into art, bear a strong
kinship to the poetic world of Wallace Stevens. In a
small, late poem, "The World as Meditation,"
Stevens revisits a mythic predicament--Penelope's
expectation of Ulysses' return--and takes it as an
occasion for allegory. The poem begins with a moment of
watchfulness and heightened awareness:
Is it Ulysses that
approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving.
The movement that
Penelope notices turns out to be the rising sun; and, in
Stevens' retelling, this most fundamental, quotidian
condition incites an ecstatic, recurring vision of
Ulysses' return. The poetic narrator elaborates on this
premise, associating the pulse of Penelope's thought with
that of her heart, and, even more, with the diurnal
rhythm of day breaking. And with this figurative
juxtaposition of the most ordinary and extraordinary of
life's possibilities, the poem's pulse itself seems to
quicken, moving to a climactic irony:
But was it Ulysses? Or
was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her
heart.
The two kept beating together, It was only day.
Stevens points to a way
of understanding this ironic outcome--"only
day," at the edge of "The World As
Meditation," in the poem's epigraph. A fragmentary
quotation from an unlikely figure, the composer Georges
Enesco, appears there, alluding to a latent
theme--Penelope's weaving and its allegorical
correlative: the particular discipline of artistic labor
and the capacity of this labor to transform daily life.
The "exercise essentiel du compositeur," Enesco
declares, is "la meditation."
This allegory of art
emerging from daily life came to mind repeatedly as I
reflected on the special pleasures and insights I've
taken from the music of Allen Anderson. Each of the three
works presented here draws deeply from the celebration
and commemoration of daily life. In the title work, a
five-movement, solo piano piece (which the composer calls
a "garland of commemoratives)," some of the
events recollected and transformed parallel aspects of
Penelope's story: "a homecoming, a wedding, time
spent in a castaway corner of Italy, the influence of
place and a friend's birthday." In all three works,
weddings abound--three are celebrated here, in both the
final piece of Solfeggietti, another
suite for piano, and the second movement of the String
Quartet. as well as the second piece of Drawn
From Life. Sometimes the occasion commemorated
is literally inscribed in the music: in both Solfeggietti
and the String Quartet, Anderson
assembles a musical alphabet to spell out the initials or
names of dear friends.
At first blush, Anderson's response to so many weddings,
birthdays, and homecomings may seem incongruous or even
startling. Certainly, his dailyness is a far cry from the
familiar evocations of daily life in American concert
music--Ives' boisterous holidays or Copand's nostalgic
landscapes. Anderson takes us far from the wide lawns of
Barber's Knoxville to a less innocent place, where the
transmutation of experience is more intense, and the
conventions of representing daily life more subtle and
ephemeral. Moreover, by contrast to Stevens' literary
evocation of art drawn from life, Anderson requires
neither allegorical description nor ironic juxtaposition;
music has more astute and powerful modes of enactment. In
Anderson's music, we repeatedly find ourselves teetering
at a musical borderline between experiences found and
experiences made --where the inchoate musical gesture
mutates momentarily into a musical line, where expressive
nuances fleetingly become structural motives, where
feeling confronts form. And, although we often talk about
music in terms of "form"/"content"
interactions, Anderson's compositions explore an
especially refined balance. They fight their own
distinctive battles; they achieve their own distinctive
poise.
Especially in the more intimate solo piano pieces, the
surface flickers fitfully, almost imperceptibly, between
eruptions of raw musical energy and more refined
actions--the piecing together of intricate contrapuntal
puzzles. So also for the larger scale and slower musical
rhythms: formal articulations and the metabolic flow of
feeling seem to emerge, one from the other without ever
quite merging or becoming entirely distinct. A couple of
examples: "Rolling Stock," the fourth of the
five movements of Drawn From Life,
echoes the rumbling and releases the energies of a
freight train on the move; but it also embodies a place
memory that's more formal than mimetic. In Anderson's
words, it's "an attempt to capture in musical
patterns something of the Renaissance architectural
symmetry I saw all around me in Italy." Thus a
poised unfolding of formal proportions counterbalances an
ongoing rush of sonorous gestures. And a delicately
delineated contrapuntal structure intermittently flickers
to the surface in the minute details of "Rolling
Stock," as well, rising out of, and returning into
its ongoing rumbling figurations and arpeggiations. I
hear this subtle movement between mimetic gesture and
contrapuntal design as a boundary phenomenon, a playful
exploration of the borderline where the apprehension of
an abstract form emerges from a more primary, inchoate
experience.
In other contexts, Anderson's music can evoke a similar
sense of flickering, but at a different border, between
more unstable structures and a more dramatic, struggling
self-consciousness. In "Chaconne," the second
movement of Solfeggietti, a lullabye
tune and the oscillating figures of its accompaniment
comprise a two-part texture and a dynamic premise for
variations. Through the set that follows, the melodic
element of the texture reappears fitfully, while the
accompanimental premise progresses more gradually from
measured to unmeasured repetitions or
oscillations--drum-like reiterated notes, slow, metrical
trilling motives, freely accelerating figures, and
finally tremolos. The original opposition of melody and
accompaniment thus comes to be linked to a more dramatic
opposition: gradual process vs. erratic eruption; and, in
the third variation, the gradualness of the accompaniment
process yields abruptly to the suddenness of the melodic
outburst, precipitating a registral thrust to the
movement's climactic high point. The preceding sense of
struggle between two elements gives the motion to the
climax an especially animistic feel; and in that context,
a long fermata at the climax and the momentary
tentativeness of its immediate aftermath seem a very
interior, conscious response--a moment of psychological
recovery, as if the music itself had been briefly
startled, almost paralyzed. This moment of dramatic
intensification is revelatory as well, a juncture point
where "experience" and "form" meet:
the potential for structural stasis latent in the opening
oscillating figures of the "Chaconne" comes to
fruition in this climax, when the music's
"persona" becomes especially vivid, but vividly
uncertain--when the music itself seems lost.
Whether or not the listener will hear such moments in the
elaborately emblematic ways I've suggested, there are
many such stunning passages of dramatic and formal
richness along the way in Drawn From Life,
Solfeggietti, and the String
Quartet. Not surprisingly, the String Quartet
involves the most extended treatment of musical forms; it
draws from life in the longest, often broadest, lines:
"Its first movement," the composer writes, is
"marked Animato/Reservato, [and it] opposes two
irreconcilable musics, one which is angry compressed and
fitful, the other introspective, world-weary, even
desolate. Beginning in turbulence and strife, the
movements gives way to ever longer periods of the
reserved music, eventually conceding to the vast and
serene." Anderson has described the second movement
of the Quartet as "a wedding present for two
musician friends...the character of [whose] variations
arise from an assortment of musical genres which have
played a role in our relationship over the years. The
five variations and finale proceed: like a viol consort,
madrigal, scherzo I, scherzo II, popular song and
finale." The final movement is a formal hybrid,
partly through-composed, partly a rondo; in its last
moments, the movement provides a modest moment of
discovery, finding an opportunity for closure in a
recollection of its opening.
By contrast to the Quartet, the five-movements of Drawn
From Life each explores a more singular image
and set of associations, if in equally-nuanced music.
Progressing from the sprung rhythms and chorale
prelude-like opening of "Springer," it moves on
to the brief wedding piece, "Romance," which
celebrates the "ecstasies of love," as Anderson
has indicated, and "Klava in Strada," named
after a painting by George Lawson ("Klava") and
the town in Italy where it was composed (Strada). After
"Rolling Stock," the set ends with
"Fortune's Telling," a birthday commemorative
which "attempt[s] to speak honestly and directly,
from one to another," and arrives at an especially
refined and poignant process of closure.
In terms of the form/expression dialectic, Solfeggietti
falls between the other two works. A formally taut set of
character pieces, it is at once more intimate than the
Quartet and more thoroughly conditioned by conventional
forms than Drawn From Life. "The material for each
movement is derived from the conversion into pitches of
the name or names of friends," Anderson writes,
"and hence the composition's title. 'Caprice' is a
fast-medium-fast movement spun from ribbons of tune.
'Chaconne', variations on a chord progression, begins and
ends with a lullaby tune, and includes among its
variations a reference to Liszt's 'La Chapelle de
Guillaume Tell'. 'Scherzo' with trio, which concludes the
set, jockeys between whimsy and a punchy, slightly jazzy
turbulence."
For the composer, as for
Stevens' mythic weaver, life is drawn from art as much as
art from life. Allen Anderson has drawn his extraordinary
music not only from friendships and travels, but from a
messy profusion of musical influences, experiences, and
aspirations. Like a large share of the composers in this
country, Anderson was born neither to modernism nor the
compositional vocation. He began his musical career as a
teenage, rock guitarist--without the characteristic
benefit of childhood piano lessons, but with otherwise
unexceptional, if extraordinarily intense, pop music
enthusiasms: the Yardbirds, the Jefferson Airplane, the
Byrds, for example. The tight song structures of the
Beatles first demonstrated to him that musical
construction, as well as improvisation, had its own
special potentials. In high school, he began to stray off
the beaten path, turning to sitar performance and North
Indian music, to Ives, Stravinsky, and Milhaud, to John
Cage's prose and George Crumb's sounds. Later, in
college--and already composing "on the sly"--he
began to experience the power of concentrated musical
designs more intensely, encountering, among other
inspiring antecedents, the late Stravinsky, The
Well-tempered Clavier, and such European avant-gardists
as Berio and Boulez. And as a graduate student, the music
of Elliott Carter, Donald Martino, and his principal
teacher, Seymour Shifrin became particularly significant.
And so it goes, on an on: for composers, performers, or
listeners alike, there is no end to such catalogues of
influences, musical and otherwise, and no end to the
variety of ways such influences can be assimilated,
combined, or transformed. But what can we take from the
preceding list? It's eclectic, but it shouldn't be too
surprising. Rather, it suggests an overarching
progression: from a performer's elated confrontation with
the power of music, to a growing appreciation of the
unfamiliar, of how much may be revealed at the far edge
of musical familiarity, and then to an awareness of how
such revelation and power may be focused in musical
forms. But beyond the particulars of their musical
antecedents, the works for solo piano and string quartet
on this disc celebrate the processes of influence
themselves. They permit the conversation between art and
life to unfold and develop, resourcefully, magnanimously,
uninhibited.
- Martin Brody
ALLEN ANDERSON
was born in Palo Alto, California in 1951. He studied at
the University of California, Berkeley and Brandeis
University, where his principal composition teachers were
Seymour Shifrin and Martin Boykan. He has been
commissioned by the Koussevitsky, Guggenheim and Fromm
Foundations, as well as by Chamber Music America and the
American Music Center. He has taught at Brandeis
University, Wellesley College, Columbia University, and
is presently Associate Professor of Music at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Charrette,
written for Speculum Musicae, has been recorded on CRI
617. His music is published by C.F. Peters, Margun and
APNM.
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