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JazzDigger Home > C - Jazz Artists > Gary Campbell > Item 1
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Swales and Angels
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by Ilia Laporev, Beth Anderson, Gary M. Schneider, Andrew Bolotowsky, and André Tarantiles
Sales Rank: 99296
Price:$17.99
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Album Details
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1. March Swale
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2. Pennyroyal Swale
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3. New Mexico Swale
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4. The Angel
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5. January Swale
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6. Rosemary Swale
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7. Piano Concerto
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Beth Anderson (b. 1950) writes chamber music of great beauty, generally simple tonality, and luminous textures. Shes adopted a deceptively unmilitant motto"To make something beautiful is revolutionary"and describes herself oxymoronically on her web page as a "neo-romantic, avant-garde composer," words that wouldnt fit together for any other composer. Her chamber music betrays its twentieth-century roots in its pervasive use of collage. Her preferred form, and one she invented herself, is the swale: a term for a meadow or marsh in which a lot of plants grow together, and by extension a musical piece in which diverse musical ideas and even styles grow side by side.
In Andersons swales, thenfive of which are on this recordingdifferent themes, styles, moods pop up and succeed each other with cheery disregard for linear developmentthough, as in any field, the same plants recur amongst each other, giving the disparate collections a family unity. Thus she has evolved a music that seems texturally and tonally conventional measure-by-measure, but whose succession of stylesmodal, nineteenth-century, Bartókian, bluegrasschart out radical postmodern territory indeed. Yet, unlike the collage techniques of Cage, Stockhausen, and John Zorn, Anderson is never abrupt or mechanical, but smooths her swale elements together in an intuitively convincing stream of consciousness.
Collage is not Andersons only mode, as is made clear by The Angel (1988), a more linear solo-voice cantata. The succession of idiomshymnlike passages, a fugue, a marchthat might occur in one of Andersons swales here follow according to the changing mood of the text. Though pretty, the piece is not afraid of stark harmonic contrasts, and plunges through some dark chromaticism before the sweet C major of the final verses. Yet Anderson never indulges in emotionalism or pathos; one might call The Angel, in this respect, a feminine counterpart to Erik Saties Socrate, another calm meditation on death. The deceptively simple Piano Concertoa concerto for an orchestra of six players plus soloistis one of the most joyous of Andersons works.
There is something unique about the naturalness of Andersons music, its free stream-of-consciousness, its convincing ability to wander through styles to fit the mood of the moment, yet without losing a feeling of unity. It fits perfectly Mozarts idea of an "artless art" in which the composers efforts became invisible.
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Swales and Angels
by Ilia Laporev, Beth Anderson, Gary M. Schneider, Andrew Bolotowsky, and André Tarantiles
Price:$17.99
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