Thursday, December 15, 2016

Women Composers: Beth Anderson

Starting with my August 23rd post, I'm exploring (to me) unfamiliar music by women composers. I'm  beginning with the composers whom Barbara Harbach mentioned there.

Beth Anderson is a Kentucky native, a student of John Cage, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley, Larry Austin, and others, according to good ol' Wikipedia, which states, "[She] is best known in her field for her swales, a musical form she invented based on collages and samples of newly composed music rather than existing music. She told a reporter for the New York Times in 1995 she named the form based on this definition of the word: 'A swale is a meadow or marsh where a lot of wild things go together.'"

Here is her website: http://www.beand.com.  And here are two of her pieces that I found on YouTube, including photographs by James Archambault. (He is a favorite photographer: my wife Beth was given one of Archambeault's photographs during a leadership conference she attended in Kentucky.) Beautiful music!   

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