Interview, Fanfare Magazine, November 2025
In your interview with David DeBoor Canfield, you revealed that you studied with Peter Maxwell Davies, and there’s a link to Milton Babbitt, too (who said some very nice things about you)! Listening to your music, one can hear that you are very much your own man! How did you forge your own musical identity? Was that encouraged by these great names?
As to teachers, probably the most important teacher for me was my first one, Malcolm Peyton. I studied for four years at the New England Conservatory with him. I first met Max Davies when I was a student at Tanglewood in the 1970s. He told me I should go to London, which I did. When I went to London, I asked (at Mac Peyton’s bidding) if I could study with him if I went to London, and he said, “I don’t teach, but if it’ll do you any good you can say you’re studying with me.” In any case, in the two years I was in London I saw Max about once a month in the first year, and about once every other month the second year. I showed him what I was doing and he reacted to it, which is, I guess, studying. At the end of the time I was in London, I was in Max’s composition seminar at Dartington Summer School, and I went back there for four other summers in following years, so I guess I actually did study with him, whatever he said.
You imply you also studied with Virgil Thomson? Certainly you mention Wheatfield at Noon (1948) as an influence—a wonderfully atmospheric piece, part of the Three Pictures for Orchestra (I notice Thomson’s own recording with the Philadelphia emphasizes a bit of “grit” to the harmonies!) and Gesualdo’s “Moro, lasso, il mio duolo” from the Sixth Book of Madrigals, too, as regards The Bees: both share the idea of chord progressions that encompass the total chromatic (or almost). Presumably that was the appeal? Also, both tackle the “challenge” with different results. Was it not just the idea but the direction it can take that appealed?
I knew Virgil’s music from the time I was in high school, most especially the Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1926–28), which is a really fabulous piece. I met Virgil because when I was in London I was teaching at a school (The Sir James Barrie Junior School in Wandsworth) and I wrote a piece for students to do which was a setting of The Shepherd by Blake, and during the composition of the piece I discovered that the notes of Jesus Loves Me are the same as the notes of Sheep May Safely Graze. Since Jesus Loves Me is an important in the Symphony on a Hymn Tune, I dedicated the piece to Virgil and sent it to him ... he answered, and said probably the nicest thing anybody has said about my music: “Thank you very much for sending me your piece, which is very pretty and not at all stupid.”
It turned out that he was going to be in London about a month later, so I met him. I kept in touch after that, and, in fact one summer Scott Wheeler and I went to New York and actually studied privately with Virgil ... primarily dealing with word setting and orchestration. I never studied with Milton. I got to know him from performing his music, initially with the new music group in Boston called Dinosaur Annex, which I started with Scott Wheeler and Ezra Sims. I was just starting to learn the Composition for Viola and Piano, and I had a chance to play the piano solo part for him because he was in Boston for something. When I did, he said, “you can tell you’re a composer.” The sort of ambiguous compliment Milton often made. You can tell you’re a composer because of the insightfulness of your playing or you can tell you’re a composer because you’re sure not a pianist.... Anyway, things went on from there. I was in June in Buffalo one year when Milton was there, and I was in one of his masterclasses, but I remember most strongly an afternoon I spent with him in a bar in Buffalo, during the course of which he analyzed the lyrics of I Only Have Eyes for You. It was staggering and brilliant. and I have a very, very strong and vivid memory of the experience although I don’t remember anything at all of what he said!
Were there any other composers who influenced you?
Two other composers had a strong influence on me: Arthur Berger, whose music I knew—well, some of it—the wind quartet and the cello duo in high school, and whom I got to know when I was at NEC, and then studied with at Brandeis; and Ezra Sims, whose influence covers everything from getting to know and adore Thorton Wilder, Ronald Firbank, and P. G. Wodehouse, to preferring Romano to Parmesan, to getting to know certain fringe New York Theater people like Jimmy Waring and Arthur Williams, who were friends of Ezra’s.
None of those people discouraged me, certainly. I guess they encouraged me. They certainly were enormous influences, probably mostly by example in their compositions and in their intellectual and musical lives. I will say that I came along just at the fringe of the domination of a thinking about what was the only acceptable language for serious music—12-tone, atonal, serial ... all those terms which got thrown around and which were mostly meaningless and which mostly people, even and maybe most especially the people who were the strongest advocates and enforcers, didn’t really understand. One of the most important and striking things about Max, when I first got to know him and his music, was the discovery that an undeniably serious and important composer could incorporate foxtrots and stuff that sounded like Scottish folk music in his music.
In that previous interview there’s a lot about your teachers. But what about your own teaching? In the notes to the beautiful disc Of Mere Being you state you taught at Greenwood Music Camp for some 30 years. What’s your teaching style like? I loved your stories of Max previously, but I imagine you didn’t model yourself on his ways.
In my teaching I think mostly I try to help students find their voice and figure out how to make their pieces. One of the questions I most often ask students about their pieces is “what does it do?” My teaching at Greenwood was mostly in coaching chamber music. I learned an enormous amount from doing it, and got much, much better as I did it more. I was also able to get to know a lot of repertory—both traditional and recent—and to expose students to a lot of repertory—both traditional and recent.
Is it useful to divide composer’s lives into periods? (I’m thinking Beethoven because I’ve been working on reviewing the late string quartets these past few days!) Is that useful for you? In which case, how would you define those periods and what are their characteristics?
The period thing is sort of hard for me to see (I suspect it would have been hard for Beethoven, for that matter). I suppose I can see breakthrough moments—writing a piece for members of Dinosaur Annex called A Little Cowboy Music which used cowboy tunes, but didn’t necessarily harmonize them or treat them in any sort of traditional way. Actually, The Bees was a turning point, due to its somehow solidifying what I understood about the triadic thing from Wheatfields at Noon and its associated hexatonic cycles. Friendly Fire, which was on the earlier Metier disc was another point. Lately, I’ve been pondering continuity and braiding different “narrative strands.” I first thought about this in an instrumental piece I wrote for Greenwood, called Detour (the title is a pun: the piece is for 10 instruments, it also ended up including the Patti Page song of that title), and more recently in a piece called The Four Seasons, written for Collage New Music two years ago (I think). I’m currently pondering it in relationship to a piece I want to write for soprano saxophone, viola, and piano. It’s going to be “about” Samson—and other things. Eyeless in Gaza is the tile of a Huxley novel, but it’s a line from Samson Agonistes by Milton.
The first thing to strike me on listening was not harmonic, but the words: you set the text so that every word is audible. So, let’s start with words, and here for Of Mere Being, they are by Wallace Stevens. What do Stevens’s writings mean to you—what’s the attraction? You return to him in the wonderfully mellifluous “On the Road Home.”
As for words—that’s one of Virgil’s preoccupations (and mine), and one of the things which I seriously learned from him. I’m certainly concerned to present the words of texts as clearly, and for lack of a better word, as sensitively as possible. I’m not sure that I have anything specific to say about the Stevens settings, except that maybe your reaction to them might imply that I succeeded....
Three poems by Richard Wilbur follow: “A Pasture Poem” centers on the beauty of nature. You create very different soundscape: “A Pasture Poem” almost begins like a Bach invention in the piano; “A Measuring Worm” is much more of an interior, more contemporary world, while the final song, “Green,” seems to hint at Impressionist territory. How do you see these cohering as a set?
I knew Richard Wilbur’s poetry from when I was in high school (also his lyrics for Bernstein’s Candide), but it was especially relevant to Greenwood, since he lived in Cummington. I used to see him at the Old Cummington Creamery quite regularly. The settings of Wilbur’s poems were not done in consecutive years; “Green” (which I particularly like) was first, I think. I think what makes them cohere is probably the fact that they are all settings of Wilbur’s poems. They don’t seem incompatible to me, anyway.
Now, there isn’t quite a poet for The Lost Feed. This appears to be directions for a play, set to music, or directions for one of a number of plays to be improvised, and the text is the direction for that play. What’s the story behind this? It’s great fun (actresses impersonating chickens!). It must have been strange to set a line such as “Chicken life is not thought to be very differentiated.”
Once again, it was through Virgil that I knew about Kenneth Koch. He has a wonderful set of songs setting Koch’s poetry called Mostly About Love. At one point they were supposed to collaborate on an opera, but Virgil didn’t think the libretto was good, so he pulled out. I also knew about Koch because of his being in Frank O’Hara’s circle. I loved the text of The Lost Feed, which is one of a number of to be improvised plays. I’m not sure that setting the directions for The Lost Feed is too much different than setting most of Gertrude Stein.
I’m not too familiar with Frank Bidart, but his To the Republic seems to take us toward politics. What’s the history behind To the Republic?
Frank Bidart was around Cambridge/Boston. I think maybe he taught at Harvard. To the Republic seemed quite compelling to me.
And the Stein and Stevens pieces?
The Stein and Stevens pieces were the first ones I wrote for the Greenwood chorus. My aim was to make them as unproblematic stylistically for the kids at Greenwood, most of whom didn’t have too much exposure to more modern music. As my notes say, both Max and Virgil were models for those. And since I knew quite a few pieces of Virgil’s that he had arranged for chorus from different forces—mostly voice and piano, but also the Campion songs, which were originally for clarinet, viola, and harp with voice—it seemed like a sound procedure to set them first for voice and piano and then, as it were, amplify the voice part for chorus. (Incidentally there’s a recording, which is on Spotify and probably YouTube, of the solo versions of the Stevens really beautifully sung by D’Anna Fortunato.) It’s also a pretty good way to work, since it produces two pieces when everything is said and done, rather than just one. There are several solo versions which haven’t been performed yet.
Now to a poet I know far less: Lawrence Rabb. Might you care to introduce him? I suspect his work involves lots of symbolism, especially in that poem (the mountains, for example).
I think Lawrence Rabb teaches at Williams College. I happened to run across a book of his poems on a trip to somewhere in Western Mass., either Williamstown or, maybe more likely, North Adams (where Mass Moca is) and I liked them. I would like to set some more someday maybe. You may have noticed that in that piece, the piano part over and over again consists of lines at the extreme register that converge in the center (the vanishing point). The piece also makes use of the triads that happen with the hexatonic cycles, which can be connected in various ways by half step connections.
Could you speak a bit about your harmonic workings? Perhaps around the 12-tone chromatic in The Bees?
The Bees, as I said, was the place where I really started using the four triads containing all 12 notes—following, of course, in Virgil’s footsteps (I’d used that idea earlier in one movement of a piece for chorus and strings setting Whitman poems). I was reading about Gesualdo by Glen Watkins when the triads in Moro Lasso came to mind, and they found their way (exactly the same chords) into The Bees. The poem is an excerpt of David Ferry’s translations of the Georgics by Virgil. David was a friend of mine, and he approved of the selection.
Shakespeare is a hallowed poet here; “Our revels now are ended”(from The Tempest) is the title of the last piece on this recording.
I did the Shakespeare setting—I’d been thinking about the poem—the summer that my friend John Ziarko’s brother died. It’s dedicated to John.
And what about the performers here and the venue? The choir is very disciplined (as it needs to be), and you have a fine pianist.
I go to the Church of the Advent in Boston, and I have a long association with choir and the organist-choirmasters. The choir is so good that it seemed like a good idea to get them to do the pieces for the recording. Fortunately, Mark Dwyer, the current choirmaster, thought it was a good idea. Chengcheng Ma, the pianist, just got his doctorate from Boston University. I’d worked with him on a number of projects, and it seemed a good idea to get him to do the piano parts.
And so, what’s next?
I appreciated then and still appreciate your plea in your Fanfare review of the earlier Metier disc, for my recognition—from your mouth to God’s ear. So far nothing too much has happened ... I guess one lives in hope. As to future recording plans, I’m hoping to do a CD, starting this coming year, which will include vocal music—two sets of settings of poems by Michael Blumenthal—one for tenor and piano and one for baritone and string quartet. I think that disc might also include a piece for mezzo with two clarinets, viola, and piano setting Hardy poems, and maybe also some settings of poems by John Hollander for mezzo and three clarinets. Then I’d like to do another choral CD with the Advent Choir again, this one doing sacred music of mine ... I’ve written quite a few pieces for the choir to do in church settings.
RODNEY LISTER Toward a Supreme Fiction. A Clear Day and No Memories. The Snow Man. Another Weeping Woman. Of Mere Being (The Palm at the End of the Mind). Never Give All the Heart. Vanishing Point. To the Harbormaster. A Downward Look. The Lost Feed. Stanza XV. Stanza XVI. Stanza XXXVIII. On the Road Home. To the Republic. A Pasture Poem. Measuring Worm. Green (trimmed). To a Waterfowl. The Bees. Our Revels Now Are Ended • Mark Dwyer, cond; Ch of the Church of the Advent, Boston; Cheng-cheng Ma (pn) • METIER 77111 (63:24 Text and Translation)
This is some of the finest choral writing from a living composer I have heard in years. Rodney Lister knows exactly what he wants, and how to achieve it. His understanding of text, and his vocal setting of words, is sublime, his choice of poetry exquisite. The settings have an unforced,
natural flow that comes from his deep resonance with poetry.
The disc begins with Of Mere Being, a sequence of poems by Wallace Stevens. The first, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” bursts with the feeling of love itself; the second, “A Clear Day and No Memories” shows how, against a beautifully calm and equal piano from Chengcheng Ma,
Lister can set a text at moderate pace with the utmost clarity—also a testament to the clear attention of the members of the Choir of the Church of the Advent, Boston. The text of “The Snow Man” reminds me of the poignancy of Robert Frost; Lister captures this feeling perfectly. There is real warmth to “Another Weeping Woman” (and the ladies of the choir maintain one through all of their range). It is telling, I think, that the titular song, and therefore one of such importance, makes its point through a seeming simplicity of seeing. “Seeming” because here is so much concealed here; melodies like this rarely come easily, and again the marriage of words and music is a happy one.
The poetry shifts now to Yeats, and the a cappella piece Never Give All the Heart. It is worthwhile, with the choir all alone, to consider just how the music itself seems to breathe: there are air pauses between lines, and they are perfectly judged. It is interesting that the piano re-enters with a huge registral gap and the most overtly “modern” music so far for Vanishing Point. One really can hear how those lines converge onto a “vanishing point.” The close is unbearably poignant; Lawrence Rabb’s poetry is beautifully honored.
It is Frank O’Hara to whom we shift next, with To the Harbormaster. The harmonies warm now, a tale of trust in a vessel against the elements (it is no accident, I imagine, that the music moves toward consonance along with a hopeful upward leap at “with my Polish rudder / in my hand and the sun sinking”). The piece is glorious, as is the almost quizzical final cadence.
Registral separation on the piano again informs the opening of A Downward Look (words by James Merrill). Here is a demonstration of how Lister can fragment the surface but always maintain a sense of coherence on the larger level; it all makes perfect sense even, dare I say, on first listening. Then the subtleties creep in, the slight harmonic twists that make all the difference.
The odd man (text) out here is The Lost Feed, which sets directions for an improvised play by Kenneth Koch. It immediately sounds different, more dramatic: “The Lost Feed,” the choir proclaims, as one, boldly. The words are actually hilarious (“seven actresses, impersonating hens and chickens, should, while retaining their human modesty and dignity, act out in as chicken-like a way as possible”).
It is quite a leap from chickens to Gertrude Stein, but there we go. Lister’s settings of Stein fall under the umbrella title of Stanzas in Meditation. The piano enters in Stanza XV with warm spread chords, while the voices (split into upper and lower) deliver the text once more with utmost naturalness. Stanza XVI is of a brighter disposition (a wonderful tutti rendition of “if they say so” at the end) before Stanza XXXVII could almost stand as a hymn in its own right (if the words were not so enigmatic, that is).
It is the dissonant harmonies and high-register piano curlicues of On the Road Home (Wallace Stevens) that speak most to my soul, its slower gait and huddled-together harmonies reflective of the search for truth. Pianist Chengcheng Ma is superlative ushering in Frank Bidart’s words, To the Republic, a frosty touch to the right hand. The poem’s eerie images are completely mirrored in Lister’s setting; again, here is a sense of narration that is absolutely gripping. And in turn, how beautiful are the fragile moments when the music offers only two vulnerable choral lines.
It is good that the various poets are grouped together. Three Poems of Richard Wilbur follow. The air lightens for “A Pasture Poem” (or just “Pasture Poem” depending on whether one believes the booklet or the disc back cover). It is these moments when the music sounds so simple (but isn’t) that are so impressive. “A Measuring Worm” is a study in the emotive power of harmony on the piano, all in a sustaining pedal embrace. How could the choir, when it enters, sing of a humble caterpillar? Of course, like Lister’s “simple” settings, there is nothing humble here, a song of transformation to come, and the blissful ignorance of the miracle of the organism itself. The harmonies evoke mystery and enigma; how poignant is the poet’s realization that he, too, has no idea which “undreamt condition” he goes toward. The final setting is “Green,” starting for all the world like a Debussy Arabesque before the choir rights us back into Lister’s world.
A bell tolls, via the piano’s most chthonic register, for To a Waterfall, a setting of William Cullen Byrant. This is a complex, sophisticated setting. This is the longest single setting on the disc (by some way: 7:48), full of aching near-silences, given a terrific performance by the Boston choir.
The setting of Virgil in David Ferry’s translation, The Bees, cropped up a number of times in our interview. Buzzing piano writing flits around the choir’s depiction of the “radiance of summer” (Ma’s touch is so even, so swift). Both The Bees and To a Waterfowl seem to hold the essence of Lister. Finally, Shakespeare, and the perfect words to close: Our Revels Now are Ended. The music carries that sense of exquisite regret at an ending.
The recording is as faultless as the performers. Previously in Fanfare, I have made a plea for recognition of Lister’s music: that plea is only strengthened via this disc. This is powerful, varied music, a masterclass in how to set poetry, heard in the strongest possible performances. Colin Clarke
LISTER Of Mere Being. Never Give All the Heart. Vanishing Point. To the Harbormaster. A Downward Look. The Lost Feed. Stanzas in Meditation. On the Road Home. To the Republic. Three Poems of Richard Wilbur. To a Waterfowl. The Bees. Our Revels Now Have Ended. ● Mark Dwyer, cond; Chengcheng Ma (pn); The Ch of the Church of the Advent, Boston ● MÉTIER 77111 (57:51 ) Reviewed from a wav download with resolution 24/96
Of Mere Being: Choral Works presents music by American composer Rodney Lister, created during his 30-year association with Greenwood Music Camp, in Cummington, MA. While Greenwood’s focus is on chamber music, the campers also play in the orchestra and sing in the chorus. Weekly concerts at Greenwood offer chamber, orchestral, and choral repertoire. In composing the Greenwood choral pieces, Lister was inspired by two of his teachers. When writing for “less advanced musicians,” Peter Maxwell Davies made certain his works “were as carefully and seriously made as possible and provided the musicians performing them with a satisfying musical experience.” “Virgil Thomson in a number of his works set texts that might have been considered to be obscure and difficult in a way that would make those texts seem clear and even sensible. Virgil also was happy to arrange for chorus works that were initially for a different scoring.” The works on Of Mere Being, scored for chorus and piano, originated as solo songs.
In his liner notes, Rodney Lister describes a musical evolution that occurred during his years at Greenwood. At first, Lister composed the choral pieces in what he described as “a fairly transparent tonal language.” Both Virgil Thomson’s Wheat Fields at Noon and Gesualdo’s Moro lasso inspired Lister to explore “a more tonally fluent triadic style.” Lister cites his 2010 choral piece The Bees as a turning point in his harmonic approach. The repertoire spans the years 1995-2019. The pieces are not performed in chronological order, so Lister’s two general harmonic styles intermingle throughout the recording. But Lister’s overall approach remains constant. The writing is homophonic for the far greater part, the product of the works’ evolution from solo song to choral piece. Lister’s music is affectingly lyrical, always respectful of the human voice, and focused on textural clarity. Featured poets include Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Lawrence Rabb, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, Kenneth Koch, Gertrude Stein, Frank Bidart, Richard Wilbur, William Cullen Bryant, Virgil, and Shakespeare.
The Choir of the Church of the Advent, Boston, and pianist Chengcheng Ma, led by conductor Mark Dwyer, perform the Lister works in exemplary fashion, with clear diction and a lovely, exquisitely blended sonority. The recorded sound is excellent. The composer’s program notes and complete sung texts enhance the listening experience. Recommended. Ken Meltzer
Four stars: Choral music by Rodney Lister
RODNEY LISTER Toward a Supreme Fiction. A Clear Day and No Memories. The Snow Man. Another Weeping Woman. Of Mere Being (The Palm at the End of the Mind). Never Give All the Heart. Vanishing Point. To the Harbormaster. A Downward Look. The Lost Feed. Stanza XV. Stanza XVI. Stanza XXXVIII. On the Road Home. To the Republic. A Pasture Poem. Measuring Worm. Green (trimmed). To a Waterfowl. The Bees. Our Revels Now Have Ended ● Mark Dwyer, cond; Choir of the Church of the Advent, Boston; Chengcheng Ma (pn) ● MÉTIER 77111 (57:11 ) Reviewed from an .mp3 download: https://divineartrecords.com/recording/rodney-lister-of-mere-being/
Rodney Lister (b. 1951) has had a long and diverse résumé. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee and got his first musical training there at the Blair School. Later he went to the New England Conservatory in Boston, and after that he went to Britain and studied with composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Once he returned to Boston he stayed there, studying at Brandeis University from 1975 to 1977 and getting his Ph.D. in music there. Lister now teaches at Harvard, Boston University, and the New England Conservatory.
Between the early 1970s and 2024, when his association there was terminated, Lister also worked at Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, Massachusetts, founded in 1933 by several progressive educators. Among them was the camp’s founding director, Bunny Little; and her successor, Deborah Sherr, who stepped down in 2022. In his notes for Of Mere Being, a CD of choral works he composed for the “campers” at Greenwood, Lister quotes the camp’s third director, Rebecca Fischer, who called the camp “an intensive musical experience for teenagers in a natural environment, fertile for personal and artistic growth and development. As a camper at Greenwood in the 1980s and 1990s, I made the best friends of my life, ran around in bare feet, and played string quartets all day. I also felt free and welcomed for who I was.”
Lister started composing for the Greenwood chorus a few years after he joined the faculty. “I continued to write a piece almost every year,” Lister recalled, saying that in writing for a relatively untrained choir “I was following the examples of two of my teachers. Peter Maxwell Davies, from the beginning of his career, wrote pieces for less advanced musicians, and did not feel limited to a certain style or sound in his work. … Virgil Thomson in a number of works set texts that might have been considered to be obscure and difficult in a way that would make those texts seem clear and even sensible.”
Lister’s first pieces for the Greenwood choir “were settings of early 20th century modernist poems by Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, and were in a fairly transparently tonal language,” he recalled. His compositions for the Greenwood chorus became more complex when he studied Gesualdo’s madrigals, particularly Moro lasso, and he set Virgil’s Wheat Fields at Noon in a polytonal style “based on the use of four discrete triads that contain between them all 12 notes.” After he set David Ferry’s translation of another Virgil poem, The Bees (included here), “the pieces I wrote for the Greenwood chorus set a variety of different texts from different times and trafficked in a tonally fluid triadic style.” He credited the choir director, Greg Hayes, in developing the chorus at Greenwood to such a high technical level that it could do justice to the pieces he wanted to write for them.
“This recording is a documentation of my time there, and a record of a place that was very important and meaningful in my life,” Lister wrote. “It contains most of the pieces I wrote for the Greenwood chorus.” The only ones missing are A Supermarket in California, based on a poem by Allen Ginsberg; a setting of Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, written after the recording was made; and a setting of e. e. cummings’s This Is the Garden:Colours Come and Go, “which somehow, during the rehearsal and recording for this album, we all forgot about.” There’s also one piece here that wasn’t written for Greenwood, a setting of W. B. Yeats’s Never Give All the Heart for unaccompanied chorus (the only a cappella piece on the CD) composed for the churches of Newton North High School but not performed until this recording. Lister said in his liner notes that he originally wrote most of these works as songs for solo voice and piano and then adapted them for chorus, and though the choral settings are great, I’d like to hear them that way sometime.
If there’s a theme running through this album, it is impermanence. Many of the texts deal with the cycles of life and the way organisms—plants, insects, people—grow, change, and die. The texts range from three of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, with her typical wordplay (“I have thought that I would not mind if they came/But I do/I also thought that it made no difference if they came/But it does”) to Wallace Stevens’s “On the Road Home” (“It was when I said/‘There is no such thing as the truth,’/That the grapes seemed fatter/The fox ran out of his hole”) and Frank O’Hara’s “The Harbormaster,” a particularly powerful use of the common poetic metaphor between a tortured soul and a ship at sea seeking safe harbor in a storm.
The most unusual text included here is “The Lost Feed,” which is not a poem at all but “directions for an improvised play by Kenneth Koch.” The play is for “seven actresses, impersonating hens and chickens,” who are directed to enact a scene in which they don’t receive their daily feeding and “each one suspects that someone of the others may be the culprit.” But in some ways the most powerful of these poems is “To the Republic,” by Frank Bidart, a grim fantasy in which the dead from the Battle of Gettysburg on both sides come back to life and declare to present-day Americans, “You betray us.” At first I wondered if Bidart had written this poem in response to the apparent self-destruction of American democracy under Donald Trump, but it was actually copyrighted in 2009.
The performances by the Choir of the Church of the Advent in Boston, conducted by Mark Dwyer, are technically impeccable and do full justice to Lister’s inspirations. Mention should also be made of the accompanist, Chengcheng Ma, who shapes, bends, and phrases the music impeccably while fulfilling his duty to support the chorus. On the long introductions and epilogues Lister gives him—particularly the ending of “To the Harbormaster” which segues into the beginning of James Merrill’s “A Downward Look”—he is quite beautiful and moving enough I’d like to hear him play solo piano music.
Though all the pieces are in medium-slow tempos and you’ll want to follow along with the printed texts (which have a few annoying typos: in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” the word “chaningness” should be “changingness,” in “A Clear Day and No Memories” “This invisible activity, this scene,” should read “this sense,” and in Stein’s “Stanza XV” there are not only little mistakes but three whole lines that aren’t sung on the record), this is a quite compelling disc of modern-day choral works. Each piece is moving in its own way, and together they make up a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Warmly and engagingly recommended. Mark Gabrish Conlan
Five stars: A beautiful choral setting of well-regarded poems from various eras in literature
Congleton Chronicle reviews Faith Based Initiative and Passiontide
This came some time ago but Easter seems a good time to pretend we held it back on purpose.
If the Mold album below is traditional, quiet and peaceful, this is much more modern and a little less relaxing in places.
The works vary from vocal to string quartet but share a theme, that of grief, either personal or for the plight of people blighted by war.
The title piece opens, and the open moments are tranquil but soon give way to an edgier sound, violins plucked to give tension over a mournful melody of sorts, although it smooths out later to a slightly uneasy calm. The sleeve notes say it’s based on a hymn (Come Thou Font of Every Blessing) and Lister wanted to write a piece that would be played (so reasonably accessible).
Complicated Grief is next and takes “tacky” folk tunes and deconstructs them to sparse violin, with louder moments on the violin that might normally signal a dance and a caller shouting “do-is-do!”.
The title track is the longest and most modern. It was inspired by a variety of sources: the US Civil War, the Gulf War and poetry including In Flanders Fields. (One of the poems included in Friendly Fire, For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell, contains a bad racial word unacceptable today except in rap songs, which prompts a sleeve warning).
Ode To The Confederate Dead opens with tenor Charles Blandy singing over a discordant sound led by horns, reminiscent of the battle the dead fell in, a sound that continues for much of the piece, the following tracks being The Fury of Aerial Bombardment, a poem that questions why God lets us do it, other than His indifference, and Women, Children, Babies, Cats and Cows, a comment on a US atrocity in Vietnam.
The March Into Virginia includes excerpts from famous civil war tunes; The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner is short and bleak (“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose”.) It’s unsettling and a little hard to listen to in places but it is those best of all things, interesting, and it’s got a moreish nature to it.
Review by Colin Clarke of Fanfare Archive:
The UK-based record label Métier has a habit of picking winners, and the music of Rodney Lister (b. 1951) is no exception. His music has previously cripped up in Fanfare’s august pages on an Arsis disc (Fanfare 28:6), while his Squares and Oblongs appeared on a multi-composer Summit compact disc entitled Expanding Spaces which I covered in issue 43:1 and which initially piqued my interest in this composer. Lister studied with Peter Maxwell Davies, and the present disc’s booklet includes an appreciation by fellow composer Nico Muhly.
The pieces here are nicely contrasted. Faith-Based Initiative (from which the disc gets its name) is a 10-minute exploration of the well-known hymn tune Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing. The Chiara Quartet gives a wonderfully varied account, from the obviously hymnic to the angular dancing that appears. Interestingly, one section of the score includes three “conjoined sort of fugal expositions,” in the composer’s own words. When the melody returns it has a sort of Goldberg-like reframed serenity and consolation about it, a sort of golden aura: all this within the space of a few minutes.
Written for solo viola, Complicated Grief is given a simply stunning performance Jonah Sirota, the violist of the Chiara Quartet. Music can be a healing experience for composers as well as performers and listeners, and so it seems here: complicated Grief was written in response to the composer’s father’s death. The title refers to a particular response to the death of a loved one used by bereavement counsellors; Lister assures us this was not the case with him, but the concept interested him. He certainly writes sadness into the piece, but there are moments of sudden anger. At nearly 25 minutes, this is a long piece for solo viola but it is gripping as we trace the various emotions and stages of grief through the three movements: “Fantasia”; “Variance”; “Quodlibet”. There are surely moments of pure pain written into the “Fantasia,” while long lines sing soulfully. Lister takes known music around southern hymn tunes and effectively deconstructs them. The result is very challenging for the player, and the level of control Sirota shows over his instrument is remarkable, particularly in the second and longest movement, “Variance” both in terms of sustained high harmonics and lower, more active gestures. While the final “Quodlibet” allows the wistfulness of the melodies to dissolve in time, beautifully Sirota’s performance is infinitely tender.
Finally, a piece for voice and ensemble, Friendly Fire. The final song, “For the Union Dead” comes with an “important note” in the booklet as it includes a racial trigger word. But Lister’s setting of the various pets he chooses is so strong and considered and, most of all, from the heart. The tenor Charles Blandy is a new name to me, but with such beauty of voice and such understanding of both line and word, he is quite a find. From his biography, he performs much early music, which possibly accounts for the purity of his sound. He is no stranger to newer music though, numbering John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby in his repertoire. The spur to composition was Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary series, thoughts revivified at the onset of the Gulf War. Again, found material has a place (the Marseillaise, for example, or patriotic songs, fragmented) and here the composer himself acknowledges the shadow of Charles Ives (in the setting of the poem by Melville about the first battle of Bull Run, and one just cannot miss the Ives references). The instrumental performances are superb, alive and the recording allows every bit of detail to come through. The emphasis on conflict inevitably connects to the basis of Complicated Grief in particular The New England ensemble here (College New Music of the New England Conservatory, Boston) is superb. Coming in at just under 40 minutes, this is a major statement. Lister’ range of emotion and sheer range of imagination is most impressive.
A wonderful disc, faultlessly produced and recorded. Maybe it is Rodney Lister’s time for full recognition: on this evidence, I do hope so.
FIVE STARS: Maybe it is Rodney Lister’s time for full recognition: on this evidence, I do hope so.
Composer Rodney Lister on His Faith-Based Initiatives CD (interview w/ David DeBoor Canfield)
Rodney Lister has been praised by Milton Babbitt as one whose “achievements as composer, pianist, and conductor are of the greatest interest to those of us who take music as seriously as he does.” This versatile musician is given opportunity to demonstrate his gifts as a composer in his Faith-Based Initiatives CD, and the works included on it provide ample evidence of his importance on the American musical scene in that area. I enjoyed the opportunity to interview the man behind the music in the latter part of September of 2022.
I noted your having studied with the late Peter Maxwell Davies, a CD of whose music I happen also to be reviewing in this very issue of Fanfare. Could you tell us what he was like as a teacher? From his music and even appearance, he would seem to have been a most colorful character!
Well, it’s hard to say—he was just Max. I met him at Tanglewood in 1973 when I was a fellow there and he was the big-name visiting faculty. I was sort of at loose ends at that time, and I went to London to study with him. To be completely honest, he said, “I don’t teach, but if it’ll do you any good you can say you studied with me.” In fact I was in London for two years (which in and of itself was a big education for me), and I saw Max about every month the first year, and every other month the second, and when I saw him I would show him what I was writing and he would offer advice. The last summer I went to Dartington Summer School and was in Max’s composition seminar there, so in the end I actually did study with him. At Dartington he was great: People in the seminar would show him their pieces, and Max, on the spot (aside from commenting with a lot of insight on them) would give the whole seminar an assignment related to the issues raised by the piece, sometimes to be done right then and there. In the second week the Fires of London, Max’s group, was in residence, and each of us wrote a piece in which we conducted the group, thereby gaining comments from Max and the ensemble.
Of the numerous important teachers with whom you worked, was there one who was a standout?
Well, Malcolm Peyton, with whom I studied for four years at NEC. Without his help, I probably wouldn’t have been able to be receptive of what my other teachers had to tell me.
Given your activities as composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher, how is your time allocated to those various activities?
These days I guess I spend most of my time teaching, which includes directing Time’s Arrow, the new music ensemble at Boston University. I really enjoy the experience of organizing, preparing for, and putting on concerts. I play piano as much as time and situations for preparation allow. I don’t much enjoy conducting, so I try to do as little of that as possible. I’m composing all the time.
Do you see faith as a connection between the three works in this recital? Pretty clearly, the first two are connected to faith, given your use of hymns (largely fragmented and deconstructed) in them, and hymns constitute an expression of faith by those who sing them. The subject of war dealt with in Friendly Fire is, perhaps, a bit more oblique in its relationship to faith, but combatants on both sides of a conflict would largely (mercenaries and blind followers of political tyrants excepted) have faith in the justness of the cause for which they’re fighting, and those who are motivated by God, rather than merely a cause, probably make the best fighters of all. Do you agree, then, with my assessment of faith as a theme through the entire CD?
The faith that’s referenced in the title of the first piece and which connects the three pieces (and everything I write) is that faith that if I write them they’ll get played somehow, eventually. Complicated Grief and Friendly Fire were written for people who asked for them, so there was a little less blind faith involved, but in the case of Faith-Based Initiative, nobody asked for it—I just wrote it, hoping it would get done sometime, somehow. I am what I guess would be called a practicing Christian, so religious faith is a component of what I do. It wasn’t particularly in the foreground of my mind in those cases. I’ve always appreciated the variable meanings of a lot of titles of Milton Babbitt’s pieces, and that multiple meaning of titles is certainly important to all three of the pieces on this CD. The main driving force of Friendly Fire was imagining (since, fortunately, I don’t have any first-hand knowledge) what the experience of combatants is and how survivors place those experiences in a narrative throughout the history of the U.S. In fact, it’s striking to me that the narrative of the Civil War actually has changed since the time I wrote the piece.
Your music is deliberately marked by stylistic variety, even within a single work. Was this approach borrowed from Charles Ives? If so, how early in your career did you become acquainted with his music?
I’ve known Ives’s music, to some extent, since I was in junior high school, and always liked it. I now almost don’t think of his music as a thing; rather, it’s just part of my world. It’s a little like what Auden says in his poem about Freud—he’s like the weather. But that stylistic variety is also an element of certain pieces of Max’s (St. Thomas Wake especially comes to mind) and is also an element of some Berio pieces and God knows who else. A lot of Max’s pieces are based on plain-song tunes which are then dealt with (maybe processed is a reasonable term for it) to realize a piece which is in an apparently different style. At some point it occurred to me that one could use all or some of the same processes based on parts of a different repertory.
A good example of your range of stylistic expression comes in the CD’s opening work, Faith-Based Initiative. Its symbolism about faith being corrupted for political ends is quite obvious, as the hymn tune you used is distorted in various ways during the course of the very effective work. I’m curious, though, as to what you’re intending to represent by the return to a firm tonal restatement of the hymn at the conclusion of the piece.
I didn’t think of the music as depicting the political situation evoked by Bush’s term, which I stole. And I don’t exactly see the less “tonal” music in the piece as representing a corruption of the original tune. It’s just an exploration and development of aspects of the tune variously drawn out, with those different tonal languages coexisting.
The moving lines in both soloist and instrumental ensemble in Friendly Fire also seem to do so in ways unconnected with each other. Were there challenges in rehearsal of this work to get it to hang together as it is supposed to?
Well, I’m also not sure that the vocal and instrumental parts of Friendly Fire are unconnected. I certainly didn’t intend for them to be. The biggest problems I remember from the rehearsals (somewhat an aspect of where we rehearsed) was getting balances right.
As a long-time professor of composition, what are some of the ways in which you seek to guide and develop the gifts of the younger generation of composers?
I guess it’s mostly a matter of helping them to find and realize their own and distinct personalities in their music and of helping them to realize the pieces that they imagine as accurately and carefully as they can.
LISTER Faith-Based Initiative.1 Complicated Grief.2 Friendly Fire3 • 1Chiara Qrt; 2Jonah Sirota (va); 3Charles Blandy (ten); 3David Hoose, cond; 3Collage New Music • MÉTIER 28618 (72:11 Text and Translation)
This article originally appeared in Issue 46:3 (Jan/Feb 2023) of Fanfare Magazine.
Review by Huntley Dent of Fanfare Archive:
When Henry James referred to the “complex fate” of being an American, he could have been referring to this collection of chamber works by Rodney Lister. One work, a solo viola piece titled Complicated Grief, captures the drift of the entire program, because the complex fate being addressed revolves around American wars, from the Civil War to the Iraq War. Grief is necessarily part of the aftermath of war, but Lister is looking deeper into the American psyche, pondering how a nation whose self-image is one of peace somehow never escapes the next war.
Musically a strain of Americana is strong throughout—the string quartet Faith-Based Initiatives (which gives the album its name) is based on a hymn tune that appears in Charles Ives’s String Quartet No. 1. Lister, himself an articulate writer as well as composer, teacher, and pianist, refers to Ives several times in his program notes. The lineage looking back to Ives wends its way through Copland, Harris, Cowell, Schuman, Rorem, and more. All took American folk roots seriously as an entry point before going on to unfold their own personal styles.
Lister’s quartet comes the closest to being in a direct line with nostalgic Americana. The tune he quotes appears in various hymns; his notes cite the one that begins, “Come, thou font of every blessing.” The melody undergoes inventive development over the score’s nine-minute length and five brief sections, peering into dissonance occasionally but otherwise keeping close at hand the invocation of a hymn. The performance by the Chiara Quartet seems ideal, and the recorded sound is excellent
At 24 minutes Complicated Grief is an ambitious challenge for an unaccompanied viola piece. Lister takes advantage of the superb technique of the commissioner, Jonah Sirota, founding violist of the Chiara Quartet. The title derives from a clinical psychiatric diagnosis: complicated grief describes an overwhelming state that is paralyzing, making ordinary life impossible. This provides a clue to the intrusion of shocking dissonance, shrieking, and screeching from the viola that makes the forward motion of the music impossible. Sirota expressly wanted Lister not to write an elegy (one of the default modes of the viola), yet there is an elegiac background that makes itself felt in Complicated Grief.
One might easily miss that Lister based his thematic material on pop gospel songs (he calls them “tacky”) that he heard, and secretly loved, growing up in Tennessee; prime examples include I Come to the Garden Alone, How Great Thou Art, and Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling. These tunes function as found objects that Lister deconstructs into their constituent elements. There isn’t a direct quotation of any tune, so from the listener’s perspective the hymnal quality of the melodies is lost entirely. By no means does Complicated Grief come across as Americana.
Fortunately, on its own terms the music is arresting and absorbing. As you’d expect, there is a nod to Bach’s unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas, but not in terms of Baroque gestures. Rather, Lister finds ways, as Bach did, to suggest harmony and counterpoint through double- and triple-stops and the separation of voices. The last technique is particularly striking when Sirota plays one melodic line in the viola’s low register alternating with a second melody higher up. The strength of this piece lies in is continual, bar-to-bar interest and imagination. Sirota gives an altogether virtuoso reading.
The longest work, at 40 minutes, is the settings of 10 poems gathered together as a song cycle for tenor titled Friendly Fire. Lister tells us that he pondered such a work for several decades, back to the Gulf War, before he decided on a rough structure. The work would begin with Allen Tate’s “To the Confederate Dead” and end with Robert Lowell’s “To the Union Dead.” In between would be Herman Melville’s poem on the first battle of Bull Run, “The March into Virginia.” The intention was to insert two shorter war poems on either side of Melville, but eventually Lister found more selections he wanted to set, including a poem by the Iraq War veteran Brian Turner. For accompaniment he chose a small mixed chamber ensemble, represented here by Collage New Music conducted expertly by David Hoose.
As an inveterate reader of American poetry from Whitman onward, I welcome Lister’s project. The core of the thematic material was situated in the long Melville setting. In Ivesian fashion Lister mixed the old patriotic songs that run as a subcurrent in every American’s mind, such as “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Fragments of these tunes are deconstructed, making the source essentially unrecognizable, after which they are repeated and varied throughout the entire cycle.
As a result, Friendly Fire is complex, dense, and overall a tough listen; I wasn’t able to follow Lister’s ideas by ear. However, there’s no doubt that this is very skillfully wrought, heartfelt music. Boston is Lister’s milieu, and I think of Friendly Fire as extending the line of American poetry settings by John Harbison. History remains inescapable in New England, and for decades artists have returned in imagination to its bloodied, hallowed ground. Friendly Fire is a deeply conceived work in that lineage. Lyric tenor Charles Blandy copes effortlessly with the music’s atonal vocal line, never losing pitch. I wish, however, that his delivery was more dramatic and varied, in order to make the 10 poets more distinctive and the emotional weather stormier.
It was intelligent to arrange the program from the most accessible music to the most challenging. I’d advise absorbing each piece one at a time before taking a deeper dive into the next one. This release deserves a recommendation to general listeners with adventurous ears, but in particular I think that anyone fascinated by Ives, American history, and our complex fate will find the music a rewarding experience. Huntley Dent
This article originally appeared in Issue 46:3 (Jan/Feb 2023) of Fanfare Magazine
Review by David DeBoor Canfield of Fanfare Archive
Rodney Lister has had a handful of his works reviewed in these pages, most notably to date an Arsis CD that was favorably covered in successive issues by Paul Ingram (28:6) and John Story (29:1). Since few biographical details were included in these, I’ll mention that he was born in 1951, received his early musical training at the Blair School of Music (Nashville, TN), and attended the New England Conservatory of Music for his BM degree. From there he went on to graduate school at Brandeis University, where he was awarded his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977 and his DM in 2000. His composition teachers included Peter Maxwell Davies, Donald Martino, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Virgil Thomson, and he also became an accomplished pianist, working with Enid Katahn, David Hagan, Robert Helps, and Patricia Zander. His music has been widely performed by many notable musicians and ensembles, among which are the Fires of London (a new music group that Maxwell Davies co-directed) and individual performers including Michael Finnissy, Joel Smirnoff, and Phyllis Curtin. He has received commissions, grants, and fellowships from the Berkshire Music Center, the Fromm Foundation, and the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, among others. He is currently on the composition and theory faculty of Boston University, and directs its new music ensemble, Time’s Arrow.
The title of the CD under review is Faith-Based Initiatives (purloined also for the title of this feature), after the first work presented, itself drawn from the world of politics and, in the composer’s words, a “reference to the governmental program which is one of the means by which the Bush administration attempted to obliterate the separation of church and state. In this sense, the logic of the piece is an encoding of the process of taking something putatively simple and pure and turning it into something grotesque.” This five-section work is based on the well-known hymn “Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing,” also notably used by Charles Ives in his String Quartet No. 1. The most obvious references to the tune come in the odd-numbered movements, while the other two make obeisance to it much more obliquely. Indeed, the opening of the piece contains a complete statement of the hymn, albeit subtly reharmonized. After this initial iteration, however, the traditional harmonies and melodic contours are transformed into something rather unrecognizable as to their source. Irregular figures in some of the instruments are punctuated by pizzicato in highly syncopated fashion in the other instruments, a very effective device. The tune does return from time to time in recognizable form, although never in its original overt tonality until the very end of the work. The Chiara Quartet has crafted a seemingly definitive rendition of the work.
Lasting almost a half hour, Complicated Grief forms one of the most extended works for solo viola I can think of. Its title was brought to the composer’s mind by a radio program he heard and refers to a type of grief so debilitating that it inhibits quotidian activity. While this sort of grief didn’t overcome Lister, who had lost his father around the time he was beginning the work, the term caused him to reflect on his father and his passing. Like its predecessor in this recital, the composer has drawn material from a number of hymns, this time using primarily deconstructed fragments of them. The work’s quiet and somber beginning is rudely interrupted a minute into its first movement (of three), producing a jarring, albeit effective, diversion. Other sorts of tempestuous outbursts continue to interrupt the soothing lines, the former utilizing glissandos, sul ponticello, harmonics, or other special effects, and often embroiled in immediate proximity to each other. Lister proves himself a master, not only in the flow of his musical ideas, but also in exploring the manifold colors that this alto member of the string family can produce. The work ends with a kind of quodlibet comprising a string of unrelated tunes. Violists looking for an alternative to Britten’s oft-performed Lachrymae would do well to investigate this challenging yet rewarding work. Violist Jonah Sirota, who requested the work from Lister and a member of the Chiara Quartet, provides a breathtaking performance.
Friendly Fire remembers events in various bellicose conflicts ranging from the Civil War up through that in Iraq. It was inspired by Lister’s having watched Ken Burns’s excellent and gripping Civil War film, which coincidentally I’d watched not more than two months prior to my writing these words. Various aspects of these conflicts are suggested even by the titles of the 10 movements, some of which include “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,” “Women, Children, Cows, Cats,” and “A Box Comes Home.” It lasts almost 40 minutes, and the composer chose texts that connected these events across time, albeit in non-chronological order (the last movement is entitled “For the Union Dead,” forming a bookend to the first). One unifying device the composer employs in poetry by such diverse poets as Herman Melville, John Ciardi, and Robert Lowell, is the declarative way the text is set. Tenor Charles Blandy with the support of conductor David Hoose and the Collage New Music of the New England Conservatory in Boston, superbly capture the pathos and anguish of the texts before them. Blandy must have an exceptional ear in order to hit the almost-atonal lines he must contend with so squarely on pitch. He must also be possessed of more than average endurance, given the almost continual flow of sounds he is required to produce. The ensemble is masterfully held together by conductor Hoose, no small feat given the music’s seeming absence of metrical regularity. The hornist in this ensemble has an especially demanding part, and so I single him or her out for extra praise.
This is a challenging work to experience, both on the grounds of the poems and Lister’s setting of them, but there are plenty of rewards awaiting the listener who approaches the work with an open mind. Particularly gripping was his setting of Randall Jarrell’s poem, Losses, a first-hand account of the poet’s war experiences. The ghost of Ives hovers over Melville’s “March into Virginia,” to the point of containing a very Ivesian martial tune, and a mirroring of his use of a concatenation of civil war tunes akin to those the iconic American composer employs in his In Flanders Field. In all three of the works presented here, Lister proves he has a distinctive and secure compositional voice, one that is one well worth exploring by those who are seeking new and arresting music. For that select group, this disc receives my firm recommendation. David DeBoor Canfield
This article originally appeared in Issue 46:3 (Jan/Feb 2023) of Fanfare Magazine.
Review by Ken Meltzer of Fanfare Archive
Faith-Based Initiatives presents three works by American composer Rodney Lister (b. 1951). Lister received his early music education in Nashville, TN; later, he studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and Brandeis University, and with Virgil Thompson and Peter Maxwell Davies. Lister is a member of the faculty of the Boston University School of Music and is director of that school’s new music ensemble, Time’s Arrow. He is also on faculty at the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory. The spirit of Charles Ives may be felt throughout the works on this recording. In his liner notes, Lister makes frequent reference to Ives, and the featured music affirms a powerful bond between the New England composers from different eras. The opening work, Faith-Based Initiative (2004), is scored for string quartet. The title is multi-faceted. Lister explains that the most obvious reference is “to the governmental program which is one of the means by which the Bush administration attempted to obliterate the separation of church and state in the United States.” Lister turns to a hymn frequently used by Ives, Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing. Lister presents the hymn both in its original form, and in permutations far more abstract, both melodically and harmonically. Faith-Based Initiative also fulfills the composer’s wish to explore “the challenge of integrating smoothly and convincingly into one work different tonal languages.” I suspect that all the elements I’ve mentioned will resonate with Charles Ives devotees. And Faith-Based Initiative, a nine-minute piece in one movement (here, beautifully performed by the Chiara Quartet), is a compelling work that stands proudly in the Ives tradition.
So, for that matter, does Complicated Grief (2013–14), a three-movement work for viola solo. Lister once again uses hymns as the work’s foundation; “not the intellectually respectable, almost folk tunes, like From the Sacred Harp, but the poppy, sort of honky-tonk hymn tunes I grew up hearing on TV and radio and sort of love.” Those hymns are: I Come to the Garden Alone (Mvmt. 1), How Great Thou Art (2), I Know Who Holds Tomorrow, Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling, and When They Ring Those Golden Bells For You and Me (3). Lister wrote Complicated Grief in response to a request by violist Jonah Sirota, who performs the work on this disc. After Lister began composition, his father died. Lister recalls: “The tunes and working with them intertwined in my mind with a whole raft of thoughts about my life and my relationship with my father, and my feelings about him and his death.” Lister “deconstructs” the hymn melodies, “reducing them to their basic thematic elements and then developing those elements on their own and in various kinds of combinations with the tunes themselves.” The trio of hymns in the finale is presented as a quodlibet, with the melodies intertwining, in different keys, before they reach a harmonic confluence at work’s close. Bach and Ives both would have been pleased, I think. Here, and throughout the work, Complicated Grief poses considerable technical and expressive challenges for the violist, all triumphantly met by Jonah Sirota.
Friendly Fire (2007–12) was inspired by the Ken Burns Civil War documentary television series. Three poems about the Civil War—“Ode to the Confederate Dead” (Allen Tate), “The March Into Virginia” (Herman Melville), and “For the Union Dead” (Robert Lowell)—provide the opening, mid-point, and conclusion of this work, scored for tenor and chamber ensemble. For his setting of the Melville poem, Lister found inspiration in Ives’s song, In Flanders Field. As with Ives, Lister calls upon various other songs (here, relating to the Civil War) as the basis for “The March Into Virginia.” In turn, those Civil War songs, “manipulated in various ways, would then become the source of the settings of the rest of the poems.” And in between the trio of Civil War poems are several others concerning various U.S. wars. While the influence of Charles Ives is once again undeniable, Friendly Fire also invites comparison with Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1961). There is a striking thematic/aesthetic sympathy between Lister’s selection and settings of war poems, and Britten’s masterful realization of verse by Wilfred Owen recounting the horrors of World War I. In both cases, those who heroically fight and die in wars do the bidding of more powerful individuals, far removed from the carnage of the battlefield. And by avoiding histrionics in their vocal settings, both Lister and Britten emphasize the narrators’ status as helpless pawns. The protagonists in Friendly Fire and War Requiem well understand both their status and inability to change it. As in the case of Britten’s War Requiem, the vocal and instrumental writing in Friendly Fire is keenly sensitive to the texts, and strikingly expressive. And I must say that in listening to the tenor music in Friendly Fire, I was struck by how well suited it would have been for Peter Pears. But the featured tenor on this recording, Charles Blandy, is marvelous in his own right. Blandy sings the music with the utmost feeling, technical assurance, and attractive tonal quality, and his diction is exquisitely precise and clear. Collage New Music and conductor David Hoose are likewise outstanding in realizing Lister’s colorful and varied score.
The recordings, made between 2013–15, provide a first-rate concert acoustic. In addition to the composer’s eloquent program notes, there is a lovely and in-depth appreciation of Lister by Nico Muhly. Blandy also contributes a passionate and convincing argument for retaining Lowell’s use of a vile racist epithet in “For the Union Dead.” I’ve mentioned the influences and elements at play in this Lister compendium. All of them (including honky-tonk!) are of great significance in my musical life. So it’s perhaps not surprising that I found Faith-Based Initiatives a most engaging and rewarding experience. But this is highly accomplished, heartfelt, and expressive music that I believe will appeal to all who gravitate toward contemporary music with a decidedly lyrical orientation. Warmly recommended. Ken Meltzer
This article originally appeared in Issue 46:3 (Jan/Feb 2023) of Fanfare Magazine.
Review of A Christmas Album - George Chien of Fanfare Magazine
In one important respect, the Arsis disc is the most ambitious of the lot, because its goal is to enlarge the Christmas repertoire. This is no small task. There is no universal musical code for Christmas other than a quotation from an existing, familiar Christmas piece. So any new Christmas music will inevitably be received first as "new" and only second, if at all, as "Christmas." Applying new music to the words of a popular carol is an almost certain path to oblivion. Though alternate versions some carols (for example, In the Bleak Midwinter) do linger, they aren't the ones that are sung from memory. It's a daunting objective.
Most of the music on the Arsis disc was composed by Rodney Lister, whose academic connections include the New England Conservatory of Music, Harvard University, Newton North High School, and the Greenwood Music Camp. Many of his choral compositions were introduced by Edith Ho at the Church of the Advent. Since the rest of the disc is devoted to music of Lister's choice, one might have been able to make a case for including it in the composer section, but rules are rules, and so it is considered here to be a collection. I hate to say it, but the most intriguing piece on the program is the Christmas Carol by 10-year-old Edith Osborne Ives, arranged by her 50-year-old father, Charles. I'll admit that my curiosity was largely extramusical, but it would not embarrass me to have written the tune. Father Ives is represented by an original carol of his own. After Lister, one of his mentors, Virgil Thomson, gets the most exposure on the disc. Thomson's version of The Holly and the Ivy may have been an interesting exercise, but ultimately it seems rather pointless. His Song for the Stable and his brief, three-part Scenes from the Holy Infancy (1937), however, might be successfully incorporated into nativity services, as might Carlisle Floyd's Long, Long Ago and Lister's own short chorale works and arrangements. Lister's more ambitious Kings and Shepherds might run into a little resistance; I suspect that it won't vie for playing time with Joy to the World when real snowflakes make their appearance come December. Arisis's clean sound captures the fine work of the many various performers.
A CHRISTMAS ALBUM • Edith Ho, dir; Mark Dwyer, dir; Church of the Advent Ch; Kevin Leong, cond; Harvard Glee Club; Jameson Marvin (music director); Denise Konicek (sop); Susan Brownfield (mez); Kevin McDermott (ten); Jennifer Elowitch (vn); Laura Ahlbach (ob); Kevin Owen (hn); Mark Dwyer (org); Rodney Lister (pn) • ARSIS CD 117 (76:44)
Music by LISTER, THOMSON, IVES, SUSA, and FLOYD
Review of Somewhere To Get To - John Story of Fanfare Archive
LISTER The Bear's Lullaby.3 Of Mere Being.1, 6 A Little Cowboy Music.1, 2, 4, 5 Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish.1, 7 Everness.1, 7 The Birds.1, 7 The Repetitive Heart.2 Sure of You.1 Blue Wine.1, 9 Somewhere to Get To.8, 10, 11 • Rodney Lister, pn 1; Joel Smirnoff, vn z; John Ziarko, va 3; Pascale Delache-Feldman, db 4; Ian Greitzer, ct 5; D'Anna Fortunato, sop 6; Denise Konicek, sop 7; John Hollander, narr 9; David Hoose, cond 8; Mary Westbrook-Geha, mez 10; Collage New Music 11. • ARSIS CD144 ( 79:10 Text and Translation)
This recital of vocal and chamber music by Rodney Lister (b. 1951) covers about 20 years of the composer's career, from 1980 to 2000. Lister's idiom ranges from the mildly acerbic to a full-throated lyricism that is ultimately the more appealing. The disc opens with one of the best examples of the latter, The Bear s Lullaby (1993) for viola and piano. Written to soothe any wild beasts lurking around the composer's country home, it is an utterly charming, vaguely English sounding nocturne. In the same vein is the little song cycle for mezzo, Of Mere Being (1993-2000), sung here by the estimable D'Anna Fortunato. Fortunato also shows up as a duet partner to Denise Konicek in The Birds (2000), which I found somewhat less attractive. Humor would not seem to be Listner's strong suit. Neither the collage of cowboy tunes, A Little Cowboy Music (1980), or the tiny setting of Susan Stamberg's family recipe for cranberry relish, Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish (1999), works especially well.
In his more advanced style, the Borges setting, Everness (1990), sung by Konicek, and the long Hollander setting, Blue Wine (1989), for speaker (here the poet himself) and piano are especially effective. The long song cycle for mezzo and chamber ensemble, Somewhere to getto (1996), is very good and features the best singing on the disc from mezzo Mary Westbrook-Geba—she is a Bach specialist, which perhaps explains both the highly focused tone and relatively unforced emission of sound. I was less taken with the solo piano work, Sure of You 1994), but The Repetitive Heart (1985) for solo violin is quite good.
The recordings, from a variety of venues and made over a number of years, are all fine. Texts, as always with Arsis, are included. This is another fine release from this label and gently recommended to listeners who like to explore the lyrical byways of American music.
John Story
Review by Paul Ingram of Fanfare Archive
LISTER The Bear's Lullaby.3 Of Mere Being.6 A Little Cowboy Music.2, 5 Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish.7 Everness.7 The Birds6, 7 The Repetitive Heart.2 Sure of You. Blue Wine. Somewhere to Get To.8, 10 • Rodney Lister, pn 1; Joel Smirnoff, vn 2; John Ziarko, va 3; Pascale Delache-Feldman, db 4; Ian Greitzer, cl 5; D'Anna Fortunato, sop 6; Denise Konicek, sop 7; John Hollander, narr 9; David Hoose, cond 8; Mary Westbrook-Geha, mez 10; Collage New Music 11. • ARSIS CD144 ( 79:10 Text and translation)
This carefully recorded and well-sung Arsis CD offers a nice portrait of a distinctive American figure, dominated by the composer's own clear and sensitive piano-playing. Rodney Lister (b. 1951) is above all a vocal composer, but the opening violin tune, The Bear's Lullaby (1993), sets out his expressive stall pretty well, and the solo piano Sure of You confirms the minimal picture. The memorable serenity suggests an American Part. That's not what we get in the songs, though. They can sound tuneful and homely, but despite Lister's insistence on being of use to his local community, the simplicity deceives, even as it charms. The straight chordal accompaniments can imply an American Finzi, especially in the Stevens settings, Of Mere Being, but the 1996 voice-and-ensemble piece Somewhere to Get To is closer in method to Lister's teacher Maxwell Davies than to the rest of the English schools. Even the rhythms recall one of Max's favorite Scotch thematic fragments. The poems are by Auden, and the final setting of “Musée des beaux-arts“ is eloquent and quite modernist, like the poem.
The relish recipe is set with, well, relish, while the Borges setting, Everness from 1990, is a suitably stark meditation on existence. The Birds is a duet written in 2000, and the words are from Belloc. It shares the sad beauty of the Lullaby. Standing apart is the recitation from 1989, Blue Wine, in which poet John Hollander relishes his own words, and draws us into another dark world, to another stark accompaniment. The nine-minute solo violin piece, The Repetitive Heart, is now 20 years old, but the yearning power of the figuration is undimmed. Joel Smirnoff does a fine job, but we should hear more people take on the Lister instrumental shorts.
It all adds up. Rodney Lister is one of the people you should hear and get to know if you care at all about current American music.
Paul Ingram
from The Boston Globe - Saturday, March 27, 1993 - by Richard Buell
Music Review: Music of Rodney Lister at The Church of the Advent, Boston, March 26, 1993
That worried-looking person you may remember scurrying across the stage with chairs and music stands at new-music concerts is more likely to have been Rodney Lister than not. He's long been visible on the local scene as facilitator, coach, accompanist, or factotum - perhaps more so than as a composer. Surely that is one reason this concert must have seemed like a good idea. One's overall impression was that the music Rodney Lister writes is personal and sincere. His penchant for dark timbres, slow tempos, and lugubrious texts never struck one as a pose. The unrelentingness of it imposed its own seal of honesty.
"You always know where you are" - that's how a local composer was praising the sense of structure and purpose he heard in a colleague's music. It was in the vocal music, where pattern was imposed by a text, that sureness of touch was most evident. In "House of Winter" (text by George Mackay Brown), soprano and mezzo sonorities floated over a dour and sinuous organ part. The somewhat Gothic effect was intensified by the Church of the Advent's resonant acoustics. "Kings and Shepherds," another Brown setting, seemed intent on denying any sense of closure till its very end, and a rather meager and ambivalent one at that.
The adroit singing of the Boston Cecilia Chamber Singers gave "the meeting" (e.e. cummings) and "No Bird" (Theodore Roethke) as clear a profile as any composer could wish, and it would be hard to imagine violin playing superior to what Joel Smirnoff brought to "The Repetitive Heart." Some moments of shaky intonation were evident in the string quintet piece "Feldeinsamkeit," but these only served to point up the high standards of execution prevailing. A violin-cello duo "Happy in the Same Way," a study in agitated dark browns, typified the affective tone of the program. A personality was there, uncompromisingly, in all the music, making itself known without recourse to charm, irony, or any of the merely decorative qualities.