Critical Acclaim for Beth Anderson "The premiere of Beth Anderson's THREE SWALES was staggering, an over-the-top, exuberant set of flamboyant pieces in a post-Dvorak vein, played for all they were worth with collective virtuosity and much adored by the audience. In a programme note about this composer, in connection with her text Beauty is Revolution, Michael Sahl applauds Beth Anderson's 'conspiracy to commit beauty'. THREE SWALES was 'beautiful music' with a vengeance! "American Composer: Beth Anderson" from CHAMBER MUSIC MAGAZINE, February 2001 By Kyle Gann, pages 46-47
"Is there such a thing as "too pretty" music? Future historians will certainly think we thought so. Our late 20th century critical rhetoric extols composers who are "tough" with the audience. "Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in the easy chair," wrote Charles Ives, little guessing how rare musical easy chairs would someday become. We now associate prettiness with New Age music, mindless tripe to be played in the background by yuppies with no taste. And prettiness is further linked with effeminacy, dissonance with masculinity and strength. "Stand up and use your ears like a man!", Ives once shouted. In an age which disdains most sexual stereotypes, "dissonance = masculinity = good" and "prettiness = effeminacy = bad" still survive in professional music circles.
Beth Anderson writes pretty music - the prettiest music I know of, after Schubert, Faure, Debussy, and a few long-dead white males. Her prettiness is not an intellectual deficiency, but a political stance. "To make something beautiful," Anderson likes to say, "is revolutionary." Her web page (http://users.rcn.com/beand/) lists her as a "neo-romantic, avant-garde composer," and she may be the only composer in the world who could justify both contradictory labels. Her music has the simplicity of that of Erik Satie or, even more, Virgil Thomson. It is listenable, melodic, fun to play. Such qualities often bring her into conflict with other composers. On one 12-tone-heavy musical festival, she says, after her lullaby was performed "everyone quit speaking to me." And yet her music is no throwback to an easy past, but radical on its own terms. | |
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