Performance of Hoquetus Frank by the Boston University Percussion Ensemble, conducted by Samuel Solomon on November 12, 2018 at the Boston University College of Fine Arts Concert Hall.

Hoquetus Frank was written in 2001.   It has an isorhythmic structure which follows in the footsteps of certain medieval composers, such as Machaut, whose work Hoquetus David is a favorite piece of mine and whose title is evoked.  It is dedicated to Frank Epstein, who first performed it with the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tPCYDs1gcs

Hoquetus Frank

composed 2015
for speaking and singing violinist
text by Anthony Hawley
recorded in 2016 by Rebecca Fischer
the HIFA Festival for the Arts in Zimbabwe

Explanatory Notes

composed 2020
title comes from Allen Ginsburg's “A Supermarket in California”
based on material from another piece of mine with a setting of that poem “A Supermarket in California”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PotDcLxSrUk

Peaches and Penumbras

Night. As long as day in this endless equinox.
It falls and we go on.  Before dawn we are gone.
                                                    --Samuel Beckett

piano, Julia Carey
composed 2020
recorded 2020

Eternal Equinox

I. Thoughtful–Quietly Singing
II. Moving Moderately
III. Still, Calm

Amy Advocat, clarinet
Chengcheng Ma, piano

Boston University, October 1, 2022

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J9bwveAj2Y

This Time Next Year

performed by Members of the Berkshire Music Center Fellowship Program at the Theatre-Concert Hall at Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music (Piotr Gajewski, conductor)

written and performed in 1983

commissioned by the Berkshire Music Center and Fromm Foundation Commission

Warble

Rodney Lister, Faculty Recital
New England Conservatory Preparatory Division

Julia Cavallaro, mezzo-soprano
Katherine Matasy, clarinet
Daniel Dona, viola
Rodney Lister, piano 

from Three Poems of Delmore Schwartz

The Beautiful American Word, Sure
by Delmore Schwartz

The beautiful American word, Sure,
As I have come into a room, and touch
The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such
Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

As I care for what I do not know, and care
Knowing for little she might not have been,
And for how little she would be unseen,
The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear. 


Where the light is, and each thing clear,
Separate from all others, standing in its place,
I drink the time and touch whatever’s near,

And hope for day when the whole world has that grace:
For what assures her present every year?
In dark accidents the mind’s sufficient grace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JYlgGS0lT0

The Beautiful American Word, Sure

in memoriam  Peter Maxwell Davies

"When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the
Riverside, into which as he went he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he
went down deeper he said, Grave, where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and
all the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side."--John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress

Rodney Lister Faculty Recital
New England Conservatory Prep Division
Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory  

Christina DioGuardi, bassoon
Michael Weinfield-Zell, percussion
Ari Issacman-Beck, violin
Rosemary Nelis, viola
Gwen Krosnick, ‘cello

III. Near Life Experience

in memoriam Lee Hyla
references Hyla's "Ciao, Manhattan"

Rodney Lister Faculty Recital
New England Conservatory Prep Division
Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory 

Christina DioGuardi, bassoon
Michael Weinfield-Zell, percussion
Ari Issacman-Beck, violin
Rosemary Nelis, viola
Gwen Krosnick, ‘cello

II. Ciao, Lee

Squares and Oblongs (2015)

for piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 alto

saxophones, 2 percussionists

The Boston University Wind Ensemble, David J. Martins, conductor, Boston University, April, 2016


--------------

“Like” and “like” and “like” — but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing? Now that lightning has gashed the tree and the flowering branch has fallen and Percival, by his death, has made me this gift, let me see the thing. There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation.”

Last summer in London I saw a performance of an adaptation of La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, a rather famous play which is a series of scenes, each for two actors, in which the first scene is for actors 1 and 2, the second for actors 2 and 3, the third for 3 and 4, and so on, until the tenth and last scene which is for actors 10 and 1.  This gave me the idea for what is the spine of my piece, a series of seven duets, each of a different proportional length, the first for flute and clarinet, the second for clarinet, and horn, and so on, until the last, for oboe and flute.   Pursuing this notion led me to asking and answering a series of questions about the piece.   For instance, how and where, in rather complicated and nonstop counterpoint, were the players going to be able to breath?  This led to my splitting each part of  each duet among two of the same instruments, so they became sort of double duets.    I had already decided that the duets would, through a series of proportionally related note values, speed up and slow down over the course of the piece.   Since the piece couldn’t consist merely of a series of duets, with everybody else sitting there while each pair of musicians played their music, I decided that each of the duets should have a sort of series of ‘echos’ over the course of the piece.    Since the later duets’ ‘echos’ would have to start at the beginning of the piece, before they had actually played their appointed music, each duet became a sort of loop, with all seven coexisting and each one being superimposed over the others at certain points.  Finally there are certain points in the progress of the piece that are marked out by different means, and there are two independent elements, one a sort of chorale, which is played at the intersection of the duets, and the other a cumulative melodic pattern which at its appearances piles up on itself and then fades away.                                                 

Since the piece trafficked heavily in the sort of isorhythmic procedures that were dear to the heart of  my teacher and later friend Peter Maxwell Davies, from who I had learned a lot about them, and since Max had been much on my mind since the fall when he became seriously ill from a recurrence of the lukemia he had battled a few years earlier, I decided to dedicate the piece to him.  Shortly after I finished the piece, copied it, and sent it off to him, he died;  I am not sure whether or not he received it before then.    Thinking of Max and his music, and of my relationship to him and it, and what I learned from him and, more generally about why we write music and what it means to us or to anybody else caused me to think about a place in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, from which the title of my piece comes.

Squares and Oblongs

Rodney Lister has received commissions, grants, and fellowships from the Berkshire Music Center, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, the Fires of London, the Poets' Theatre, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the Master Singers, the International Barbara Pym Society, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. He was co-founder and co-director of Music Here & Now, a concert series of new music by Boston area composers at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1971-1973), and from 1976 until 1982 was music coordinator of Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble. His music has been recorded on the Albany, Arsis, Summit labels, and his recording with David Kopp of music for piano four hands by Virgil Thomson, Harold Shapero, and Arthur Berger is on the New World label. He is currently on the faculties of Boston University School of Music, where he teaches composition and theory and is the director of Time’s Arrow, a new music ensemble, and of the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory, where he teaches composition, theory, and chamber music and is director of the school’s annual contemporary music festival. He is also a music tutor at Pforzheimer House, Harvard University, and is on the faculty of Greenwood Music Camp.

Rodney Lister's works have been performed by Joel Smirnoff, Tammy Grimes, Phyllis Curtin, Jane Manning, Mary Thomas, Michael Finnissy, Kathleen Supove, Jonah Sirota, Rebecca Fischer, Boston Cecelia, the Blair and Chiara Quartets, the Boston University Wind Ensemble, Collage New Music and the Fires of London among others, at Tanglewood, the Library of Congress, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and in New York and London, among other places. As a pianist, he has been involved in premieres, first US performances, first UK performances or first Boston performances of works by Virgil Thomson, Peter Maxwell Davies, Milton Babbitt, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, Lee Hyla, and Paul Bowles, among others. His articles and reviews have appeared in Tempo, Sequenza21, and The Paris New Music Review. He is the author of the article on Arthur Berger in the Grove Dictionary of American Music.  His articles on the music of Peter Maxwell Davies were published in Tempo and in Peter Maxwell Davies Studies edited by Nicholas Jones and Kenneth Gloag.  

Rodney Lister received his early musical training at the Blair School of Music in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music (Bachelor of Music degree, with honors) from 1969 to 1973 and at Brandeis University (Master of Fine Arts degree) from 1975 to 1977, and from which he received a doctorate in 2000. He studied privately with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, and was a member of Davies's composition seminar at the Dartington Hall Summer School of Music (1975, 1978, 1980-82). He was a Bernstein fellow at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in 1973. His composition teachers, aside from Davies, were Malcolm Peyton, Donald Martino, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Virgil Thomson. He also studied piano with Enid Katahn, David Hagan, Robert Helps, and Patricia Zander.

Rodney Lister

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