Songs to Harvest (2006): Texts by Catullus, Hölderlin, and David Ferry featured in a chapter in Jane Manning’s book, Vocal Repertoire for the Twenty-First Century, Volume 2: Works Written From 2000 Onwards, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

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.