Stir Up Your Repertory! with music by T.J. Anderson

An ACA member since 1965, Anderson’s catalogue features many scores (from as early as 1960) that exemplify his unique take on improvisation. Prime among these are Fragments (A J.S. Bach-T.S. Monk Fantasy), a piano concerto commissioned by the University of Iowa that features a fully improvised solo part in rilievo to a scrupulously notated orchestral canvas; Intermezzi, a work for three instruments (pf, cl, and sax) that can be played as three solo pieces in sequence or as a trio of the three independent pieces played simultaneously; and Ivesiana, a piano trio in which the parts are unsynchronized, presented in a new ACA edition. Anderson’s mentor Darius Milhaud, who wrote two string quartets that could be played separately or atop one another as an octet, inspired T.J.’s improvised pastiche concepts of “multiple sound platforms” and “orbiting”: up to six different simultaneous pieces could go on within a work, enlivening a coexistence of diverse ideas.

A sampling of other ACA titles includes his In Memoriam series, installments of which begin with the 1968 high school band work In Memoriam Zach Walker (commemorating a harrowing lynching that occurred in Anderson’s birthplace of Coatesville, PA in 1911) and continue through to the 2022 In Memoriam Greg Fukushima (for alto flute). The majority of the In Memoriam pieces are brief solos (with the notable exception of the 1974 In Memoriam Malcolm X, for soprano and orchestra), moderate in their technical demands, yet often so intimate and personal as to encourage profound care and sensitivity from performers. Pieces that remember Gerald Gill (Tufts colleague; historian of race and democracy), Peter Gomes (preacher and theologian), and Lerone Bennett, Jr. (social historian and author of Before the Mayflower), among other distinguished Black scholars and artists, join this musical record. Valued friends and acquaintances who have made impressions on his everyday life in Boston, Chapel Hill, and Atlanta inhabit these miniatures as T.J. intimately documents the culture one person at a time. He has written “we have many biographies of famous people, but not enough of everyday people.”

I was touched and honored when T.J. wrote the oboe solo In Memoriam John Garwin McDonald for my father, an executive and avid amateur singer who died in 2021. T.J. said to me, “I didn’t know him, but I know you, and through you I got an idea I liked about him.” This gesture epitomizes Anderson’s ability to demonstrate friendship and empathy through his compositional practice.

Further piquing the imagination, two recent voice-and-piano settings of words by his son T.J. Anderson III [left, shown with the composer] and his mother Anita Turpeau Anderson respectively, Evocation (2016) and Three Songs of Life (2022), show T.J.’s imaginative treatment of sung text. Larger canvases include the Chamber Concerto: Remembrances (1988), a virtuosic showcase of Anderson’s musical parlance recently performed by the Oberlin Contemporary Ensemble; the powerful, devotedly researched oratorio Slavery Documents 2, premiered in 2002 to remarkable effect by Boston’s Cantata Singers and Orchestra; and the opera Soldier Boy, Soldier (1982; Libretto: Leon Forrest), premiered by Indiana University Opera Theater.

And there’s more. Currently residing in his collection with Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, projects from all phases of Anderson’s career will soon find their published home with ACA. Stay tuned!

[See below for spotlights on four works available right away: Songs of Illumination; Play Me Something (an absolutely wonderful teaching piece); Jonestown; and How To Be Remembered]

Characterizing Anderson’s Career

I began working on a biography of T.J. Anderson in 2015, coupling a book project with a two-disc audio recording documenting works for soprano and piano interspersed with short piano pieces—a cross-section of music composed between 1979 and 2020. The book project title Stirring Up the Music: The Life, Works, and Influence of Composer T(homas) J(efferson) Anderson, Jr., derives from a 1978 letter to T.J. from Robert Shaw for his 50th Birthday Celebration:

The forthcoming recording What Kind Of Person Are You?, featuring soprano Louise Toppin, takes the question posed in the last line of Anita Turpeau Anderson’s poem People as its emblem, and presents T.J.’s music for soprano and piano alongside short piano pieces (many of them part of the In Memoriam series). This publication and recording release—as well as this article—are meant to inspire others to engage in discovering this composer’s many sides.

These musical sides have been explored by performers in limited ways. Anderson’s three operas have either been performed just once or merely workshopped, and yet to be premiered are two of Anderson’s most striking contributions to the 20^th/21^st Century repertory. Intervals, a fantastical collection of scores organized in sets, each of which catalyzes new ideas about what orchestral activity can be, creates freshly independent roles for the participating musicians. The entire work, commissioned by conductor Robert Shaw and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1970 during Anderson’s composer residency, lasts about 42 minutes (all seven sets, to be performed before, during, and after an orchestral concert intermission or ‘interval’). Too unwieldy (or scary for the players?) to program during that seminal residency, the work, in its multifarious components, asks: what could a modern orchestral concert program look like? Additionally, the disarming operetta The Shell Fairy (for young singers and piano; libretto by Chester M. Pierce), the first in a string of notable theatrical works, still awaits its debut. Committed performance organizations who may meet the challenge of unveiling these works in upcoming concert seasons will not regret the effort. After half a century, they are guaranteed to make a fresh impact.

Get Ready to “Step Into Yourself” with Four Anderson Creations

T.J.’s works take deeply personal turns, and the tricky frames of reference that can result cause Anderson to caution “if you step into yourself, you are losing a number of your listeners.” A commitment to the contemplative search for musical honesty (stepping into oneself?) means that Anderson’s music is rarely an easy road for the new listener; the sounds do not often rest comfortably in the ear.

Perusing Anderson’s ACA works, you will find tenderness, fearless confrontation, downright fun, and piquant lyricism. The four works summarized here are just a small indication of what is in store for the musically inquisitive seeker.

1. Songs of Illumination (1989-90)

Songs of Illumination, a cycle of twelve settings of poems by T.J. Anderson III for soprano, tenor, and piano composed during a Guggenheim Fellowship year, explores almost every conceivable vocal technique in the service of vibrant, often graphic poetry. Its nearly forty-minute span makes it one of T.J. Jr.’s largest recital works. Following internal, varied stylistic directives, Anderson achieves a monumental utterance in the genre.

Organized in an alternation pattern of soprano and tenor solo songs, the cycle also presents three deftly handled duets. In his program notes for the 1998 Centaur recording of the work, William C. Banfield writes:

Songs of Illumination is a masterful blend of contemporary poetry by the composer’s son and a wide variety of compositional approaches from varied pitch collections, arm clusters, improvised vamps, and minimalism with vocalism from vibratismo to rap, “human beat box” and even scatting. This is modern concert music of extreme complexity and unpredictable lyricism, with the pianist playing an effective third role.

Whether it be the unforgiving melismatic vocal chromaticism of Living Below Van Gogh (with next to no keyboard support); the ‘chorale prelude’ style of Cody and the Chicken, with soprano as cantus firmus amid piano rivets and grace-note punctuations, all preceding a super-virtuosic, thrown-off piano ending; Income’s microtonally varied incantations of the note “E;” an a cappella tenor solo in rap style; or the improvisational scats and claps of Myself When I Am Real (performed in ‘Tempo Mingus’), this cycle stays permanently in exploration mode.

This ambitious work is well worth devoted study and deserves multiple new performances.

2. Play Me Something (1979)

Anderson’s Play Me Something (1979), for solo piano, “small hands,” was composed for a student at the Rivers School Conservatory in Weston, Massachusetts, which sponsors a Seminar on Contemporary Music for the Young each year.

Play Me Something (“hey—you’re a musician?—play me something—do you take requests?”) is really more of a menu from which to choose a sonic meal than a “piece” in the accustomed sense. This ACA manuscript score excerpt displays part of the menu; note the need to read alto clef (not usual for a pianist), the grand pause as a menu item to be played, and the varied stylistic references shown even in this small part of the piece:

The composer writes:

Some of The Shell Fairy music found a miniature ‘home’ in Play Me Something. Here, specifically, the music for the number Who Am I? in Scene 1 of the operetta was repurposed as a set of two ‘gestures’ or ‘events’ in Play Me Something. “I think the idea of using so many types of music in one effort was pleasing to him,” says librettist Chester Pierce. “Often he’ll have various types of jazz and classic forms in one work. In Shell Fairy, I think this inclination is carried out in greater extent.” Pierce, the psychiatrist who introduced the term ‘micro-aggression’, also coined the term ‘childism’. He defined it in both the empowering way ‘feminism’ is used and the critical way we explain the pathological illness and oppression of ‘racism’. Recounting the Shell Fairy’s story, he leans into the positive side of childism: empowering children’s imaginations. We can view the light steps of The Shell Fairy and its echoes in Play Me Something as Anderson’s and Pierce’s testament to children. Social engagement, improvised pastiche techniques, and aspects of childism are explored in other works as well. Block Songs, scored for “voice, chromatic pitch pipe, jack-in-the-box, music box, and Winnie-the-Pooh toy or equivalent,” speaks of a young Black mother’s psyche and experiences in a context where there is little need for synchrony between voice and instruments. Since the toys are largely automated, they start and are allowed to play themselves out. Likewise, in the small-scale charmer Five Easy Pieces, free, unmeasured music made for his three children to play on violin, piano, and Jew’s harp leaves a deep impression.

It is clear that just as much of Anderson’s creative energy went into making these works for young people as was employed for larger contemporaneous compositions. No conceptual “writing down” to non-professionals occurs. None of Anderson’s music concedes to trends or fashions.

Weaving throughout the soon-to-be-released recording What Kind of Person Are You?, I perform Play Me Something in five different versions. Its novel ‘playing-style menu’ format has inspired several Tufts student projects that help young composers figure out how to engage performer choice as part of their mission, using some or all of the “gestures” or “events” that can be shaped, repeated, ignored, celebrated. With its refreshing brand of improvised pastiche, Play Me Something incited me to employ it as programmatic glue for this Anderson recording project.

3. Jonestown (1982)

A stark contrast to Play Me Something, this effort for young musicians (children’s choir and piano) emerged three years later. Essentially an epitaph for the more than 900 people who were murdered at the cult settlement in rural Guyana led by Jim Jones, Jonestown briefly and powerfully recounts the horror of the mass ritual cyanide poisoning that counted among the dead 691 Black people (70% of Jonestown’s residents), some of whom were children. In calling for children’s voices to mark this horrific 1978 incident, T.J.’s unflinching portrayal of the largest deliberate loss of American civilian life until September 11, 2001 featured his initial professional collaboration with his poet son T.J. Anderson III, whose text is first intoned by unison children’s voices after an opening incantation of “Jonestown” (pp; hands cupped to mouth, three voices whispering) to a continuous, up/down low-range piano glissando with a timpani mallet (pedal held). Imagine the singers’ and audience’s reaction alike to these opening sounds and words:

The black mask of death vomits its gloomy discharge
Fleas dip their transparent wings and smile as their tongues vibrate over rotted bodies

What one critic called the music’s “trepidatious, single-note motif in the midrange interspersed by urgent ascending rubato passages," Jonestown had been commissioned by the Chicago Children’s Choir, and the premiere at Boston University in May of 1984 was undertaken by John Ross and the choir Voices of Black Persuasion. The piece provides a stunning example of the composer’s confrontational approach to exigent musical expression; both difficult (but never impossible) for the young singers to execute and hard for the listening audience to swallow, more challenge is presented here in five minutes than in most much longer works.

4. How To Be Remembered (Memory Book; 2020)

In February 2021, the Tufts Composers concert How To Be Remembered interspersed two performances of a work by Anderson written during the pandemic with selections from his In Memoriam series, presented alongside Tufts faculty and student works. The concert was performed masked before a limited live audience and simulcast via livestream. How To Be Remembered is the second poem of Part 1 of T.J. Anderson III’s book-length poem Devonte Travels the Sorry Route (Omnidawn Publishing; 2019), which has been described as “a conversation and masquerade in four sections, charging every moment it explores with resonant depth.” T.J. Jr’s setting of How To Be Remembered began and ended the program in two manifestations, first with collaborating composer/pianist Joel LaRue Smith narrating and the present author playing, and then with the two of us switching roles. A later performance as part of a lecture on Anderson’s work at Howard University in March 2023 saw Howard faculty member and composer William Kenlon narrating; I was again at the keys.

Offered alone and in the August 2021 publication of Memory Book, an anthology of short T.J. Anderson pieces sponsored by American Composers Alliance in honor of T.J.’s 93rd birthday, the non-narrative, list-form poem lends itself to the evocative musical frame that Anderson, Jr. provides for speaking performer. Leaving the poem to sound alone in cordoned-off excerpts allows the listener/receiver a conducive environment in which to contemplate each compelling text-image. This example from the ACA score shows T.J.’s signature ‘filigree-style’ piano passage providing a striking transition from one text section to the next:

By way of wrap-up, I paraphrase here from The History Makers Interview, February 19, 2012 [T.J. Anderson's Biography (thehistorymakers.org)], in which T.J. responds to the question of how he’d like to be remembered:

Coda

Selected ‘Hints and Cautions' from Stirring Up the Music:
A Compendium of One-to-Several Liners by T.J. Anderson, Jr.