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. In between his stay at those two institutions, he lived in England, where he studied privately with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. He subsequently 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, have been Malcolm Peyton, Donald Martino, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Virgil Thomson. He has also studied piano with Enid Katahn, David Hagan, Robert Helps, and Patricia Zander.

Mr. Lister 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. He was a founding member of the Music Production Company in 1982 and continues to work with the group as pianist and composer.

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4/24/2006
Reminiscing In Tempo

I recently heard Ingrid Monson at Harvard do a talk on the interaction of jazz and recording. It caused me to think again about Ellington's Reminiscing In Tempo. For anybody who doesn't know, most jazz recordings until post World War II are about 3 -3 1/2 minutes long, since that was the limit of 78rpm recordings. Reminiscing In Tempo is unusual in that it was released as a single piece that went over four sides. The fact that the recording I own, which is a Classics CD, maintains a break between the four sides, rather than putting them together as might have been done for, say, a movement of a Beethoven Symphony originally recorded and released on 78s. Gunther Schuller's analysis in his Swing Era book treats it as a continuous piece, taking no account of the side breaks. I wonder if the side breaks weren't, as it were, composed into the piece and are, somehow, integral parts of it, functioning a little like the breaks in the Carter First Quartet. I tried to ask Gunther about it once, without a lot of success. I asked him how Ellington performed it; according to Gunther, since it was controversial and got him a lot of criticism, Ellington was rather discouraged about it and didn't ever actually perform it much--bacisally he didn't know, I guess. Gunther did say though, that when he performed it he had to add a little music because going directly from one side to the next doesn't actually work.

Is considering the piece with the breaks as some sort of Stravinskyish or Carterish continuity a sort of anacronistic hearing which distorts the piece or does it have some validity (or both)?

Any thoughts?
posted by Rodney Lister