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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4/10/2006
So Few Quintets--So Much Time

Today's Independent described yesterday's article on Condoleezza Rice's chamber music playing by Tony Tommasini in the NYTimes as fawning--accurately, it seems to me. Putting aside the question which occupied the writer of the Independent, which is why all of a sudden such pains are being taken to make the Secretary's warm and human side so obvious these days--good luck-- (the work of Karen Hughes, maybe), and on a tiny bit of reflection, I wonder how long those people have been at it. There aren't all that many piano quintets, really and they don't seem to have much scratched the surface of the literature yet, since the three pieces they seem to be playing are the best known ones for that combination. Maybe they could look into some others. At the top of my list would be the Faure Quintets, especially the second, which is my favorite Faure chamber piece--except maybe for the trio. Maybe close to that the Elgar. There's also the Dohnanyi which would be right up Condi's alley, being an adolescent rip-off of Brahms. The Piston Piano Quintet is one of his best pieces, I think. All of that would be kind of non-threatening. Now let's see...is there a Feldman Quintet, late or otherwise. Something like that could keep them busy for a while....

I suppose it's too much to expect that they might start commissioning new piano quintets. (Just think of that...)

But if she's really into quality and/or Brahms, why not just get rid of one of the violinists (although I suppose that might display a nasty inhuman side) and do the Schumann Piano Quartet (I like it a lot better than the Quintet) and the Brahms Quartets (her favorite, after all--just think what she could do with the last movement of the G minor)--there are three of them, as opposed to only one Quintet.
posted by Rodney Lister