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.ROPER: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you —where would you hide, Roper, the law all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down–and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
— A Man For All Seasons–Act One, Robert Bolt
I’m suprised that, as far as I can tell, noone’s mentioned (or at least that tons of people aren’t shouting it out all the time):
So today, we’re ready to fix things so that people can be declared by some person in the government as a danger to the state (or the people, if you like), and then, without any kind of benefit of due process, be put away indefinitely without any recourse to any kind of higher authority–without any chance to prove that they’ve been accused either mistakenly or unjustly, just on the word of whatever person in the government has decided that they’re a danger. (“Just trust me/us.”) Just dissappeared—-
Now it’s “enemy combatants,” “picked up on the battlefield” (the definition of the term “battlefield,” presumably, including an airport lounge in Newark on your way home to Canada).
What about when it’s gay right activists or anti-war activists or—name your favorite danger to the state…
The idea that such a thought could ever be taken seriously in the Congress of the United State of American is grotesque almost beyond imagining… let alone that it could become law….
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