My Music
David P. Anderson
Percussionist - Composer
(click on the pictures for larger images)
This is where I blow my own horn (as
it were) concerning my musical escapades over the last 25 years, including
15 years with the
BL Lacerta Quartet, national and international
tours, dance scores, silent movie scores, electronic and computer music, nuclear marching
band, my project with the Woodrow Wilson All Star Choir, and recent accompaniments
for dance and piano trios with Scott Roller and Ulrike Stortz of
OpenMusic.
12 August 2008
Seven by Seven
O'Donnell Performance Hall
Meadows School of the Arts
Southern Methodist University
(Special Thanks to
Robert Dodson, SMU Director of Division of Music)
(and David Pierce, University of North Texas College of Music)
Ulrike Stortz, violin
Scott Roller, 'cello
David Anderson, piano
Trio 1.1 (60M mpg video)
5.6M mp3 audio
Trio 1.2 (available) (120M mpg video)
11M mp3 audio
Trio 1.7 (79M mpg video)
7M mp3 audio)
Trio 1.8 (69M mpg video)
(6M mp3 audio)
Trio 2.8 (lullaby)(83M mpg video)
7.6M mp3
more to come...
21 August 2008
Music for Kissing Greer Garson on the Mouth
(5M mp3 audio)
I've been spending a lot of time recently on evenings and weekends over at the Southern Methodist University
Meadows School of the Arts, playing piano, accompanying dance, and performing with the Seven by Seven piano trio.
Greer Garson, she of film, acting, and directing fame, once roamed the halls of this very building.
With her generosity the University added an excellent little theater onto the the Meadows building and there is a
bronze bust
of Greer in the theater lobby, portraying her when she was young and extremely beautiful.
Sometimes for inspiration, late in the evenings when no one is about save me and perhaps Michael Church and his dog Lobo, I slip past the velvet ropes under the watchful eye of the security camera, and
I kiss Greer Garson on the mouth. I don't think she'd mind.
I did so last night and walked away humming with
this little melody playing in my head, found a lonely piano, and recorded it.
06 June 2008
Music for
Breanna Gribble's Graham Class.
I went over to the SMU Meadows building Friday evening June 6th with the multi-talented
geophysicist/dancer/choreographer and all around smart gal
Breanna Lauren Gribble
to record some piano music
for a modern dance class she is teaching next week. We found an Empty Dance Studio with Steinway Grand Piano (most bless-ed
of all studios) and recorded these little piano improvisations while she danced. I hadn't accompanied for many
years and my hands were rusty and I was initially quite nervous. But as we warmed up and settled
down my heart opened and began to sing, just like in the
before-time, and I stopped thinking about my hands and just played.
I especially like the 6th improvisation in the suite which seemed to spring forth unbidden, like with Lacerta, and I think 2nd and 3rd are lovely as was the
dancing that inspired and accompanied them. I kick myself that I did not video Breanna's movement.
We did some wonderful free improv before setting up the equipment to record these little pieces.
I should have learned by now to record and video everything, especially with improv --- you never know when the muse will appear.
In addition to the Steinway, this studio also has what appears to be an old man
asleep in the closet. You can hear him snoring on some of the recordings. Breanna says he's been there for years.
Dance Suite for The Old Man Asleep In The Closet
13M mp3 audio
146M wav audio
June and July 2008
Breanna vanished away to study geophysics in New Mexico but I've continued to wander over to the Meadows building in the evenings to find a piano and play. Here are some of the improvisations.
The first one,
"Celerity"
is a geophysics term that roughly translates as average velocity, after the slowly increasing tempo of the piece (and my congenital tendency to rush every tempo!)
"Earth Dance"
is a massive dance piece for Breanna, recorded on the world-class Steinway Grand Piano that is kept locked in the "O'Donnell Performance Hall" at SMU (thanks Michael!).
"Mafic Intrusions"
is a term I like from structural geology which I've always thought sounded vaguely obscene.
The other pieces were inspired by my friends and fellows at
The Huff. My current favorites are
"Celerity" and
"The Tall Waltz,"
a ballsy waltz for six foot (and taller!) ballerinas en pointe.
More Music for The Old Man Asleep in the Closet.
Celerity (136M wav) (13M mp3)
Earth Dance (66M wav) (6M mp3)
Music for the Baker's Birthday (94M wav) (8M mp3)
Jenny's Lament (85M wav) (7.7M mp3)
The Tall Waltz (80M wav) (7.3M mp3)
Mafic Intrusions (130M wav) (12M mp3)
21 July 2008
And then one day, just like magic, Breanna reappeared. She delivered a paper she had authored on Geo-Magnetics.
She did some Infrasound research with us. Then she picked up her paycheck, sold her bed, packed up her things and said goodby to everyone, designed and shot a TV commercial for a new PUMA shoe on her way out of town, and headed off to Europe to dance, by way of Colorado and the Grand Canyon.
This is the gospel truth.
Just before she left we went back to the old man's studio and performed her last three dances at SMU. My accompanying seems a bit heavy-handed and clumsy at times but her dancing is passionate, creative and intelligent.
I love the third one, "Breanna at the Ballet Bar" or perhaps "Breanna's Revenge on the Ballet Bar." And I got video this time!
Breanna Gribble and David Anderson: Improvisations.
Last Dance #1: 108M mpg video
Last Dance #1: 690M hi def mpeg video
Last Dance #2: 84M mpg video
Last Dance #2: 512M hi def mpeg video
Last Dance #3: 102M mpg video
Last Dance #3: 370M hi def mpeg video
Nick Danger: "Well, Bradshaw -- It's like in The Army, you know--The Great
Prince issues commands, founds states, vests families with fiefs.
Inferior people should not be employed"
The Before-Time*
I spent five years in the early '70s at the University of North Texas
Center for
Electronic Music working with the great sage Merril Ellis. I have most
of that music on reel-to-reel tape (agh!) but a few pieces survived into the digital
age. We had a nice recording studio with two
Ampex 350 two track stereo decks, an
Ampex 440 four track deck, and several
Putney,
Arp, and
Moog,
synthesizers in a little house on
Mulberry Street. Before "sampling" was a technical possibility we recorded and spliced
magnetic tape in a form of music styled "Musique Concrete."
Trek (8.2M mp3) is one of the pieces that has survived, composed
in 1974 from recordings of three different episodes of StarTrek. I had a lot of fun
making this piece, and it has been featured since then at a several Star Trek
conventions (for reasons that are not altogether clear to me...)
On The Spot (5.2M mp3) is a sound-mass piece commissioned by the
Woodrow Wilson Elementary School All Star Choir, where my sons attended school. Sound-masses like
the bubbling of a creek, rainfall on the roof, a chorus of frogs, or the incredible dense song of
night creatures are all musical textures made of large numbers of individual similar sounds. Most
people are familiar with these textures from movie scores and incidental sounds, but composers
dating back to the early 1900s have employed these timbres for theatrical and dramatic effects.
This recording is from a performance at the Texas Music Educators Association
(TMEA) in San Antonio, Texas, in 1999, conducted by myself, and
performed by a bunch of fearless
4th and 5th graders who blew the roof off the building. Once the kids understood what I needed
them to do, their creativity was absolutely astounding. If you listen carefully to the
final cadence, you can hear a baby cooing softly in the audience. One of the girls in
the choir picks up on the note exactly and weaves the baby deftly into the final chords,
a lovely and extremely sensitive finale.
Mudrussel (4.0M mp3) was my first piece written on the new
Moog synthesizer, about 1973. I originally made a piano four-hand
arrangement and recorded it on the studio's four track Ampex machine. When we got the new synthesizer
I went back and pieced together the tracks one by one by over dubbing against the original two track
mix down of the piano version, which worked moderately well.
Sound synthesis has come a long way since those days, particularly
the synthesis of traditional orchestral sounds. These tracks were essentially hand assembled from
simple oscillators and filters. Tuning and control of intonation and signal drift were constant
problems as the temperature in the Chilton Hall and Mulberry Street studios wandered around both summer
and winter. If we had access to the instruments my son uses today, we could have RULED THE WORLD!
Six Big Ones (5.1M mp3) is another musique concrete piece
composed from recordings made off the radio one evening in 1972, featuring snipets of pop music
of the day and a happy radio evangelist from Tulsa Oklahoma selling his wares. Part way through
the evening a couple of young ladies tripping on LSD dropped by the studio and I stuck a mic in front
of them and made them sing. Several hundred tape splices later this humourous piece emerged.
Adegil (6.3M mp3) is my favorite tape piece from my days at the UNT
Electronic Music Studio. Written in 1975, it is constructed entirely from human voices, mostly
mine and my friends', tape recorded and modified electronically and manipulated physically with
all the techniques I had learned in my time working with Merril Ellis. The ethereal sounds in
the final section were created by a technique suggested by my father, a physicist who taught
musical acoustics, singing into a piano. I had an operatic soprano sing into the un-damped
strings of a giant Steinway. This causes only the strings which match the overtones of the
voice to ring. The ring is what we recorded, producing a hauntingly human and yet not-quite-human
sound.
I spent a year in 1978-1979 as
Composer-in-Residence
at North Carolina State University in Raleigh,
writing music for various college ensembles, the men's chorus, percussion ensemble and the
concert band, and had a similar job two summers in the late 70s at the American Institute of Musical
Studies in Graz, Austria; most of that music has been lost in the ether.
I pretty much stopped composing when I began performing, in 1979, with the
BL Lacerta
Quartet, of which more is written below, and which had a profound influence
on my life. So after a 15 year hiatus from composing, I ventured back into the woods with some trepidation.
Most of my recent music has been much more traditional melodic and rhythmic compositions, written
on the computer (who'd of guessed?) using my
son Jonathan's electronic keyboards, and often inspired by the machines' capabilities.
I sent a CD of some new pieces to my friend, composer, music producer and general talented smart guy
Arthur Barrow a couple of years ago. He liked the bass lines (which pleased me; he's a bass player)
but his main question was, "Why so conservative?" So maybe I've been out of the woods too long.
Here are some downloadable mp3 files of some recent pieces:
The Bug (5.5M mp3) is a piece I put together this Christmas (2002) with
a new midi keyboard my parents bought for me. The themes were actually composed in the late 1980s
with the birth of my sons, one theme for each son, and woven together contrapuntally on an enormous
Synclavier belonging to William Rollow. I re-orchestrated the whole thing in a week of all-nighters over the holidays. Piano, horns, flutes, percussion.
The Lion Queen (4.3M mp3) is a dance for double-bass, pan-pipes,
percussion and strings. I particularly enjoyed writing the bass line, as bass is sort of
a half melodic and half percussion instrument.
My Scheherazade (4.6M mp3) was written for my wife as she came
dancing through the garage one spring afternoon, syncing the movement of her walk to the
sultry melodies I was improvising at the time. She really is my Scheherazade.
Weather Channel (4.3M mp3) is a passacaglia inspired by
the background music played on the cable radar channel. I started to name it "Passacaglia,"
which is an ancient form based on a set of variations on a repeated bass line, but its just
too darn hard to pronounce. I had a lot of fun with the form of this piece.
Bali (1.4M mp3) is not really very much like real Gamelan music of
Java and Bali, of which the BL Lacerta Quartet was much influenced, but it has an oriental
flavor and I was looking for an excuse to use the cool ethnic timbres of one of our keyboards.
China Doll (5.5M mp3) started as a pentatonic whimsy and wandered
through blue grass to a sort of Hollywood-John-Ford-Western feel. It's really just a vamp, sonic wallpaper
suitable for a drive through the countryside with the volume down low. It ends with a long slow
fade, intended to fall below the noise level without the listener noticing. That sort of thing
doesn't work too well with digital media, I've discovered. Too much gain compression and
too much compression noise. It's a gentle piece nonetheless.
Clock Works (4.1M mp3) is a percussion and orchestration
exercise in which
a single musical phrase is orchestrated and re-orchestrated through a series of variations.
That turns out to be really easy to do with a MIDI sequencer. Each line of the initial phrase takes
its turn as the melody, and each as accompaniment, with all sharing equally in the final cadence.
I always thought this piece would be cool performed by a highschool marching band.
Igor Stravinsky felt that, no matter how International a composer's style might be,
he reveals his roots and true origin when he writes songs with lyrics. I suppose this
must be true
in my own case, because all the songs I've written seem to turn into country and western
without my intention.
Here are some lyrics to some songs I've written over the years,
or least the ones I can still remember.
As mentioned above I began performing regularly in 1979 with the BL Lacerta
Improvisation Quartet. This ensemble was an orchestra in miniature, with one string
player, (originally violist Maurice Hood, later 'cellist Scott Roller, and later still
'cellist Tom Green) one woodwind, clarinetist Robert Price, one brass player (originally
tubist Les Gay, later trombonist Kim Corbet) and one percussionist, myself. I originally
joined the group intending to write compositions for these very talented individuals, but
I quickly found that we could improvise music so much more profound and sophisticated and
majestic than I could conceive that the urge "to music" was satisfied.
This flier is from our New York Debut at Carnegie Hall in 1983. Gregory Sandow from the
Village Voice wrote an
extremely nice review after the Carnegie concert.
We were together for 15 years in one form or another, performed hundreds of concerts both
solo and with guests artists like
John Cage
and Pauline Oliveros, dancers from Merce Cunningham
and Erik Hawkins companies, sculptors,
theater troupes, and dozens of live performance scores for classic silent films.
Music critic Lawson Taitte came to hear us perform in Dallas and attended several rehearsals and
then wrote
a really great article about us featured in the November 1981 edition of Texas Monthly
Magazine.
Texas Arts Magazine did a very friendly
profile of the quartet in February of 1985.
Someday I'll put together
a history of the ensemble worthy of the effort, but for now I've collected some links below
that hint at what the group accomplished. It made a huge impact on my life and I believe
the other musicians would agree that we were collectively much more than the sum of the parts.
I miss it greatly, especially the rehearsals. 'Cellist and composer Scott Roller, who now
makes his living in Germany, once wrote me that "...despite all I have done since that time,
and the pride I've taken in my music and performances, I've never experienced that same sense
of reverence, of walking off stage loving my fellow musicians, awed by what we had just experienced."
That says it exactly for me.
I recently ran a google search on the BL Lacerta quartet and was surprised at all the
links I found. Here are just a few:
Here is a nice writeup about us by the good folks
at Coma music. Scroll on down to where they talk about their background.
Our "rare" LP recording on IRIDA
Cellist Scott Roller's Home Page
Trombonist and Musician Extraordinare Kim Corbet
Clarinetist and Birdman Robert Price
The BathHouse Cultural Center Anniversary, where we gave lots of concerts.
Chamber Music America, who supported and nurtured us for many years.
Tubists Universal Brotherhood
Composer Mike Matthews whom we commissioned in 1982 (? I think)
Brass Music of Finland
Discussion of John Cage (we commissioned a piece from John Cage shortly before his death, and performed it with
him in an amazing live concert at the Dallas Museum of Art. I still have his hand autographed score, somewhere).
This is us playing in Carnegie Hall in 1984,
complete with three-piece suits. I'm the flute playing percussionist standing in the center:
Gregory Sandow's Village Voice Review of our record upon the
occasion of the Carnegie Hall performance.
Lawson Taitte's Texas Monthly Article
Wiley Akins created an un-ending flow of artwork for our concerts, fliers, posters, and programs,
and especially a series of music-playing lizards ("lacertas"). This is one of my favorites.
Somewhere along the line, I learned how to write computer software, and discovered that it is amazingly similar
to composing music, and generally pays a lot better. I tell my artist friends, only half in jest, to be very
careful that they don't learn a sale-able skill, a profession to "fall back on" as we used to say, because one
day you will!!! Composing and performing now occupy a significantly smaller proportion of my life, and the wonders
of fatherhood and the excitement of exploring the unknown waters of cyberspace and science and robotics generally
fire my imagination more in these days. I still find I have to grab the marimba mallets or sit down at the piano
from time to time, to calm my restless heart and give vent to the non-verbal, the un-say-able, the hidden places and
parts of my being. Putting together this web page has really reminded me of just how much that is.
16 August 2002
Dallas, Texas
dpa
*The Before Time. Stardate 2713.5, the Onlys refer to the time when grups (grownups) were still among us as "The Before Time." I think of it the same way.
Back to my homepage.
last update 02 September 2008 dpa
(c) 1971-2008 David P. Anderson
I pretty much stopped composing when I began performing, in 1979, with the
BL Lacerta
Quartet, of which more is written below, and which had a profound influence
on my life. So after a 15 year hiatus from composing, I ventured back into the woods with some trepidation.
Most of my recent music has been much more traditional melodic and rhythmic compositions, written
on the computer (who'd of guessed?) using my
son Jonathan's electronic keyboards, and often inspired by the machines' capabilities. 
and the pride I've taken in my music and performances, I've never experienced that same sense
of reverence, of walking off stage loving my fellow musicians, awed by what we had just experienced."
That says it exactly for me.
