Shop Now

Fanfare

Rodney Lister (b. 1951) has had a long and diverse résumé. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee and got his first musical training there at the Blair School. Later he went to the New England Conservatory in Boston, and after that he went to Britain and studied with composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Once he returned to Boston he stayed there, studying at Brandeis University from 1975 to 1977 and getting his Ph.D. in music there. Lister now teaches at Harvard, Boston University, and the New England Conservatory.

Between the early 1970s and 2024, when his association there ended, Lister also worked at Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, Massachusetts, founded in 1933 by several progressive educators. Among them was the camp’s founding director, Bunny Little; and her successor, Deborah Sherr, who stepped down in 2022. In his notes for Of Mere Being, a CD of choral works he composed for the “campers” at Greenwood, Lister quotes the camp’s third director, Rebecca Fischer, who called the camp “an intensive musical experience for teenagers in a natural environment, fertile for personal and artistic growth and development. As a camper at Greenwood in the 1980s and 1990s, I made the best friends of my life, ran around in bare feet, and played string quartets all day. I also felt free and welcomed for who I was.”

Lister started composing for the Greenwood chorus a few years after he joined the faculty. “I continued to write a piece almost every year,” Lister recalled, saying that in writing for a relatively untrained choir “I was following the examples of two of my teachers. Peter Maxwell Davies, from the beginning of his career, wrote pieces for less advanced musicians, and did not feel limited to a certain style or sound in his work. … Virgil Thomson in a number of works set texts that might have been considered to be obscure and difficult in a way that would make those texts seem clear and even sensible.”

Lister’s first pieces for the Greenwood choir “were settings of early 20th century modernist poems by Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, and were in a fairly transparently tonal language,” he recalled. His compositions for the Greenwood chorus became more complex when he studied Gesualdo’s madrigals, particularly Moro lasso, and he set Virgil’s Wheat Fields at Noon in a polytonal style “based on the use of four discrete triads that contain between them all 12 notes.” After he set David Ferry’s translation of another Virgil poem, The Bees (included here), “the pieces I wrote for the Greenwood chorus set a variety of different texts from different times and trafficked in a tonally fluid triadic style.” He credited the choir director, Greg Hayes, with developing the chorus at Greenwood to such a high technical level that it could do justice to the pieces he wanted to write for them.

“This recording is a documentation of my time there, and a record of a place that was very important and meaningful in my life,” Lister wrote. “It contains most of the pieces I wrote for the Greenwood chorus.” The only ones missing are A Supermarket in California, based on a poem by Allen Ginsberg; a setting of Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, written after the recording was made; and a setting of e. e. cummings’s This Is the Garden: Colours Come and Go, “which somehow, during the rehearsal and recording for this album, we all forgot about.” There’s also one piece here that wasn’t written for Greenwood, a setting of W. B. Yeats’s Never Give All the Heart for unaccompanied chorus (the only a cappella piece on the CD) composed for the Family Singers at Newton North High School but not performed until this recording. Lister said in his liner notes that he originally wrote most of these works as songs for solo voice and piano and then adapted them for chorus, and though the choral settings are great, I’d like to hear them that way sometime.

If there’s a theme running through this album, it is impermanence. Many of the texts deal with the cycles of life and the way organisms—plants, insects, people—grow, change, and die. The texts range from three of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, with her typical wordplay (“I have thought that I would not mind if they came/But I do/I also thought that it made no difference if they came/But it does”) to Wallace Stevens’s On the Road Home (“It was when I said/’There is no such thing as the truth,’/That the grapes seemed fatter/The fox ran out of his hole”) and Frank O’Hara’s The Harbormaster, a particularly powerful use of the common poetic metaphor between a tortured soul and a ship at sea seeking safe harbor in a storm.

The most unusual text included here is The Lost Feed, which is not a poem at all but “directions for an improvised play by Kenneth Koch.” The play is for “seven actresses, impersonating hens and chickens,” who are directed to enact a scene in which they don’t receive their daily feeding and “each one suspects that someone of the others may be the culprit.” But in some ways the most powerful of these poems is To the Republic, by Frank Bidart, a grim fantasy in which the dead from the Battle of Gettysburg on both sides come back to life and declare to present-day Americans, “You betray us.” At first I wondered if Bidart had written this poem in response to the apparent self-destruction of American democracy under Donald Trump, but it was actually copyrighted in 2009.

The performances by the Choir of the Church of the Advent in Boston, conducted by Mark Dwyer, are technically impeccable and do full justice to Lister’s inspirations. Mention should also be made of the accompanist, Chengcheng Ma, who shapes, bends, and phrases the music impeccably while fulfilling his duty to support the chorus. On the long introductions and epilogues Lister gives him—particularly the ending of To the Harbormaster, which segues into the beginning of James Merrill’s A Downward Look—he is quite beautiful and moving enough that I’d like to hear him play solo piano music.

Though all the pieces are in medium-slow tempos and you’ll want to follow along with the printed texts (which have a few annoying typos: in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction the word “chaningness” should be “changingness,” in A Clear Day and No Memories “This invisible activity, this scene,” should read “this sense,” and in Stein’s Stanza XV there are not only little mistakes but three whole lines that aren’t sung on the record), this is a quite compelling disc of modern-day choral works. Each piece is moving in its own way, and together they make up a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Warmly and engagingly recommended.