Andrew Imbrie

Initially something of the American Bartók, Andrew Imbrie matured right into a second-generation Roger Sessions, writing music of formal and linear clarity and classical development patterns, regardless of how dense and atonal it could become. Pursuing piano and structure studies with several numbers, including Pauline and Leo Ornstein, Nadia Boulanger, and Robert Casadesus, Imbrie dropped beneath the spell of Classes at Princeton, that he graduated in 1942. After a tour of responsibility in the U.S. Military, Imbrie followed Classes to the University or college of California, Berkeley, for any master’s system (1946-1947). After a 1947-1949 fellowship in the American Academy in Rome, Imbrie came back to Berkeley to instruct; he continued to be there until retiring in 1991. His curriculum vita arranged the typical for academy-based composers of his era and those pursuing; it includes many going to professorships and composer residencies (including at Tanglewood, 1991); two Guggenheim fellowships; commissions from your Koussevitzky, Fromm, Ford, and Naumburg foundations and SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA Opera; and election towards the Country wide Institute of Arts and Characters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among a great many other honors. Within an era where American educational composers tended to imitate Webern’s usage of small motivic cells, Imbrie continued to be committed to much longer thematic lines and traditional structural plans. Nevertheless, his functions were metrically complicated, harmonically thick, and forcefully dramatic. At exactly the same time, he could absorb whatever outside components might be suitable to the task accessible; his opera Position of Repose, for instance, uses some folk idioms without departing from Imbrie’s customary abstract design.