Rodney Lister: Faith-based Initiatives

Description

Though the works on this album are varied in genre, from vocal to string quartet, they share a common theme, explicit in the song cycle Friendly Fire and implicit in the other works; that theme embodies grief, personal or for the plight of people blighted by war; hope in the backing of action by faith. Rodney Lister is a composer based in New England. His biography is impressive and features commissions from the US Library of Congress and many leading ensembles, and a wealth of compositions, articles and other writings. He is currently teaching at Boston University and the New England Conservatory as well as tutoring duties at Harvard; he also works with the Greenwood Music Camp in Massachusetts. This album offers a view of a composer whose output is both lyrical and abstract, with a poetic command of foreground and background, consonance and dissonance. Often, the core of the work is a borrowed or found fragment, in particular American hymn tunes. The melodies become locations of stability but subject to subtle and sometimes unsettling modifications. One of the poems included in Friendly Fire (‘For the Union Dead’ by Robert Lowell) contains a racial epithet considered unacceptable in day to day speech and writing today. It is retained because of its historical and social context in a poem which is strongly anti-racist and is a cry against the injustice meted out to African-American troops fighting for the Union in the American Civil War. The poem itself is regarded as a classic of modern literature, appreciated by commentators of all ethnicities.