English composer Julian Anderson enjoyed a professional status of being named "composer-in-association" to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra between the years 2001 and 2005; before that he'd been engaged in a similar capacity with the chamber orchestra Sinfonia 21. Anderson is a former student of Tristan Murail and shares Murail and Gérard Grisey's interest in "spectral" composition, a kind of massing up of timbres that claims a common continuum from the music of Boulez, Messiaen, Dutilleux, and post-serialism. ...
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English composer Julian Anderson enjoyed a professional status of being named "composer-in-association" to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra between the years 2001 and 2005; before that he'd been engaged in a similar capacity with the chamber orchestra Sinfonia 21. Anderson is a former student of Tristan Murail and shares Murail and Gérard Grisey's interest in "spectral" composition, a kind of massing up of timbres that claims a common continuum from the music of Boulez, Messiaen, Dutilleux, and post-serialism. Anderson claims that his harmonic practice is "systematic, but drawn from life," which must be sort of like having your cake and eating it too if you want to be recognized as a follower of the great Western tradition said to be moving forward from Boulez, and yet not held responsible for departing from the model. Nevertheless, in the works featured on the NMC disc Book of Hours, Anderson is everywhere trying to break out of the mold of such techniques, and he seems most successful when...
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