ANDREW IMBRIE
Excerpt(s) from liner notes by Phillip Ramey
Andrew Imbrie was born on April 6,1921, in New York City. He studied piano from the age of four, first with Ann Abajian and then with Pauline and Leo Ornstein from 1930 to 1942 and Robert Casadesus in the summer of 1941. Although Imbrie had begun to 10 compose when very young, he did not study composition until he was in his teens. Abajian had encouraged him to write music, and in 1937 the boy began work with Roger Sessions, who was to have a great impact on his developing style. (Years later Sessions would refer to his former pupil as "one of the leading composers of his generation.") According to Sessions, when Imbrie came to him he had already had "some elementary training in harmony" and had spent the summer of 1937 studying with Nadia Boulanger in France. Reminded of this recently, Imbrie observed, "I wouldn't say that Boulanger's influence on me has been very important."

Initially Imbrie's studies with Sessions were private; after 1939 they were continued at Princeton University, where Imbrie had enrolled. After graduating from Princeton in 1942, he did a four-year tour of duty in the Army Signal Corps before returning in 1946 to work with Sessions at the University of California in Berkeley. In a 1962 article written to mark Sessions' sixty-fifth birthday, Imbrie pinpointed what was perhaps Sessions' greatest influence on his music:

In an era fascinated either by the motive or by "sonority," Sessions speaks most often about line. Those of us who have studied with him will remember with affection his tone of voice in speaking of "the large gesture," "the long line." Music which is deficient in this quality becomes monotonous or static...

. . .

At his best, Imbrie combines generative spontaneity and a restrained but often telling lyricism (which can sometimes blossom into cadenzalike melisma) with rhythmic liveliness and an acute sense of instrumental color; that these qualities should be joined to structural clarity, fluid motivic development, and complex but masterfully controlled contrapuntal textures is a considerable achievement.


GUNTHER SCHULLER

String Quartet No. 2

Excerpted from liner note comments by the composer

The Second String Quartet began with a blank piece of manuscript paper thirteen years ago. Some months later, as a result of that mostly inexplicable and mysterious phenomenon we call the "creative process," those blank pages were filled with little dots and lines, symbols, and a few words—untested, untried, unheard except by myself in my inner ear.

The miracle of birth is always wonderful and astonishing. But the realization and translation of those black dots into an audible reality are just as miraculous. For the composer, when the performance is poor, the experience is torturous; when it is beautiful, it is like a rebirth. To my four young colleagues I owe the fact that they made me love my creative child again by carrying the struggle to "realize" the work—I reject the word "interpret"—to the ultimate of their talents and energies. And in that instant they helped to restore and maintain my faith in myself. No composer can receive a greater compliment.