1950, Lexington Kentucky
American composer and pianist
Works for Brass Ensemble
- The Brass Swale (1989) for brass quintet
- Saturday/Sunday Swale (1991) for brass quintet
Biography
Beth Anderson studied with John Cage, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley, and Larry Austin, among others. She studied at the University of Kentucky, UC Davis, New York University and Mills College.
She began playing the piano as a child and began composing shortly after. At age 14 she began studying piano with composer Helen Libscomb. Lisbcomb taught Anderson the rules of counterpoint, enabling her to compose simplistic traditional music. During her last two years of high school she began to compose serial music, learning from books on the topic.
Anderson is best known in her field for her swales, a musical form she invented based on collages and samples of newly composed music rather than existing music. She told a reporter for The New York Times in 1995 she named the form based on this definition of the word: “A swale is a meadow or marsh where a lot of wild things go together.”