Anthony Green and 'Weightless'

Another Pendulum Concert approaches on November 30th, and I sat down with Anthony Green to chat about his upcoming premiere Weightless, written for alto saxophone and piano. Written in the summer of 2010, it will be played on sax by Benjamin Sorrell from Los Angeles, CA.

Weightless is part of an ongoing series of Green’s works that contain multiple compositional or philosophical ideas of some of Green’s favorite composers, such as Stockhausen, Scelsi, and Cage. This piece in particular showcases ideas and influences from Lee Hyla, who is the featured composer of this Pendulum concert and a former composition professor of Green’s at New England Conservatory. Green says that Hyla’s influence can be found in many places in Weightless, including a careful attention to pitch (for example, Green avoids or skirts around the pitch F-sharp throughout the piece and then ends the piece on that particular note); rhythmic fluidity, and use of minor thirds. All of these ideas appear in much of Hyla’s music.

With a piece called Weightless, I wondered if the audience would be able to hear a certain ‘floating’ quality in the music, or if this would be built more into the composition structure. Green says that he’s working with both sonic and structural “weightlessness”. The piece is built around quasi-serialist processes, not so much in deciding which pitches will appear in certain orders, but in avoiding certain tones and using “incorrect” resolutions of harmonies. There are also musical gestures that always move upwards and never come back down, giving piece a sense that it never quite arrives back where it started. The audience should be able to hear that the piece is highly organized and structured, even if the compositional technique is not audible. In a sense, the listener is aware that the composer is “up to something”.

When Anthony is not composing, his other interests tend toward the detail-oriented. Green loves learning the structure and syntax of languages, and is currently learning Dutch in preparation for moving abroad after his time at CU. Green is also studying the Japanese instrument the koto; he says the sound and meditative resonance of that non-Western instrument may also be creeping into his compositions. I'll wait and see if these sounds and syntaxes continue to make their way into Green’s future work, which include an upcoming opera. Until then, please come to hear Green’s work and all the pieces on next week’s Pendulum concert, November 30th at 7:30pm!