By Robert P. Commanday

"Andrew Imbrie, who turns 85 [on April 6], is a national treasure insufficiently recognized," wrote Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe's music critic, in a review last week. Dyer went on to observe that Imbrie's latest piece, The Tyger, a song cycle for soprano and baritone that incorporates poems by Blake, Wordsworth, and Thomas Moore, is "guided both by inspiration and by impeccable craftsmanship ... honest, eloquent music, full of internal energy."

Those words stand as well for all of Imbrie's music, emanating as it has from a deep spirit and sensibility. In its great range (symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber, choral, and vocal works composed over a span of 60 years), there is a consistency of style, character, spirit — what is commonly called "voice" — that identify the music as personally, individually his.

At no point could it be identified with a movement, a trend, a school, an "-ism." Twenty and 30 years ago, a critic here and there would refer to the influence of 12-tone composers, usually Alban Berg, but that was a stretch. Imbrie drew on the technique (and a lot else), as did a high percentage of his generation of composers, using it as a resource, a way of creating distinctive, generative ideas and of handling musical materials as it was advantageous. But overall, Imbrie's music is chromatic and ultimately tonal. Never was he a serialist who extended the procedure's use with any systematic strictness.

Andrew Imbrie

Imbrie is more a "native" composer of this region than any other who comes to mind, though only in the literal, geographical sense. That's because Imbrie has lived and done most of his composing in Berkeley for the past 60 of his 85 years. Here, as a professor of music at UC Berkeley, he was a most influential teacher of composition. Many of his students have long since reflected his inspired guidance as they went on to fine careers. Berkeley was also the base from which he has ventured to spend teaching/composing years abroad, in Japan and Korea, and in universities in Chicago, New York, Alabama, and Massachusetts. Yet there's no regional cast to Imbrie's music, and only a couple of pieces of particularly local reference. He maintains that his music "does not strive to be American like my nationality, nor Scottish like my ancestry." Any such identification would have to come from a listener's perception and inferences.

Musically, most of his ideas, even those that are referential, come from his internal sources. For example, the melodic slant of certain tunes in his single full-length opera, Angle of Repose (1976), are not quotes or paraphrases of salon waltzes or period popular music. Rather, they are his own melodies intended to set a mood, a time, a flavor of the 19th century West. In the important ways, he is inescapably an American, influenced inevitably by American culture, jazz, his World War II years in the army, his surroundings, and his determinedly independent and individualistic outlook.

His own voice

Imbrie has always gone his own way, being himself. As he never resorted to experimentation or radical departures for the sake of testing an extreme, no single work of his sticks out as an example of a trend, an approach, a procedure. In fact, the consistency of his music's character and style is its salient compositional quality. From the first of his four string quartets until today, Imbrie's music sounds like his and no one else's. The common term for this today is "the composer's voice." In Imbrie's case, that phrase happens to be deeply appropriate, for much of his melodic impulse is a vocal one, despite the fact that the piano is his mother instrument. Ultimately, Imbrie is a singer. That comes through in his choral works but just as evidently in his instrumental works, music that the ready listener internalizes and joins.

A singing lyricism pervades Imbrie's early works. We can hear this in the slow movement of the Serenade for Flute, Viola, and Piano (1952) and in the captivating, aspiring line given the soloist in the Violin Concerto (1954). This sense of cantabile carries through the Fourth Quartet (1969) and the charmed clarinet theme in the second movement of Symphony No. 3 (1970), all the way to the gorgeous cello solo of Pilgrimage (1983). In the works from the 1960s on, this instrumental vocalism becomes increasingly more impassioned, wide ranging, ecstatic.

Frequently, rapidly repeated notes urgently punctuate the end of a phrase, heightening the impression of a quasi-vocal or speech utterance. I know of no composer of his or subsequent generations who produces a pronounced musical element that is so recognizably and affectingly a personal expression. While this is most evident to musicians performing his music, it is also clear to the participating, serious listener. Imbrie counts on and writes for the active listener. His composing takes consistent care to prepare and signal events (often to unify multimovement works) and always to keep clear the music's intentions. He does not write for casual sonic "surfers" and so is not a participant in the entertainment/diversion culture. As he has said, "I write the kind of music I like to listen to."

What controls and guides the forces of Imbrie's music is first a dialectic process; the musical idea generates both its own continuity and its own contrasting response. Second comes his grasp of the whole, of the ultimate aim of the music. This sense of the music's destiny was fundamental to Roger Sessions, the teacher most important, and closest, to Imbrie.

Images and musical ideas

Underlying Imbrie's music are concepts, metaphors, dramatic and human issues. There are images that suggest musical ideas and processes, and musical ideas and processes that suggest images. His music is often of metaphoric origin and is rich with suggestion, as in his Piano Concerto No. 3 (1991), whose reiterated-chord theme Imbrie traced to the "insistent background of taxi horns in New York City, my birthplace, to which I return with mixed feelings of alarm and nostalgia."

The external inspiration that elicits Imbrie's deepest response is found in the texts he has chosen and set in many songs, choral pieces, and large choral orchestral works, particularly the Requiem In Memoriam, John H. Imbrie (written in 1985 for the younger of his two sons), for soprano soloist, chorus, and orchestra. The same is true for his two operas, Angle of Repose and the one-act Three Against Christmas. The San Francisco Opera commissioned Angle of Repose and gave its well-received premiere. It is a great American opera. Had supertitles been in use then, I believe the work would have caught on and found a place in the repertory. It was that vocal, that dramatically telling and musically involving.

Both vocal and text setting seem to come naturally. More than simply rewarding for the singer, the vocal writing is consistently expressive and touching. Imbrie has an unerring and sensitive ear for the chorus as a complex, human instrument and achieves with it a sound that is distinctive and expressive.

The celebratory work

This has been true from his earliest choral work, On the Beach at Night (1949), set to text by Walt Whitman. This will be the single work of his to be performed here this spring, by Volti, Robert Geary's celebrated vocal ensemble with the strings of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. Performances are May 19 at 8 p.m. at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco, May 20 at 8 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, and May 21 at 4 p.m. at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley. While not close to this week's signal birthday, these performances do serve as a celebratory gesture — the only one in the region where he has flourished for three-fourths of his life and made a distinguished contribution.

On the Beach at Night is utterly beautiful, a lyrical setting that draws out distinctive lines and shadings, with pointed expression and nuance and exquisite sonorities. The string orchestra is not an accompanying force but an eloquent partner in the projection of the feeling and sense of Whitman. Its music develops as unswervingly and dramatically as that of Imbrie's later string quartets. On the Beach at Night launched the great series of Imbrie's vocal works for solo voice and all manner of ensembles, leading up to major choral-orchestral compositions.

Challenging profound human questions and his own interior response and understanding, Imbrie's music has the power to move deeply — a power that is exceptional, if not singular, in our time. Imbrie at 85 is, as he has always been, an individual, a composer apart.

(Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle from 1965 to 1993, and before that a conductor and lecturer at UC Berkeley.)

©2006 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved.

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From September 1, 1998, to April 4, 2006, SFCV has published, in addition to our weekly features, Music News, and Listening Ahead columns, 2,366 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 52 symphony orchestras (501 reviews), dozens of recital presenters (412 reviews), 39 opera companies (328 reviews), 89 chamber groups (283 reviews), 37 new-music ensembles and programs (255 reviews), 36 early-music ensembles (189 reviews), 32 choral groups (149 reviews), 15 music festivals (102 reviews), 24 chamber orchestras (95 reviews), six musical theater groups (15 reviews), as well as numerous world music groups (14 reviews), youth music ensembles (11 reviews), and other organizations (12 reviews).