New Music USA Online Library

Allen Brings was born in New York City in 1934. He holds a bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude from Queens College, a master of arts degree from Columbia University, where he was a Mosenthal Fellow and a student of Otto Luening, and a doctorate in theory and composition from Boston University, where he was a student of Gardner Read. In 1962 he was a Naumburg Fellow at Princeton University, where he studied with Roger Sessions. He has twice served as chairman of the eastern region of the American Society of University Composers and is vice-president of Connecticut Composers. Each year since 1975 he has received an ASCAP Award. In 1988 he was awarded an Individual Artist Grant by the Connecticut Commssion on the Arts. His published compositions, which include works for orchestra, band, chorus, a wide variety of chamber ensembles, piano, organ, harpsichord, guitar, and voice, have been recorded by Navona, Capstone, Centaur, Contemporary Record Society, North/South Consonance, Arizona University Recordings, and Vienna Modern Masters. A pianist as well as a composer, Allen Brings has performed extensively both here and abroad especially in programs of music for piano, four-hands, with Genevieve Chinn, with whom he has recorded for Centaur Records, Orion Master Recordings, and Composers Recordings, Inc. He is also a co-author of A New Approach to Keyboard Harmony and has contributed articles to College Music Symposium, ComposerUSA, New Oxford Review, Society of Composers Newsletter, New Music Connoisseur, Contemporary Music Newsletter, and Adoremus Bulletin. Allen Brings is Professor Emeritus of Music at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College of the City University of New York and a director of the Weston Music Center and School of the Performing Arts in Weston, Connecticut. Artistic Statement - "As a composer who is also a performer, I often imagine my music actually being performed while I am composing it, visualizing even the arm gestures that would be made by the string players. I am a composer who deals above all with sounds produced by living, breathing musicians, experienced in real time by willing, attentive listeners. "Although the musical language that I use is recognizably of my own time and place, I am also aware of its relationship to the musical language of the Western tradition as it has evolved from its earliest recorded beginnings. If asked which composers have influenced me most, I am more likely to cite Claudio Monteverdi or Heinrich Schütz than a twentieth-century master. "My music has always had a strong expressive content which I have tried to convey by clarity of melodic line and phrase structure. Whether writing for children or accomplished professionals, I have always tried to reward their efforts by writing only as many notes as are necessary and only notes that will continually captivate the ear while urging it forward to the end of the piece. The overall impression which I think my music conveys is rather like the waves of an ocean rising and falling in intensity while below a strong current bears everything above it to a not-entirely-unanticipated but completely-satisfying destination. "I take great pains in establishing a particular character for each piece and for each movement of a piece. That character, however, will almost always undergo transformations, most gradual, a few sudden. In certain pieces these transformations may seem unpredictable, almost improvisational; they reflect nevertheless the many states of mind that we can observe in ourselves or indeed that I observe in myself. "I confess without apology to being a serious composer who writes serious music. At a time when music often has no greater purpose than to provide an agreeable or hypnotic accompaniment to quotidian activities, my music needs to be listened to actively without distraction in order to be enjoyed; at a time when music is also viewed by some as little more than a demonstration of theories bearing only the most tenuous connections to music as it is actually heard, my music prefers to be experienced as an art, not as an analog of number-sets. "Like Monteverdi, Henry Purcell and Arnold Schoenberg before me, I too am a bilingual composer. One piece might be distinguished by an energetic interplay of chromatic lines in a lean, uncompromising harmonic context while another might be exclusively diatonic with long, lyrical lines that even I often have difficulty banishing from my mind. Depending on my expressive intentions, the language I choose will fluctuate widely between these extremes. "In a century which has seen bewildering changes in musical fashions, composers have often discarded as unworthy works composed early in their careers. Although I have sometimes chastised them by revising or rewriting them, I have never cast off any of my offspring, and, perhaps because none of them was ever written to follow a current fashion, all of them seem to me as fresh today as anything I have just written. I recommend all of them without reservation therefore and will never wish that I had composed them differently." Allen Brings