Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

Imboccatura

(It.).

See Embouchure.

Imbrie, Andrew (Welsh)

(b New York, 6 April 1921).American composer. He began piano studies at the age of four with Ann Abajian, and continued with Pauline and Leo Ornstein until 1942. He also studied briefly with Nadia Boulanger (1937) and Robert Casadesus (1941). As an undergraduate at Princeton (BA 1942) he studied composition with Sessions. After serving in the US Army (1944–6), he followed Sessions to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an MA in 1947 and was in the same year appointed an instructor. He postponed the start of his teaching career, however, to accept a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (1947–9), to which he later returned as composer-in-residence (1967–8). Returning to Berkeley in 1949, he remained a member of the music department until his retirement in 1991. Highly respected as a teacher and scholar as well as a composer, Imbrie also taught at the San Francisco Conservatory and held distinguished visiting professorships at the University of Alabama, the University of Chicago, and Brandeis, Harvard, Northwestern and New York universities. He also served as composer-in-residence at the Tanglewood Music Center (1991) and the Festival at Sandpoint, Idaho (1989, 1990, 1992, 1993). His many honours include the New York Music Critics’ Award (1944), the Alice M. Ditson Award (1947), two Guggenheim fellowships (1953–4, 1959–60), the Hinrichsen Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1971) and a Citation from the University of California, Berkeley (1991), and commissions from the Koussevitzky (1954), Fromm (1957), Ford (1959, 1974) and Naumburg (1960, 1981) foundations, the New York PO (1977), the San Francisco Opera (1976) and the San Francisco SO (1984). He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1969 and, in 1980, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also served as a board member of the Koussevitzky Foundation and as governor of the San Francisco SO (1982–91).

Imbrie’s aesthetic was strongly shaped by his pedagogical encounter with Sessions. Like Sessions, he has remained committed to the principles of classical motivic development, harmonic structure and phrasing throughout his career, despite gradual changes in his musical idiom. His early works sometimes show a stylistic debt to Bartók; works of the late 1950s and early 1960s show a similar debt to Sessions. In these as well as in later works, he aimed to project maximum clarity and dramatic force even in complex, contrapuntal textures, and to mine the full potential of motivic and harmonic transformations particular to each of his compositional ideas. In published articles on Sessions and Beethoven, he has articulated concerns that also inform his compositional work: the construction of long, nuanced musical lines, and the embedding of metrical relationships on different structural levels. The harmonic materials of his work are varied, though usually non-triadic. He has remained flexible and open to a broad range of possibilities, however. In the opera, Angle of Repose, for example, he incorporated bits of banjo music and other North American folk idioms into a predominantly atonal harmonic language. This and other large-scale works for voice and instruments (e.g. Requiem, 1984; Adam, 1994) also demonstrate his interest in the ways in which musical experience may model personal and historical memory. A similar concern inheres in many of his ‘abstract’ instrumental works.

WORKS

operas

Three against Christmas (Christmas in Peebles Town) (comic op, 4 scenes, R. Wincor), 1960, Berkeley, CA, 1 Dec 1964

Angle of Repose (3, O. Hall, after W. Stegner), 1976, San Francisco, 6 Nov 1976

instrumental

Orch: Ballad, D, 1947; Vn Conc., 1954; Little Conc., pf 4 hands, orch, 1956; Legend, 1959; Sym. no.1, 1965; Chbr Sym., 1968; Sym. no.2, 1970; Sym. no.3, 1970; Vc Conc., 1972; Pf Conc. no.1, 1973; Pf Conc. no.2, 1974; Fl Conc., 1977; Pf Conc. no.3, 1992

Chbr and solo inst: Str Qt no.1, 1942; Pf Trio, 1946; Pf Sonata, 1947; Divertimento, fl, bn, tpt, pf trio, 1949; Serenade, fl, va, pf, 1952; Str Qt no.2, 1953; Str Qt no.3, 1957; Impromptu, vn, pf, 1960; Sonata, vc, pf, 1966; Dandelion Wine, ob, cl, str qt, pf, 1967; 3 Sketches, trbn, pf, 1967; Here We Stand, fanfare, double brass ens, 1969; Str Qt no.4, 1969; A Hawk for Peace, fanfare, brass, 1970; To a Traveler, cl, vn, pf, 1971; Fancy for Five, 5 trbn, 1972; Short Story, pf, 1982; Pilgrimage, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1983; Daedalus, pf, 1986; Dream Sequence, fl, ob, cl, vn, va, vc, pf, perc, 1986; Prelude, org, 1987; Str Qt no.5, 1987; Three-piece Suite, hp, pf, 1987; Pf Trio no.2, 1989; Reminiscence, gui, 1992; Earplay Fantasy, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, perc, 1995; Chicago Bells, vn, pf, 1997; Mukashi Mukashi (Once Upon a Time), 2 pf, 1997; Spring Fever, fl, ob, cl, pf, perc, 2 vn, va, vc, db, 1997; Soliloquy, vn, 1998

vocal

On the Beach at Night (W. Whitman), SATB, str orch, 1949; 3 Songs (R. Frost, E.L. Masters, J.C. Ransom), S, orch, 1949; 2 Christmas Carols, male vv, pf, 1955; Introit, Gradual and Alleluia for All Saints’ Day, chorus, org, 1956; Drum-Taps (cant., Whitman), SATB, orch, 1960; Ps xlii, TBB, org, 1962; Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred (W. Shakespeare), S, cl, gui, 1964; 3 Songs (e.e. cummings, Euripides, T. Roethke), chorus, pf, 1965; [3 songs], 1966: The Wind has blown the rain away, SAB, pf; Love distills desire upon the eyes, SATB, pf; The Serpent, SAB, pf

Let all the World (G. Herbert), anthem, SATB, brass, perc, org, 1971; Let Us Now Sing the Praises of Famous Men, SATB, org, 1977; Prometheus Bound (D. Grene, after Aeschylus), 3 solo vv, chorus, orch, 1979; 5 Roethke Songs, S, pf, 1980; 3 Campion Songs, S, A, T, B, pf, 1981; A Song for St Cecilia’s Day (J. Dryden), SATB, 2 vn, brass, perc, 2 pf, 1981; Requiem: in memoriam John H. Imbrie 1962–1981 (Lat., W. Blake, J. Donne, Herbert), S, SATB, orch, 1984; Adam (cant., late medieval and Amer. Civil War period texts), S, SATB, orch, 1994; Songs of Then and Now (R.L. Stevenson, Cummings, Shakespeare), SA, fl, cl, vn, va, pf, perc, 1998

Recorded interviews in US-NHoh

Principal publishers: Malcolm, Shawnee

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EwenD; VintonD (J.D. Kramer)

M. Boykan: ‘Andrew Imbrie: Third Quartet’, PNM, iii/1 (1964–5), 139–46

E. Soskin: Cadences and Formal Structure in Four American String Quartets (diss., U. of California, Berkeley, 1986)

A.P. Basart: ‘A Three-Dimensional Musical World’, Cum notis variorum, no.131 (1989), 1–4 [interview]

ANN P. BASART/MARTIN BRODY