Andrew Imbrie

Introduction
Andrew Imbrie was an American composer born in New York on April 6th, 1921. Imbrie began his musical training at the age of 4 on piano and later traveled to Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger. After returning to the United States he attended Princeton University for his undergrad and completed his masters in music at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as a composition, theory, and analysis professor at Berkeley until his retirement in 1991. Imbrie is known for his tightly organized atonal contrapuntal techniques and his avoidance of serial techniques which were heavily used after World War II.

Work Analysis
The piece that I will be analyzing is Andrew Imbrie's Concerto No. 2. This piece was composed in 1975 and consists of three movements made for piano and orchestra. The piano opens the work on a repeated high D in a descending line. This whole piece is made up of different descending and ascending ideas throughout the orchestra and piano that clash in speed but later form a specific harmony. Imbrie used the idea of overlapping melodies and fusing different ideas and themes together to complete this piece. The second movement consists of the same overlapping technique but the instruments are now in pairs in some cases. Throughout the piece, we see a repeat of the high D and a low C in the bass. The low C is most obvious at the end of the work between the orchestra and the piano.

Comparisons
Andrew Imbrie was heavily influenced by Béla Bartók a Hungarian composer known for incorporating folk like elements into his works like Imbrie along with a great use of counterpoint. Most of Imbrie's influence came from his teacher Roger Sessions who during Imbrie's time wrote more atonal music that did not directly and consistently use the twelve-tone technique. Imbrie also stayed away from the twelve-tone method and instead wrote with more of an organized mayhem like his teacher.

Observations
I thought it was interesting to learn about a composer who didn't use the twelve-tone method because we have been stressing it so much in our day to day class time. I loved the connections that Imbrie had to Bartók and learning about all the directly passed down techniques. As far as the concerto went, it was easy to pick out the common high D and low C usage and the clashing melodies.