Andrew Imbrie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Andrew Walsh Imbrie (Born April 6, 1921) is an American composer of classical music.

In 1937, he went to Paris to study briefly with Nadia Boulanger, but returned to the United States the next year, going to Princeton University, where he received his degree in 1942. His senior thesis there, a string quartet, was recorded by the Juilliard Quartet. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an M.A. in Music in 1947. He taught composition, theory, and analysis at that institution from 1949 until his retirement in 1991. In addition to his principal teaching job at Berkeley, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Brandeis University, Northwestern University, New York University, the University of Alabama, and Harvard University.

Imbrie's style was influenced early by Béla Bartók, and then by his undergraduate teacher, Roger Sessions: the influence of Sessions was to prove long-lasting. Imbrie prefers harmonies that are non-triadic, or if triadic, non-functional, and he writes a tightly organized, often atonal contrapuntal texture with attention to careful motivic development; he avoided the serial techniques which dominated art music composition after the Second World War. Imbrie was also attentive to melodic line and shape, as one of the ways to make a free atonal language accessible.

Imbrie writes both vocal and instrumental music; he wrote two operas (Three Against Christmas, 1960, and Angle of Repose, 1976), as well as numerous orchestral, chamber, choral, and solo vocal compositions.