Andrew Imbrie dies - composer and teacher
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Andrew Imbrie, the composer of many arresting and impeccably
crafted musical works and a generous teacher to several
generations of younger composers, died Wednesday at his
Berkeley home after a long illness. He was 86.

Mr. Imbrie's music, which included operas, symphonies,
concertos and a wealth of chamber scores, was a
predominating presence in the musical life of the Bay Area
for many decades. His opera "Angle of Repose," based on
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was
commissioned and premiered by the San Francisco Opera in
1976.

It was his largest creation, a historical panorama whose
action shuttled between 1876 and 1976. The score included
American folk tunes and banjo music alongside more austerely
atonal writing.

Among his other notable works were five string quartets,
which reveled in the contrapuntal possibilities of the
genre; three symphonies; three piano concertos; and a host
of choral and chamber works.

The San Francisco Symphony gave the world premieres of six
of his works, including the Violin Concerto (1958), the
Symphony No. 1 (1966) and the Requiem (1985), written in
memory of his son John, who had died of heart failure at 19.
Writing in The Chronicle, former music critic Robert
Commanday hailed it as "affirmative and beautiful in the
largest sense." A 2000 recording of the Requiem on the
Bridge label was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical
Composition.

Mr. Imbrie was also a gifted and influential teacher. He was
on the faculty of the music department at UC Berkeley for
more than 40 years, and taught composition simultaneously at
the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

In both his creative and academic endeavors, Mr. Imbrie was
notable for the clarity of his thinking, as well as a plain
spoken eloquence that infused even the most intricate
scores.

For all the rhythmic vitality and harmonic sophistication of
his best music, it was the impulse of counterpoint - the
weaving together of graceful and dramatically charged
melodic lines - that gave his work its distinctive quality.
Yet Mr. Imbrie wore his learning lightly and paid as much
attention to the rhetoric of a piece as to its structure.

The goal, always, was to speak directly to listeners. "A
piece can be fairly complex, but I believe that there's a
deal you make with your audience," he said in a 2001
interview with The Chronicle. "You make the piece as clear
as you can, and they have to give it their undivided
attention. And if you both keep to the deal, then there's a
real communication going on."

The same concern with clarity helped make Mr. Imbrie a
teacher of remarkable insight and thoroughness. His profound
mastery of the nuts and bolts of music-making - the basic
skills of voice-leading, harmony, form and so on - allowed
him to guide even those students whose stylistic premises
were far removed from his own.

"One of his alchemical skills was to be able to divine what
a person's piece needed, and to talk about it on its own
terms," said composer and musicologist Robert Greenberg, who
came to Berkeley to study with Mr. Imbrie. "He could ask you
the questions that forced you to address why you'd written
what you'd written."

Mr. Imbrie was born in New York City in 1921. He began
studying piano at age 4, and remained a skilled player
throughout his life.

But the formative encounter of his life came in 1939, when
he enrolled at Princeton - the fourth generation of his
family to do so - and began studying composition with Roger
Sessions.

Sessions' esthetic outlook, including his reliance on
classical formal principles and his insistence on clarity
above all, had a profound and lifelong influence on the
young composer. Generations of Mr. Imbrie's students
observed that it was a rare lesson or class that did not
include some invocation of Sessions' teachings.

After a stint in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, Mr. Imbrie
followed Sessions to UC Berkeley, where he earned a master's
degree in 1947. He spent two years on a fellowship at the
American Academy in Rome before returning to Cal to join the
music faculty. He retired from the department in 1991.

Mr. Imbrie is survived by his wife, Barbara, and his son,
Andrew Philip of Santa Clara.

Services will be Wednesday at 4 p.m. at St. Clement's
Episcopal Church, 2837 Claremont Blvd., Berkeley.

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