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A Little Cowboy Music

Until I heard this CD, I only knew of Rodney Lister from his often insightful posts to Sequenza21. A Little Cowboy Music, composed in 1980, is a polytonal quodlibet for clarinet, violin, contrabass, and piano which combines seven classic American “cowboy” tunes ranging from “The Streets of Laredo” to the theme song from Roy Rogers’s… Read more »

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NewMusicBox Staff

Until I heard this CD, I only knew of Rodney Lister from his often insightful posts to Sequenza21. A Little Cowboy Music, composed in 1980, is a polytonal quodlibet for clarinet, violin, contrabass, and piano which combines seven classic American “cowboy” tunes ranging from “The Streets of Laredo” to the theme song from Roy Rogers’s TV show. Remember when Esa Pekka Salonen claimed in our talk for NewMusicBox last year that “there are no tools you can lift out of” the music of Charles Ives “without resulting in plagiarism”? He ought to listen to this extremely inventive Ivesian descendant!

—FJO