Joseph McClellan
Above all, in an era when serious music has thundered inexorably along paths of increasing elaboration, Getty's works are simple. They have a direct, immediate appeal to the average, not especially sophisticated listener. Getty knows how to write a tune, how to make a harmony sound distinctive, and particularly how to use the psychological overtones of music. Otherwise, he avoids undue elaboration like a plague.
Charles McCardell, The White Election and Annabel Lee
Composer Gordon Getty, when questioned about his style by a Terrace Theater audience member last night, confessed to being "a backward-looking guy."
That seemed a pretty fair description given the program preceding this remark, a collection of melodically rich vocal works and piano miniatures drawn from throughout his career.
Backward in Getty's case means composing tonal music with conviction, stressing clarity above all else. It's an art equivalent to writing prose simply. Conservative, yes; but very effective when communicating poetry.
Sixteen selections from his song cycle "The White Election" -- Emily Dickinson's life story told in her own words -- proved the virtue of simplicity, with soprano Martha Ellison and accompanist Wendy Glaubitz attentive to Getty's rhythmic scheme.
His ear for verse was particularly well displayed in the choral setting of Poe's "Annabel Lee," in which 20 male voices packed a subtle dramatic punch.
Getty described his pieces as showing "no evolution, just an increase in confidence." Confidence that promises there's plenty more where these came from.
Joseph McLellan, The White Election (1988)
According to her friends' reports, Emily Dickinson used to sit at her family's piano late at night improvising "weird and beautiful melodies." Those melodies have vanished, but in his carefully elaborated cycle "The White Election" (Delos D/CD 3057, with booklet), composer Gordon Getty has set 31 of her poems (one of them twice as beginning and end) as he thinks she might have done "if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm, something like that in her poems." Like the poems, the music has a deceptive air of simplicity and the power to wound -- deeply, suddenly, unexpectedly. The cycle, arranged in roughly chronological order, tells a story (conjectural in some details) about the unfulfilled love that led the poet to become a recluse in her late twenties.
Setting Dickinson to music has become a sort of cottage industry among American composers, but this thoughtful, quirky cycle stands out in sharp relief from similar efforts. The performance by soprano Kaaren Erickson and pianist Armen Guzelimian is excellent and the composer's detailed program notes are worth careful reading.
Richard Morrison, Plump Jack
[Plump Jack] has merits, brevity, and an excellent text. And there is nothing wrong with composers returning to a 'tuneful' idiom. But it does help if you can write tunes. Nearly all the text here (the Boar's Head scene from Henry IV, Part One) was set in dry, parlando style - whole sentences on a single pitch - with the voices often shadowed by cataclysmic percussion effects in crude, strip-cartoon fashion. Elsewhere the orchestra played whole-tone scales in unison fortissimo, or a harpsichord tinkled desultorily.
Stacey Anderson, Plump Jack
"Plump Jack" premiered in San Francisco in 1985, and has only been performed with full orchestra two or three times since. Phrased in dramatic bursts between solos, the opera sounds a bit like the soundtrack to an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.