In August 2025 Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont puts the music of Julian Anderson in the spotlight. The focus will include several national debuts of works by Anderson from this year’s participants of the chamber music summer school and festival.
A performance of Anderson’s Tiramisù (1994) for ten players concludes the residency on 9 August. The 10-minute work consists in many smaller pieces strung together to form a continuous whole, “like a series of disparate objects hung together along a piece of string”, as Anderson says. Within the ensemble – comprising flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, harp, and single strings – various sub-groupings emerge (duos, trios, soloists), sometimes playing simultaneously or at striking cross-purposes. Following the title (“pick-me-up”), each of the pieces has a tendency towards increased tension and speed, and the energies of the work gradually accumulate. The coda is cast in a calmer mood, drawing the various fragments of the piece together with a folk-like cantilena.
Anderson’s String Quartet No.2 - 300 Weihnachtslieder also features. The 17-minute work, which premiered with the Arditti Quartet at Wigmore Hall in 2014, draws its material from the bells and German Christmas songs of Speyer, Berlin, Cologne, and Lübeck. Far from being a festive medley, though, the various carols are woven elusively into the piece, with new rhythmic ideas – some inspired by the bellringing traditions of these areas – applied to their melodic shapes. Though fragments of the songs sometimes emerge more explicitly, their titles and themes lend the each of the seven movements character, mood, and pace. Like Anderson’s Symphony (2003), Book of Hours and Eden, the quartet draws on non-tempered tunings, also inspired by the local bells.
Yellow Barn also sees the US debuts of Anderson’s Bach Machine and Quasi una Passacaglia. Bach Machine, a 3-minute trio clarinet, violin, and vibraphone, was commissioned by BBC Radio 3 in 1997 to accompany a series of programmes about the relationship of machines and music; it uses the so-called ‘Royal’ theme by Frederick the Great which provided the starting point for Bach’s Musical Offering. Quasi una Passacaglia, to be performed by Yellow Barn Artistic Director Seth Knopp, was written for pianist Nicholas Hodges in 2002; as its title implies, it presents a simple theme with seven variations and a short coda, subject to increasingly complex transformations. It was composed as an homage to Oliver Knussen on his 50th birthday, and is programmed alongside Knussen’s Canata, a 10-minute work for oboe and string trio, on 4 August.