Anthony Green

Anthony Green was born in 1946 and studied with his father, Tanya Polunin and James Gibb, harmony and counterpoint with Anthony Milner, composition also with Anthony Milner and then with Hugh Wood and Melanie Daiken.

1979 – 1981 he was on a British Council scholarship to Budapest where he studied composition with Zsolt Durkó, piano with Imre Rohmann and Istvan Lantos at the Liszt Academy, where he also studied Bartók-analysis with Ernö Lendvai.

Green was a finalist in the BBC Beethoven Chamber Music Competition (1969) and the British Liszt Piano Competition (1976) and has had compositions performed on the BBC and Hungarian Radio.

He has been teaching piano since 1990 at Trinity College of Music, where he also lectures on Romantic and Contemporary Music.

He started composing at an early age but did not study harmony and counterpoint until the age of 15. Composition was intermittent until his early twenties; Messiaen´s "Vingt regards" inspired him to start composing seriously - other influences were Busoni, particularly the Second Sonatina, and Schoenberg, particularly the Op. 33 piano pieces. however, the first piece he acknowledges was not written until 1974-5 ("Piano Piece").

He started writing serial music but later has used a technique of continuous developing variation of basic musical idea involving a mathematical permutation of intervals; this is applied in Piano Sonata No. 2 (1985-6), a single movement work lasting 35 minutes, all based on one melodic idea - the work he regards a shaving found his own voice for the first time.

An example of this technique is as follows: supposing the basic idea is an ascending line

C Eb Ab F#

the first interval is a minor 3rd, so that interval will be added to the next statement of the idea - the minor 3rd will become an augmented 4th, C do F#; - the perfect 4th Ec to Ac will become a minor 6th F# to D so the idea will then be:

C F# D Eb

Then this permutation will itself be changed by adding the next interval in the original series (a perfect 4th - Eb to Ab), so now it becomes:

C B C F#

(if, however, the composer does not like the sound of a particular interval in its melodic or harmonic context he changes it by the interval of an augmented 4th - half-way through the octave - if this does not work, by a minor 3rd - half way through the tritone). Green does not use this technique in every work; his approach is basically eclectic - sometimes more conventional variation techniques are used, but he likes to develop two or more ideas at the same time, slightly out of synchronization with each other, e.g.. in Concertino No. 2, here he was influenced by Ives and Elliott Carter. He sometimes uses collage-like structures as in the outer movements of Piano Sonata No. 3 and the middle movement of Piano Sonata No. 4, a programmatic work based on Sartre's "Road to Freedom" trilogy . here some 20 different ideas are used.

Although he does not now write serially he likes to be able to justify every not cerebrally. Octave doublings are generally avoided but he sometimes likes allusions to tonality, as at the end of Piano Sonata No. 3. He tends not to use exact repetitions and sequences, and does not like too regular rhythms; polyrhythms and added note lengths are common but and underlying sense of harmonic progression is striven for.

In his larger works, Green attempts to recreate in modern terms a symphonic ideal, not necessarily sing sonata-form, but exploring all facets of one or more ideas, with a definite goal-orientation. He was also written a number of of shorter works, impressionistic in character, inspired by the landscape d of Scotland. In the ate 80s he was interested in the possibility of using plain-song in a contemporary context (Nos. 4 to 7 of 12 studies) and a number of works from that time use cantus-firmus techniques (Triptych, Fantasia on L' Homme Armé).

In his recently competed orchestral work, "Resurgance", written to celebrate the move to Greenwich of Trinity College of Music, he uses the letters of TRINITY COLLEGE OF MUSIC and GAVIN HENDERSON, the Principal, to form musical themes, using French, German and Russian equivalents of the letters where necessary. He has also written a few works of amateurs (the pieces for clarinet choir, and "Lyric Movement" for orchestra) in a more immediately accessible idiom.

Biography by Ingvo Clauder

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