While Ruth Anderson (1928-2019) was a brilliant composer, orchestrator, touring flutist (with the Totenberg Ensemble and principal with the Boston Pops), and inspirational teacher, she was – more than anything else – a trailblazer in the realm of electronic music.
She received a bachelor’s degree in flute performance from the University of Washington in 1949, studying privately with Johnnie Wummer and Jean-Pierre Rampal, and a master’s degree in composition there on 1951. She also took courses with the poet Theodore Roethke, and she later came to know many other poets including Jean Garrigue, May Swenson (with whom she did “Pregnant Dream”), W.S. Merwin, and Louise Bogan (whose haunting poem, “Little Lobelia” is the source of Anderson’s “I come out of your sleep”). Two Fulbright Scholarships took her to Paris (1958–60), where she studied composition privately with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger, who encouraged Anderson to also study Gregorian chant.
In addition to making a living playing flute, she was also successful orchestrating for NBC television and for Lincoln Center Theater when she became one of the first four women admitted to the Princeton University Graduate School program in composition, winning a fellowship. While there, Vladimir Ussachevsky showed her how he had electronically inserted a few missing notes into a recording of her playing a chamber piece, and she was hooked. Just a handful of years later she founded the Hunter College Electronic Music Studio. It was one of the first in the country to be established and directed by a woman. She would run it for more than a decade (1968-1979), creating a space for students to experiment and experience acoustics, so “they learn and do, or dream,” as recounted by her life partner MacDowell Fellow and composer Annea Lockwood. Anderson remained at Hunter, teaching composition and theory from 1966 until retiring in 1989.
In a remembrance of Anderson in New Music Box written by Lockwood, she says Anderson’s establishment of the Electronic Music Studio and her involvement with New York’s downtown music scene in the late 1960s and 70s brought a burst of creative activity when her studies of psychoacoustics, Zen Buddhism, and teaching intersected. It was during that time that Anderson produced her best-known works, including “DUMP” (1970); “SUM” (1973), a sound collage that works as a send up of both President Richard Nixon and TV commercials; and also “Points” (1977).
Just before she died, Anderson approved the test pressings for an LP of her work entitled Here and released by Arc Light Editions in 2020. Included are “I Come Out Of Your Sleep” (constructed from speech sounds in Louise Bogan's poem “Little Lobelia”), “SUM,” “Pregnant Dream” (a collaboration with poet and MacDowell Fellow May Swenson), “Points” (constructed entirely from sine-waves); and the electro-acoustic “So What.” A 2022 release called Tête-à-tête includes an 18-minute drone piece inspired by Anderson’s embrace of Zen meditation called “Resolutions;” “Conversations,” a joyous 19-minute track built from secretly recorded phone calls Anderson and Lockwood had while living apart; and an homage Lockwood composed for the album called “For Ruth” that combines field recordings with snippets of conversation allowing listeners to reminisce about a deep love.
Anderson wrote of her work, “It has evolved from an understanding of sound as energy which affects one’s state of being. [These are] pieces intended to further wholeness of self and unity with others.” Her archive is held in the Music Division of The New York Public Library.
Portrait by Manny Albam
