T.J. ANDERSON
composer

T.J. Anderson is one of the leading composers of his generation. He was born August 17, 1928 in Coatesville, Pennsylvania and received degrees from West Virginia State College, Penn State University, and a Ph.D in Composition from the University of Iowa. He also holds several honorary degrees. After serving as Chairman of the Department of Music at Tufts University for eight years, Thomas Jefferson Anderson became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music and in 1990 became Austin Fletcher Professor of Music Emeritus. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he devotes full time to writing music.

He studied composition with George Ceiga, Philip Bezanson, Richard Hervig, and Darius Milhaud. Anderson is well known for his orchestration of Scott Joplin's opera, Treemonisha which premiered in Atlanta in 1972. His opera, Soldier Boy, Soldier was commissioned by Indiana University and is based on a libretto by Leon Forrest and a chamber opera, Walker , was commissioned by the Boston Athenaeum with a libretto by Derek Walcott.

Mark DeVoto, in program notes for a concert of T.J. Anderson's music honoring the 100th year of Tufts University's Department of Music, says: "T.J. Anderson, as all the world knows him, has spent a long and distinguished career composing music reflecting a global awareness of human experience in the twentieth century, synthesizing Eastern and Western classical traditions with the Black experience in America. His works reveal inspiration from a variety of classical styles ranging from Purcell to Alban Berg, and techniques and forms ranging from the serially rigorous to the freely improvisatory, all arrayed in a stylistic panorama that is wholly his own. The sentiments of revivalist hymnody and the spontaneous timbral resources of African- American jazz are as much a part of his work as the disjunct melodic and rhythmic values of contemporary atonality. T.J. Anderson has worked in all musical media and genres."

T.J. Anderson takes pride in collaborations with his distinguished friends Leon Forrest, writer and Richard Hunt, sculptor. A number of his works have been premiered in the artist's studio. As a lecturer, consultant, and visiting composer, he has appeared in institutions in the United States, Brazil, Germany, France, and Switzerland. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Arts, the Djerassi Foundation, the National Humanities Center(their first composer), and a scholar-in- residence at the Rockefeller Center for the Creative Arts, Bellagio, Italy. Anderson was singularly honored when Bruce Alfred Thompson devoted his Ph.D. dissertation at Indiana University to an analysis of his works. Other honors include an honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a Rockefeller Center Foundation grant, Composer-in- Residence Program (with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Shaw, Conductor). At his 60th birthday celebration at Harvard University, letters from Robert Shaw and Sir Michael Tippett were read. In March, 1997, he was honored as a founder and first president of the National Black Music Caucus with concert of his music.

In 1990 when T.J. Anderson received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Penn State University, the citation read: "To T.J. Anderson for translating the joys and sorrows of life into moving music to be shared with the world and for his willingness to pass on to others his knowledge and love of music."Sur

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