William Anderson
Adjunct Lecturer
Fields of Study:
Classical Guitar
Degrees and Studies:
MM, State University of New York at Purchase
Biographical Information:
William Anderson plays solo classical guitar and chamber music all over the world, most recently in Japan and Korea, playing concerti by Vivaldi and Rodrigo.
Anderson is highly devoted to chamber music, and has performed with many of New York City's finest ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Players, Sequitur, the Group for Contemporary Music, the Da Capo Chamber Players. Anderson founded the Cygnus Ensemble in 1985, through which he and his Cygnus colleagues have built a substantial repertoire of chamber music with plucked strings.
As a composer and arranger Anderson was the first to use a multiply partitioned array as an accompaniment to a 3-chord pop song (My Morphine--Welch/Anderson), This and other experiments in adapting 20th Century modernist techniques for 21st Century purposes led Paul Griffiths, in the NY Times, to say, "The mindful voice of Ives, of Stravinsky and of Mr. Wuorinen's music would not seem to be implied much by such a song as "Night and Day," but Anderson's extraordinary arrangements of this and other numbers by Jerome Kern and Richard Rogers set them squarely and astonishingly in the same tradition..."
At age 19 he began playing chamber music at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where he performed from 1981 through 1988. In 1982 he began studying with America's premiere guitar pioneer David Starobin, who introduced him to the music community in New York City. His first solo recital was presented by the League of Composers/ISCM at Weill Hall, New York City (1990). For ten years Anderson was a member of the Theater Chamber Players in Washington D.C., resident chamber ensemble at the Kennedy Center, performing both solo guitar and chamber music repertoire, under the artistic direction of Leon Fleisher and Dina Koston.
Email:
william.anderson@qc.cuny.edu
Website:
http://www.williamanderson.us