Beth Anderson is rapidly becoming one of the most original voices in 21st-century neo-Romantic, minimalist-inspired music. On Anderson's Web site, musicologist Alan Gilmore describes her music as "a refreshing simplicity without naiveté-deeply felt, direct, and yes, beautiful." This most appealing CD certainly confirms that impression. It features an excellent sampling of Anderson's instrumental and vocal works including three song cycles: Cat Songs, Dreaming Fields and Harlem Songs, performed by Keith Borden, baritone, and Johannes Wallmann, piano, with Darren Campbell, string bass. The disc also includes her major piano work, Quilt Music (1983), performed by Joseph Kubera; Belgian Tango; Dr. Blood's Mermaid Lullaby; and Tales # 1 and 2, performed by Ana Milosavljevic, violin, and Terezija Cukrov, piano; and finally, Cleveland Swale, performed by Darren Campbell and Kirsty Mattheson, string bass, and Johannes Wallmann, piano.

Not surprisingly, with its continual momentum and gently rocking motion, Quilt Music was commissioned as a dance piece for the Daniel McCusker Dancers. Its "patchwork" structure comes from Anderson's metaphor of the crazy quilt, which she describes as having "no rules, only things that seem beautiful to the maker. It doesn't matter if your stitches aren't all the same size or going in the same direction. There are no inhibitions." This piece, like a quilt, is a wonder of homespun Americana, full of remarkable craftsmanship. From its folk-like opening theme of a four-bar C major sequence, it evolves with one idea juxtaposed to the next, weaving an unpredictable pattern of colorful harmonies and sometimes impressionist blocks of sound. At times, there is even a mesmerizing Celtic feel to it.

Although one can definitely hear Anderson's roots in minimalism-she studied with both John Cage and Terry Riley-this piece has far more surprising and quixotic twists and turns. Rather than becoming tiresome, the repetitive motives of this 25-minute work both delight and comfort the listener in their familiarity and meanderings. The exuberance and rhapsodic nature of Quilt Music is beautifully captured by pianist Joseph Kubera. It certainly sounds as though it would be fun and rewarding to play!

In the song cycles, Anderson allows the text to be her guide. The Cat Songs create a cycle both serious and comic. "Lazy Pussy" is quite chromatic, with a jazz-like bass line; "Kilkenny Cats" has an accompaniment that suggests an Irish folk song; "The Tyger" gives a heavy, ominous flavor to Blake's poem; while "Hey Diddle Diddle" is infused with both jazz and the Kentucky bluegrass traditions of Anderson's birthplace. "She Sights a Bird" (Dickinson text) is completely atonal, while "The Widow and Her Cat" (Jonathan Swift) is sinister and dissonant, and ends with a true growl! Baritone Keith Borden sings these giving far more attention to the diction of the words and the meaning of the text than attempting to "show off" his voice. In the song cycle Dreaming Fields (poetry by Eugene Fields), "The Sugar Plum Tree" receives a popular, New Age treatment in the accompaniment, while the nursery rhymes "The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat" and "Wynken, Blinken and Nod" venture into complex harmonic territories that belie the apparent simplicity of the poems.

Anderson's Kentucky roots are evidenced most clearly in Harlem Songs, commissioned by Keith Borden and employing poems from the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Songs alternate ragtime figures with New-Age, minimalist arpeggiations. "Southern Roads" is a true blues holler, augmented with an articulating string bass line. "While You Love Me" is reminiscent of the American parlor song tradition, albeit in 5/4 meter. Violinist Ann Milosavljevic and pianist Terezija Cukrov perform with color and verve.

Belgian Tango (which also exists in a solo piano version), a haunting tango with peripatetic tonal shifts, has a 1940s movie feel, and Dr. Blood's Mermaid Lullaby undulates with music-box fantasy. These works, which date from the 1980s, are counterbalanced by two Tales from 2000, the first of which shimmers with the breakneck figures of fiddling and boogie-woogie, while the second is pentatonic and Asian-sounding and indeed was meant to evoke the cherry blossoms in the Japanese garden of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

For many of her works, including the last one on this CD, Anderson has adopted the term swale as a new musical form. A swale is a meadow or marsh in which diverse arrays of plants grow together. Anderson has applied this conceit to the process of musical composition, where diverse ideas and even styles exist side by side and flow together (a device similar to that of Quilt Music, and an early example of this technique). Thus in Cleveland Swale, written for that city in 2001, hymn tunes, tangos, jazzy solos, and hypnotic Eastern-sounding rhythms coalesce into a collage of Americana, an aural cityscape for this most unusual combination of two double basses and piano.

In his excellent liner notes to the CD, composer and critic Kyle Gann points out the "radical" quality of Anderson's music-its seeming "normalcy," which foils an underlying compositional subtlety that is anything but normal. Just as the striking kaleidoscopic colors of Anderson's grandmother's crazy quilt that adorns the cover of this CD provide eye candy, this CD is most definitely ear candy, one that will give repeated pleasure to audiences both sophisticated and naïve.

Dr. Nanette Kaplan Solomon is a concert pianist, IAWM board member, and Professor of Music at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches piano, music history and women in music. She has performed extensively in the United States and abroad. Her compact discs "Character Sketches: Solo Piano Works by 7 American Women" (Leonarda 334) and "Sunbursts: Solo Piano Works by 7 American Women" (Leonarda 345) have received critical acclaim and are available in music stores, at amazon.com or at leonarda.com.

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