Turbulent electronic shadowing of a Kentucky auctioneer's rapid verbal delivery on "Ode" (1975) or the challenging sonic physicality of the intrinsically loud organ piece "Tower Of Power" (1973) seem remote from the elegant Neo-Romanticism of Anderson's writing for string quartet, yet there's continuity in Anderson's concern to make music that's direct and affecting. "In school it was not taught and not suggested that one's music should be personal", she says. "Music was taught as though it was conceptual and disconnected from time and place. I do not agree that music must be abstract".

The covers to both CDs depict fertile grassland with trees. Brooklyn's Prospect Park takes the place for Anderson of open countryside but she has chosen the word "swale" to designate the form she now favours. It means marshy ground or meadow hosting a variety of plants and that suits well her musical material, intuitively conceived then cut-up and juxtaposed as collage. "I'm not imitating a tree or some particular natural structure", she comments. "I am just doing what comes naturally to me. The sort of collages I make now grew out of my life experience - musically, financially, psychologically, how I experience entertainment, my reaction to my education, what I hear around me, my grandmother's crazy quilts, flipping around many television and radio channels, Fluxus collage, eclectic architecture, interior design and fashion, a certain period in Frank Stella's paintings. I love Kentucky fiddle music, all folk music. I love Ralph Vaughn Williams. My work with dancers returned me to meter".

John Cage was a formative influence. Anderson took classes with him at the University of California, Davis in 1969, "He told stories and brought us mushrooms from his gatherings. We performed his music and Satie's 'Vexations'." More importantly Cage's radical aesthetic provided a liberating example for Anderson's approach to composition. This was consolidated during postgraduate study in the adventurous early 1970s climate of Mills College, Oakland. There she studied 'Cyclic Composition' with Terry Riley, "learning the basics of Indian raga singing from the tradition of Pandit Pran Nath". Riley was influential for her later development, she notes, in that "he was the only teacher I had who used pitches in a straightforward way, floated in a liquid of sound".

She also witnessed a performance at Mills by Charlemagne Palestine and wrote a piece for him. "It's a graphic score", she explains. "The first movement looks like a rabbit in a maze. The second looks like a lettuce patch. The third is a reinterpretation of the rabbit. It had something to do with the Zen idea that first you see the mountain, then you don't and eventually you do again, but its completely different after enlightenment. It was premiered in San Francisco about 1974. I admired his work so much. It was really beautiful".

Her primary composition teacher at Mills was Robert Ashley, who recognized the compositional worth of her electro-acoustic work "Peachy Keen-O" (1973) and gave the green light to its staging by Hysteresis, a group of women composers and performers.

"We were allowed a Saturday afternoon concert on the regular series. Despite the fact that Mills is a women's college at undergraduate level, most of the teachers and staff (and a high percentage of the graduate students) in the music department and electronic music studio were men. It was vital that the door was open."

Anderson has been for many years actively feminist. Her concert series Women's Work was initiated in New York in February 2004. "I still want to be a good role model to women musicians but I don't feel I need to do overt things such as only setting words of women poets or only working on music-theatre projects based on a woman's life story. I feel that writing my music and proceeding onward is the best model. And I believe in working through organizations such as New York Women Composers where I'm the treasurer and the International Association of Women in Music. I am comfortable with being called a 'woman composer'. It would not be necessary if women composers and men composers were performed, commissioned, rewarded, reviewed, recorded, published, taught and lauded equally. But we're not." The truth of this observation is evident from the neglect Anderson's own music has suffered until now in terms of available recordings. Terms are being negotiated for issue of a further CD of her songs, piano and chamber compositions, but much remains lamentably undocumented.

Anderson resists formulating any theoretical position as a woman composer but her vocabulary is notably uninhibited with regard to words such as 'beauty', 'love' and 'intuition'. In music she considers beauty "the highest goal"; one that can be reached most readily through simplicity. "Complication is very good for theorists because it gives them employment," she suggests. "But it really isn't necessary for composers and is not interesting to an audience unless the complication is overcome by the beauty of the result."

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