For saxophonist, flutist, and composer Anna Webber, her choice in collaborators is a key indicator of her breadth as a musician. Take her 2021 album Idiom: on Disc One, Webber creates timbrally intricate composites of woodwind, drumset, and piano with only the spare forces of her Simple Trio with John Hollenbeck and Matt Mitchell. But On Disc Two, performers likely familiar to ICIYL readers such as cellist Mariel Roberts and trombonist/composer Jacob Garchik fill out a large-ensemble lineup that showcases Webber’s harmonic ingenuity and her skill as an orchestrator.
This month, Webber’s extraordinary range expands a little further with adjust, a new composition for the Anzû Quartet that appears on their debut album of the same name, out April 25 on Cantaloupe Music. For Anzû (violinist Olivia De Prato, clarinetist Ken Thomson, cellist Ashley Bathgate, and pianist Karl Larson), commissioning new pieces for their oddball, Quartet for the End of Time-inspired instrumentation is functionally a necessity. And while Webber has been composing throughout her career, adjust is her first commissioned composition where she isn’t performing alongside the rest of the ensemble.
Despite the fact that adjust does not feature Webber as flutist or saxophonist, her voice is still keenly audible in the rollicking polyrhythmic grooves, slowly morphing spectral dissonances, and tight, often explosive ensemble unisons. The work blends through-composed material with structured improvisation over five parts. In the excellent liner notes by Anzû’s own Karl Larson, he describes the choices Webber offers to performers: beyond the selection of pitches (choices that define the gradually intensifying arc of Part v), performers choose the pace of alternating between improvised “pushing and pulling” against written “primary material” and a disruptive interjections into that material.
Leading up to the release of adjust, we asked Webber five questions about her work with the Anzû Quartet and her creative process.
In an earlier interview, you wrote that the “root” of adjust is the excellent multiphonic that you get by playing the lowest note on a clarinet, with all its weird, idiosyncratic skipped partials. How did that harmonic and timbral kernel develop into a 20-minute piece?
I wrote this piece a few years ago, so I couldn’t really tell you that anymore with any specificity without going into my notebooks. But I tend to do a lot of pre-compositional work, and my goal is always to derive as much connected material as possible from the smallest original idea – to create a whole cohesive universe with its own rules and systems. I’ve heard this called cellular composition, or generative composition. I believe Bob Brookmeyer said all he needed was 3 notes to start a piece – he could derive everything else from those 3 notes. An overtone multiphonic gives you so much more than 3 notes! Plus, it gives you timbre, form, the notes that AREN’T there, etc etc…
For people who write for their own ensembles, scores can be useful to structure time and act as a mnemonic for players’ lived experiences in rehearsals, which is where “the music” is actually located. Did you feel like you needed to communicate differently in the score or in conversation with Anzû to facilitate this piece’s development?
Differently as opposed to when I write for my own ensembles? In a sense, sure – I wasn’t there for any of the rehearsals or for the first several performances of this piece, so I needed to make sure that all the details I wanted were clearly communicated in the score. That said, I tend to try to make sure all the details I want are in the score in any situation, including when I’m in the group. Ultimately though, I tend to trust the musicians who are involved in playing my music to bring their own personalities to the music. At a certain point it becomes less yours and more theirs, and I think that is a good thing.
Karl Larson writes in the liner notes that your piece explores the feeling of “adjustment” in response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Even more has changed since 2022 when this piece was written; what adjustments have you noticed in your music communities after the onset of the pandemic?
Do you remember at the beginning of the pandemic when everything slowed down and we thought we could maybe come out of this better as a society (despite the obvious horrific loss of life)? That feels farcical at this point…
Specifically though, that’s a little hard to say. A lot has changed, but the pandemic and its effects were so all-encompassing, that it’s difficult for me to separate things caused by the pandemic from things that are just caused by me and my immediate community getting older. Or from other global events that are having a necessary effect on artists and the art we make.
You seem to think really carefully about scope and performing forces in your music. For this commission, how did you think about writing for the four-piece ensemble and what it could do differently from Simple Trio or the 12-piece ensemble from Idiom?
The biggest difference between writing for Anzû Quartet and writing for one of my groups was the engagement with improvisation (and the extended implications of writing a “new music” piece, i.e. that it might eventually be played by groups with even different skill sets). I am a jazz-trained improvisor, and I tend to play with and write music for people with a similar background. Ken Thomson has a background in jazz, but the other 3 members of Anzû have varying levels of experience with improvisation – and aside from Ken, their background in improvisation is primarily coming from a new music perspective. As giving agency to the musicians I work with is a priority of mine, I gave a lot of thought to how to include improvisation in this work. And, specifically, how to include it on a level where musicians without a background in an improvisation-based idiom could still be successful.
You describe yourself as a flutist/saxophonist/composer in the “aesthetic overlap between avant garde jazz and new classical music.” Does getting people to understand your musical identity feel any easier in 2025 than at the beginning of your career?
I’m not so concerned with getting people to understand what it is I do (nor do I have any kind of complex about being misunderstood). I just try to make music that I think is interesting, and try to keep moving forward!
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