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JAMES REEL
As a composer and critic, Virgil Thomson abhorred the Germanicism creeping over American culture. He probably would have loved the music of Judith Lang Zaimont, which combines an American openness to demotic expression (especially jazz) with a French love of color contrasts, chromatic tonality, and elegant craftsmanship. But while Thomson's aesthetics too often resulted in wan trivialities, Zaimont's produce music of consistent substance.
Some of her abundant piano, chamber, vocal, and choral scores were becoming available to record buyers toward the end of the LP era, mainly on the Leonarda and Golden Crest labels, and have appeared spottily on CD. Now, Arabesque--a company with a higher profile--is making a significant contribution to Zaimont's discography with two 1996 releases devoted to some of her larger chamber works. The project is spurred by a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
The Arabesque CDs will concentrate on Zaimont's chamber music of the past dozen years--from the point at which she decided she was perhaps too well established as a composer of vocal music to the exclusion of other genres. ''I'm a singer manquée from the time I was in college, when I sang in chorus,'' she said. ''I have no gift for the voice, but I do have a love of words, a love of
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their sound as well as sense. So I was naturally drawn to setting text, grabbing after that thing I wasn't blessed with. I had many invitations to write for choral groups and solo artists, and by the early to mid-80s I realized my catalog was lopsided.''
Zaimont's experience setting texts manifests itself subtly in her instrumental works. ''Cantilation is not part of my vocabulary, but a sense of line, a sense of narrative, whether it's established directly or through jump-cuts, is part of what I do,'' she said. ''More apparent than that is my aversion to absolute music titles.'' Both her piano trios, which make up the bulk of the Arabesque CD scheduled for summer release, carry programmatic titles--as, indeed, do almost all her works since her 1972 two-piano Snazzy Sonata . The only exceptions are a generically titled piano concerto, and a symphony that was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra last January. ''I may begin with...