The composer Ingram Marshall died last week at 80. Ingram was my teacher, mentor, friend, and needless to say, an enormous influence on my music and life. I’m working on writing an appraisal of Ingram’s music, explaining why it meant so much to his small but passionate audience. In the meantime, here is a new film of his solo piano piece Authentic Presence from 2002.
When I performed the piece at Wigmore Hall in 2012, I wrote in the program note:
Authentic Presence is one of Ingram’s few purely acoustic pieces. The electronic-music tools of delay, reverb, and sampling are integral to his composing style, taking their place alongside 1970s California minimalism, Balinese and Javanese harmonies, and early American hymns in his musical nature preserve. Hazy memories of the civil rights protest song “We Shall Overcome” cycle through the dramatic episodes of Authentic Presence; the piece has a pleasantly un-rigorous formal logic to it, concerned perhaps with following a train of thought rather than any set musical program.
NPR has a beautifully-written obiturary by Lara Pellegrinelli.