A quiet pioneer of electronic music, Ruth Anderson (1928–2019) died on 29 November at the age of 91. Unlike most composers of electronic – or any – music, Anderson’s best-known works span an astonishing range, from the pre-plunderphonic collages of DUMP (1970) and SUM (State Of The Union Message) (1973, revised 1997) to the soothing tones of Points (1973–74) and smeared syllables of I come out of your sleep (1979, revised 1997). To borrow a line from the poet Louise Bogan, Anderson composed “music that is not meant for music’s cage”.

Brash, funny and subversive, SUM is a sonic snapshot of early 1970s American television. Seemingly random snippets – exclamations by sports announcers (“OK!”), phonemes, laughter, sound effects (coughs, gargling) – give way to peppy fragments (“lemons”, “why not?”), phrases (“Give that old drain a shot every week!”), and spliced together jokes (“America’s favourite snack?” “Geritol”, a dietary supplement aimed at the aged and infirm). Named after the President’s annual address to Congress, Anderson’s title hints – by way of Marshall McLuhan – that the state of our union can be divined through the latent gender politics of advertising.

Anderson’s propulsive editing quickly turns provocative and oracular. Embedding the tagline “What attracts a man to a woman?” amid seemingly innocuous phrases (“Nothing like a little Sara Lee [cake] before dessert!”) and a syrupy string orchestra riff, we soon hear sly permutations still unheard in advertising today: “What attracts a man to a man?” and “What attracts a woman to a woman?”. Now fragmented, advertising copy briefly uncages the utopian possibility of poetry:

“Perfect
(who)
We haven’t danced this much in years
Murder”

But a circus huckster, drawling the closing line of SUM, reels us back into reality: “Now everybody try to find a good hiding place”. The jolly calliope music that ends SUM suggests that even today our shared carnival of sonic commercialism cannot be escaped.

Begun the same year as SUM, Points (1973–74) is comprised of sine waves. Instead of enlisting those pure tones as sonic embodiments of numerical purity – sine waves have no harmonics – Anderson took a radically different approach, liberating the sine tone from the exclusive enclave of elektronische musik. Noting that her electronic music students felt calm and energised when listening to sine tones in class, Anderson explored the nourishing properties of these tones in Points, which was released on a landmark LP, New Music For Electronic And Recorded Media: Women In Electronic Music 1977.

In music, form is the shaping of memory through sound. When viewed in digital audio editing software, the form of Points suggests a floating Chopin étude, pitting seven tidal surges against six eddying whorls of sine waves spanning five and a half minutes. But Anderson’s craft makes the complex form of Points seem simple; a sine wave enters every five seconds. Yet when hushed and heard quietly, these gentle, lapping waves create an amniotic depth, what Anderson hoped would be “a healing piece”.

Hearing Anderson perform I come out of your sleep (1979, revised 1997) through a four channel surround sound system at Seattle’s Chapel Performance Space in 2008 was a revelation. I come out of your sleep gradually exhales a cloud-like bed of whispered vowels culled from the poem Little Lobelia by Louise Bogan. Elongated into the sound of distant wind, the voiced vowels hover in mid-air: frozen, haunted, yet calming. Intended to be heard at the threshold of audibility, I come out of your sleep is a forerunner of lowercase sound. Anderson’s voice lulls you into a netherspace between waking and sleeping – “softly awake” to borrow a phrase from Bogan – where dreams still seem real while evaporating from memory.

Describing herself as a “late developer”, Anderson corralled a career that foreshadowed the eclectic coalition of performing, touring, teaching, studying and composing that musicians must assemble today in order to survive. After receiving a Master’s Degree from the University of Washington, she spent most of the 1950s as a flautist of The Totenberg Instrumental Ensemble. After two years of study with Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud in Paris, Anderson moved to New York in 1960. She began assisting Robert Russell Bennett as an orchestrator for NBC – one of the three national television networks in the US – during an era when composers who happened to be women were seldom taken seriously. Bennett also relied on Anderson for the 1966 revivals of Show Boat and Annie Get Your Gun; her orchestrations are still heard today.

As the curtain rose on Annie Get Your Gun in late 1966, Anderson began teaching at Hunter College. Her hiring was well-timed: Anderson had also studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Pril Smiley at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Two years later she founded, designed and managed the Hunter College Electronic Music Studio. At Hunter, Anderson met her lifelong spouse and partner, the composer Annea Lockwood. Together, they continued researching the healing properties of sound, collaborating on Participatory Sound Environments and team-teaching a pioneering course, “Living Women, Living Music”, designed to remedy the ignorance of women’s contribution to music.

Anderson is fondly remembered by her students. Composer Judy Klein recalls her semester with Anderson as “unforgettable” and treasures the uncommon openness of her classroom. According to Klein, Anderson exhorted her students to “compose with whatever tools you have” and to remember that “a composition is not complete until it is heard”.

Our understanding and appreciation of Ruth Anderson’s music is not complete. Along with chamber, choral and orchestral music, much remains to be heard. Sound works for installations and more pieces of electronic music – a few tantalisingly listed in now dusty books – including Sappho, So What #1 and, fittingly for those of us who hope for more of her music, The Pregnant Dream. The latter two, along with SUM, Points and I come out of your sleep, will be released on LP early next year by Arc Light Editions.