American Music

[eschiss1]

I quite like Finney's music - thanks! Any of his quintets (piano or string)? A friend says that one of them (trying to remember which) is among the best of its kind from the 20th century in his opinion if I recall- I'd like to test that out.

[jowcol]

Based on some  comments I've seen posted here, I'm not sure which is more likely to engender more controversy, wildly dissonant modernist works or Ferd Grofe.   Having done the former, I want to be an equal-opportunity annoyance...

I've posted the premiere of Grofe's Niagra Falls Suite in the downloads section.



I'm also providing a description of the suite provided in the liner notes of the recent Naxos release of this work, penned be Victor and Marina A. Ledin

Among Grofe's last major works was a commission from the New York State Power Authority, to commemorate the opening of the largest power plant at Niagara Falls, the Roben Moses Power Plant, On l0th February 1961, Ferde Grofe was there to conduct the Buffalo Philharmonic in the first performance of his Niagara Falls Suite.

The four-movement suite begins with The Thunder of the Waters, a tone-painting tinged with Indian motifs, depicting the majesty of the cascading water. Devil's Hole Massacre recalls the ambush by Indians on 14th September 1763 of a British train of 25 wagons. Only eight out of around 360 British escaped. The romantic third movement of the suite is The Honeymooners, a waltz-like section that includes the faint sound of wedding bells, a reminder of the popularity of Niagara Falls as a place for honeymooners or Hollywood lovers. The finale, Power of Niagara – 1961, in Grofe's finest Hollywood style, shows a bustling hydro-electric plant. With a triumphantly patriotic middle section, the music suggests a factory whistle and a crowd of workers busily producing electricity to bring comfort and prosperity to a new generation. The suite, crafted by a master orchestrator, offers a vivid depiction of one of America's most magnificent sights.

[jowcol]

I quite like Finney's music - thanks! Any of his quintets (piano or string)? A friend says that one of them (trying to remember which) is among the best of its kind from the 20th century in his opinion if I recall- I'd like to test that out.

I do not, unfortunately.  Anyone else?

[shamokin88]

With respect to Harris 12 I acquired the complete version and a separate performance, first "section" only from a Wisconsin collector whose name I cannot recall. It was about our only connection.

[britishcomposer]

While I don't know the source of the posted version of the Harris 12th, I got my copy from the Dan Stehman, author of two books on Harris. As for the Gould First Symphony, while I haven't listened to the posting offered, my copy came from a dub Paul Snook did of Gould's copy plus I added a bit from a tape I got from David Canfield who had copied some lacquers from a former member of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Karl

Welcome, Karl!
This sounds all very thrilling! 

I read Mr Stehman's two-part essay on the Harris Symphonies in the Tempo Journal some years ago. A highly recommendable source for a beginner who is interested in Harris.

Sorry, I have to correct myself: the two essays from Tempo were written by Malcolm D. Robertson, NOT Dan Stehman. However, Mr Robertson acknowledges the groundbreaking work of Dr. Stehman several times. The essays were published in the following issues:
No. 207, Dec., 1998
No. 214, Oct., 2000

[TerraEpon]

I absolutely LOVE Grofe, and probably have the majority if not all of his compositions that's had a CD release. The Niagra Falls suite is a great piece -- not 'high art' perhaps but colorful and exciting.

And Herrmann is always welcome, of course.

[jowcol]

I absolutely LOVE Grofe, and probably have the majority if not all of his compositions that's had a CD release. The Niagra Falls suite is a great piece -- not 'high art' perhaps but colorful and exciting.

And Herrmann is always welcome, of course.

I'll confess that I love the first and last movements of the Grand Canyon Suite,  even though I will go out of my way to avoid the 3rd movement, which I've heard too many times.

[TerraEpon]

I'll confess that I love the first and last movements of the Grand Canyon Suite,  even though I will go out of my way to avoid the 3rd movement, which I've heard too many times.

As  a bass clarinetist, I cannot deny myself On The Trail. Hehe.

[jowcol]

I'm posting a fairly recent performance of the 2nd Symphony by Walter Piston in the downloads folder.  I'm not sure if his as is "unsung" as some of the others here,  but I'll provide some background courtesy of Wikipedia nonetheless.



Wikipedia Entry:

Walter Hamor Piston Jr., (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976), was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter.

Piston was born in Rockland, Maine. His paternal grandfather, a sailor named Antonio Pistone, changed his name to Anthony Piston when he came to America from Genoa, Italy. In 1905, the composer's father Walter Piston Sr. moved with his family to Boston.

Walter Jr. first trained as an engineer at the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, but he was artistically inclined. Upon graduating in 1912, he proceeded to the Massachusetts Normal Arts School, where he completed a course of study in draftsmanship in 1916.[1]

During the 1910s, Piston made a living playing piano and violin in dance bands and later playing violin in orchestras led by Georges Longy.[2] During World War I, Piston joined the U.S. Navy as a band musician, after rapidly teaching himself to play the saxophone; he later stated that, when "it became obvious that everybody had to go into the service, I wanted to go in as a musician".[3] Playing in a service band, Piston taught himself to play most of the wind instruments. "They were just lying around" he later observed, "and no one minded if you picked them up and found out what they could do".[4]

Piston was admitted to Harvard in 1920, where he studied counterpoint with Archibald Davison, canon and fugue with Clifford Heilman, advanced harmony with Edward Ballantine, and composition and music history with Edward Burlingame Hill. Piston often worked as an assistant to the various music professors there, and conducted the student orchestra.[5]

In 1920, Piston married artist Kathryn Nason (1892–1976), who had been a fellow student at the Normal Arts School.[6] They remained married until her death in February 1976, a few months before his own.[1]

Upon graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Piston was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship.[7] He chose to go to Paris, living there from 1924 to 1926.[8] At the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Paris, Piston studied composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger, composition with Paul Dukas and violin with George Enescu. His Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon of 1925 was his first published score.[2]

He taught at Harvard from 1926 until retiring in 1960.[2] His students include Samuel Adler, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Gordon Binkerd, Elliott Carter, John Davison, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Karl Kohn, Ellis B. Kohs, Gail Kubik, Billy Jim Layton, Noël Lee, Robert Middleton, Robert Moevs, Conlon Nancarrow, William P. Perry, Daniel Pinkham, Frederic Rzewski, Allen Sapp, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies.[2]

In 1936, the Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned six American composers (Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, William Grant Still and Piston) to write works for CBS radio stations to broadcast.[citation needed] The following year Piston wrote his Symphony No. 1, and conducted its premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 8, 1938.[9]

Piston's only dance work, The Incredible Flutist, was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra, which premiered it with Arthur Fiedler conducting on May 30, 1938. The dancers were Hans Weiner and his company. Soon after, Piston arranged a concert suite including "a selection of the best parts of the ballet." This version was premiered by Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on November 22, 1940. Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra included the suite in a 1991 RCA Victor CD recording that also featured Piston's Three New England Sketches and Symphony No. 6.[10]

Piston studied the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and wrote works using aspects of it as early as the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1930) and the First Symphony (1937). His first fully twelve-tone work was the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach for organ (1940), which nonetheless retains a vague feeling of key.[11] Although he employed twelve-tone elements sporadically throughout his career, these become much more pervasive in the Eighth Symphony (1965) and many of the works following it: the Variations for Cello and Orchestra (1966), Clarinet Concerto (1967), Ricercare for Orchestra, Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (1970), and Flute Concerto (1971).[12]

In 1943, the Alice M. Ditson fund of Columbia University commissioned Piston's Symphony No. 2, which was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra on March 5, 1944 and was awarded a prize by the New York Music Critics' Circle. His next symphony, the Third, earned a Pulitzer Prize, as did his Symphony No. 7. His Viola Concerto and String Quartet No. 5 also later received Critics' Circle awards.[2]

Piston wrote four books on the technical aspects of music theory which are considered to be classics in their respective fields: Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration and Harmony. The last of these went through four editions in the author's lifetime, was translated into several languages, and (with changes and additions by Mark DeVoto) was still regarded as recently as 2009 as a standard harmony text.[13]

He died at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts on November 12, 1976.[4]

[Dundonnell]

Later today I shall be uploading three works by the American composer Richard Yardumian(1917-85)

The pieces I am uploading are taken from an EMI LP with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Anshel Brusilow:

Symphony No.1(1961)
Armenian Suite(1936-37)
Cantus Animae et Cordis for string orchestra(1954)

From Wikipedia:

"Yardumian was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of ten children to Armenian immigrant parents, and began studying the piano at a very early age. His mother, Lucia, was a teacher and organist, and his father, the Rev. Haig Yardumian, was the founding pastor of the Philadelphia Armenian Evangelical community, which later became the Armenian Martyrs' Congregational Church, now located in Havertown, PA.

Very little has been written about Yardumian's early life, but it is known that his family's household was busy and musical. Elijah Yardumian, a concert pianist and a product of the Curtis Institute, served as a musical mentor to his younger brother Richard, who began composing at age 14 and began a formal study of piano, harmony, theory and counterpoint at age 21. He was only 19 when he wrote his most popular piece, The Armenian Suite. This work, later recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Utah Symphony, the Bournemouth Symphony, and the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, was also used as the signature theme for the Voice of America radio program Behind the Iron Curtain. Yardumian's earlier compositions frequently reflect the Armenian folk songs and religious melodies he was exposed to as a child.

The Great Depression of the 1930s precluded advanced formal music training for Yardumian, but he continued to progress on his own time. He was a private in the army during World War II when, in 1945, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Desolate City, which marked Yardumian's debut as a composer. This was also the beginning of his long association with Ormandy, which led to several recordings on the Columbia label. Throughout the history of their relationship, the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered ten of Yardumian's works, bringing the total of known performances worldwide to nearly 100. This number includes the performances of his Story of Abraham, a multi-media composition that included the broadcast of Andre Girard's unique hand-painted 70mm film sequences.

In 1967, Fordham University, in celebration of its 125th anniversary, commissioned Yardumian to write his mass, Come Creator Spirit, which was premiered at Lincoln Center that year with mezzo-soprano Lili Chookasian. This musically complex piece is now rarely if ever performed, yet it stands as an interesting contribution to the Catholic musical canon, if for no other reason than for its having been penned by a Protestant.

In the 1950s, Yardumian began writing hymns for The Lord's New Church Which Is Nova Hierosolyma, a Swedenborgian congregation, in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, a church he later joined and for which he became musical director.

He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.[1][not in citation given]

Yardumian died of complications following a heart attack at home in Bryn Athyn on August 15, 1985. He was the father of thirteen children, including pianist Vera Yardumian and painter Nishan Yardumian."

Yardumian has been surprisingly reglected on cd. His music is extraordinarily colourful and attractive. There is a BIS cd of the Second Symphony 'Psalms' coupled with the Armenian Suite and the Violin Concerto played by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Lan Shui(Swedish label, Singapore orchestra, Chinese conductor, Russian violinist, American-Armenian composer: how''s that for internationalism ). Eugene Ormandy championed the music in Philadelphia and John Ogden performed and twice recorded  Yardumian's Passacaglia, Recitative and Fugue for piano and orchestra.

(I think I recall shamokin saying that he had seen Yardumian at concerts in Philadelphia.)

[jowcol]

Later today I shall be uploading three works by the American composer Richard Yardumian(1917-85)

The pieces I am uploading are taken from an EMI LP with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Anshel Brusilow:

Symphony No.1(1961)
Armenian Suite(1936-37)
Cantus Animae et Cordis for string orchestra(1954)


Yardumian has been surprisingly neglected on cd. His music is extraordinarily colourful and attractive.

Excellent choice, Dundonnel.   I fully agree with your description, and strongly recommend these works to anyone who appreciates mostly tonal 20th century orchestral music.

[shamokin88]

Richard Yardumian

There was a Columbia mono LP of his music, ML 4991 - I think - that offered Desolate City, the Armenian Suite, the setting of Psalm 130 and the Violin Concerto. I mention this because the performance of the latter was of the 1949 version of the score, much more compact than the 1960 version that has subsequently been the standard. Anshel Brusilow was soloist both in it and Columbia's subsequent recording of the later version, MS 6462. Brusilow conducted a short-lived Philadelphia chamber orchestra during the mid-1960s that made a few recordings for RCA. The soloist in Psalm 130, Howell Zulick, was the proprietor of a small jewelry store in suburban Bryn Mawr and not a professional singer.

I went to many Philadelphia Orchestra concerts with my grandparents for most of a decade - mid fifties to mid sixties, and Yardumian sat one parquet circle box over. We would talk about what we had just heard, be it Cowell, Piston, Sessions, Dello Joio, Max Reger or whatever until the point of being shushed by others. Heady Friday afternoons for a then high school student!

[Dundonnell]

The Philadelphia concerts were in the afternoon

[shamokin88]

Philadelphia Orchestra concerts in those days always offered a Friday afternoon - that was when I went. If the concert was a little bit on the long side there were occasional scurryings as concertgoers left for their various suburban trains, especially the 4:24 express to Bryn Mawr then local to Paoli!

[Latvian]

Quote from: Dundonnell on Today at 12:54
Later today I shall be uploading three works by the American composer Richard Yardumian(1917-85)

The pieces I am uploading are taken from an EMI LP with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Anshel Brusilow:

Symphony No.1(1961)
Armenian Suite(1936-37)
Cantus Animae et Cordis for string orchestra(1954)


Yardumian has been surprisingly neglected on cd. His music is extraordinarily colourful and attractive.


Excellent choice, Dundonnel.   I fully agree with your description, and strongly recommend these works to anyone who appreciates mostly tonal 20th century orchestral music.

Love that First Symphony!