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A propos Greg K's comment: that might be very interesting.

Things being what they are, it is clear that I will not be able to contribute much from this point on. Please do not misunderstand - it is just that the bulk of my collection and the core of my interests fall outside UC's newly-defined boundaries. I will watch this site with sympathetic interest and wish to everyone the very best, especially the hard-pressed moderators.

Shamokin88

Having contributed several of the Rubin symphonies under discussion you would think I would have something useful to write about him. But at the same time several of those uploaded by others were quite new to me, and I haven't reached anything like a point of taking him all in beyond understanding that he is not an especially "typical" Austrian symphonist. He is less predictable, less likely to reveal the same musical personality from one symphony to the next, very different from, say, Weigl, who is gradually being revealed in UC. Would biologists call him a "sport" if their standards were fixed by Schmidt, Wellesz or Weigl? A stimulating discovery, someone who seemed to have sidestepped what Roger Sessions called "the long line."

The recent Karl Weigl offerings are most welcome, especially the Triad LP with the 6th String Quartet - I used to have a copy. The Record Hunter store in New York had a bin full of these things during the late 1960s at 99 cents the copy.

There is [or was] a two CD set of his music issued in a limited edition by the Karl Weigl Foundation offering a complete Viola Sonata, the 4th String Quartet, the Two Pieces for 'Cello & Piano on one disc and a collection of songs on the other <kweigl@brsgroup.com>.

I will shortly put up the Violin Concerto, the String Quartet #8, the adagio - only - from the Symphony #2,  the same Two Pieces for 'Cello & Piano, the latter from a different source, and the Pied Piper orchestral suite, if I can find it.

The String Quartet #2 has not yet been recorded but it was played in Philadelphia about fifty years ago as part of a recurring chamber music concert series offering mostly baroque and renaissance music. The Weigl snuck in because a viola d'amore is employed rather than a standard instrument.

Another deserving composer who was a victim of history.

Best from Shamokin88.

Sorry. It gets too hot to think sometimes. I'll have it sorted out by my bedtime. I had a phone conversation with her this afternoon about her work.

It should be all right now.

Shamokin back once more on what will prove to be another wretchedly hot day in Philadelphia.

I would like to discourage any connection with Facebook or like sites. I don't think it is useful that someone in Senegal might learn that I just finished brushing my teeth or that I might learn the same about them. And the participants in these social networks are not really people being served, they are people being sold. My opinion.

Yesterday I uploaded a Viola Concerto by a young American composer, Amanda Harberg. The day before, I confess, I had never heard of her. Her concerto fits within my notion of what constitutes a good piece and more broadly, an appropriate piece for UC. I'd welcome opinions in this respect because her concerto emerges from the place, you might say, where I "am" or, better, a space within which I am comfortable. My comfort zone, in other words.

Were we to "police" ourselves - and goodness knows we could do that, we have the discernment for that - her concerto would probably not appear on this site, not yesterday, not today nor any other day.

If her concerto ought not to be here - and I can remove it in the twinkling of an eye - the self-censorship implied in taking it down suggests that there is not a great deal more that I could offer UC - my collection is heavily weighted in the direction of more Amanda Harbergs. For every Edgar Stillman Kelly Piano Quintet that I upload I have twenty five quintets that would possibly send Kelly spinning in his grave. I know that no one blames me for this, they just wish it might be the other way 'round.

Self-censorship will likely keep you out of trouble but - fill in the blanks. History offers many options here.

I was struck by the idea that we might have a sharper demarcation between the uploads, on one hand, and the discussions, on the other. I'm not sure what that would mean other than different emphases in moderating and monitoring what comes in.

Anyway, as ever, peace linked to purpose to all from Shamokin88.

The Gulliver Symphony.

This particular glitch has happened before which is to say I upload piece A, confident that I am uploading piece A but it turns out when someone else downloads it it has turned into piece X. So here I am doing it once more.

As it is I'm increasingly sure that the two performances are the same performances. Well, we'll see. I think it may be all right now.

Is there an unattached piece for violin and piano rattling around loose inside MediaFire that has three times attached itself to one of my uploads? Can such things happen?

Shamokin88 back with this conundrum to consider: What direction would you like the site to take if maintenance of the status quo is not an option? That is a quote.

I'm not going to play games with words - what does Romantic mean for example. Some years back we had on our Supreme Court a justice by the name of Potter Stewart. He and his colleagues were rassling with a question in which pornography was snarled up with our First Amendment "free speech" guarantees. Mr Justice Stewart suggested that while he was unable to define pornography he surely recognized it when he saw it.

Some of that thinking pervades our desire to capture the meaning of Romantic. Let me posit that Alban Berg's opus three String Quartet is Romantic in the full measure of my - perhaps faulty - Hegelian understanding of the word. [That, by the way, is my opinion of the piece.]

But my intelligent and sympathetic friend complains that the Berg is horror piled upon horror, beyond his ken and has  spoiled his day utterly. I'll say just you wait until judgment day, Ducky, when they'll play Stefan Wolpe's [in my opinion] masterful Quartet for you, or even a certain seven-movement quartet in c# minor that offered up the world anew when it was new.

I am unable to imagine the substance of this site bifurcated, before and after something. I can, barely, imagine it divided into three parts, however - from roughly the post-Napoleonic period and the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert forward to the full maturity of the masterpieces of Bruckner, Brahms and Dvorak, say about 1815 to the late 1870s or early 1880s. Then comes a period of transition, one of ferment and pushing the envelope: Strauss, Mahler, Reger, Debussy, Scriabin into the harsh world of the 1920s and beyond - Hindemith, Stravinsky, Tansman, Szymanowski, Toch - perhaps music composed between 1875 and 1950. And then we enter into a new world, one that extends up to the present, one of integration and cross-fertilization.

I think such a division into three parts would better reflect the kind of understanding to which Mr Justice Stewart gave voice rather than a procrustean division into two parts.

Each period might employ its own curatorial attendants and moderators, and with the good will and decorum that seems to be the norm for this site perhaps there could be a happy outcome. It wouldn't be easy, either.

As for the Forum itself I must ask myself if that is the point of all this. I delight in reading many of the contributions, considering some to have gotten it just right about something and that someone else may have a loose screw somewhere. But that is my private opinion, not a law laid down. It happens that I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends - Quakers - and it is not incumbent upon us to speak in Meeting every time what seems like a good idea comes by.

One other thought. It just may be that there are fewer recordings of, say, Brüll, Rufinatscha or little known Max Bruch pieces that we can upload as opposed to postwar symphonies. But that is a guess.

Best to every blessed one of you from Shamokin88.

I begin by writing that I know nothing about the Raff Forum or the history of this site, how it came to be or what it was hoped that it would become. I came to it by accident having been prompted by an old friend in the UK to see if, somewhere, there was available a recording of a particular Catoire piece. A long poking about in the internet's thickets led me here, to this site.

The Catoire problem was solved but I found two things here for which I had been seeking for a long time. First, a site that had posted a great many pieces that interested me for one reason or another - a second a venue where it would be possible to share some of the fruits of my own collecting since the late 1950s, a point by which I imagine some of the members had not yet been born.

It had long been a source of frustration for me that while I had literally thousands of recordings in my collection I knew of no way to share them with people who might be interested in them absent knowing them personally. I trade with no more than a half dozen collectors, some of whom have become close friends of forty-plus years.

As for my own preferences I am comfortable with most of the music of the last two centuries, roughly, with the exception of vocal music in which I have little interest and what for want of a better term I'll call the Post Webern bunch. I'd much rather have Reinecke than Haubenstock-Ramati. But then, as I read these postings, the problem is apparently that I choose Gardner Read over Reinecke and if I upload Read Reinecke's admirers may drift away. I'm not sure what I can do about that except to continue to share what I've got and hope for the best. I'm not sure what I might do differently other than to enjoy most everything that comes my way between Louis Spohr and Humphrey Searle.

I upload music for which I do not especially care, a pair of symphonies by Heimo Erbse being a case in point. But even so I'm eager to hear the rest of them, no more and no less so than a string quartet by Anton Rubinstein.

The work that must fall to our moderators and encouragers is probably more than we know, and we owe them a great deal. If they lose interest because of what I upload then that is a problem. One that I have no idea how to remedy.

I have tended to avoid the discussions because I hope that aside from some fundamental details what you hear should hold its own. I am not much interested to read that someone prefers Joe's 8th to his 5th. That isn't going to do me much good nor, I think, that I prefer his 5th to his 8th is going to do someone else any good.

But it seems to me that this is a case of if it ain't broke don't fix it. Unsung Composers is an unbelievable resource. It will flourish only to the extent that we contribute some of our time and energy to it.

Put me down as naive if you like but there you have my opinion.

Best to all from Philadelphia in its third day of being poached.

Shamokin88

Possibly I should keep out of this discussion because I live in the USA and benefit from Radio 3 and other "foreign" radio services while paying nothing to support them or their activities. My appreciation of this is enhanced by the constant diminution and dumbing down of "classical"music here - and I began listening to it on AM radio during the 1950s.

What we have left here in the US is a pitiful remainder of what there once was, and Radio 3 by these standards, is almost an oasis in the desert. Fifty some years ago we had regular weekly broadcasts of the orchestras in Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Cleveland, entire seasons. We heard the season of chamber music concerts from the Library of Congress, the American Music Festival concerts from the National Gallery, also from Washington, broadcasts from the Salzburg Festival and the Wiener Festwochen - plus whatever we might have locally, all on essentially two and a half classical stations. All of that is gone, as are the various transcribed programs from the BBC, Deutsche Welle, the ORTF and RAI.

Please, friends, struggle mightily to keep what you've got, imperfect as it is. I understand what the BBC used to be like - I had a subscription to The Listener once upon a time. As it is now, there seems to be a lot of fluff, of personality and empty chatter on Radio 3. But what remains, even as it is, is so far superior to what we have.

Best to all from Shamokin88

[Music and the Nazis.]

Music and the Nazis.

This, of course applies to various Austrians and Czechs as well, let me suggest those who lived in Germany as it was, geographically, up to the outbreak of the war in 1939. Two pieces - at least - seem to be under a ban.

First, Franz Schmidt's final, uncompleted work, taken in hand and finished by Franz Anton Wolpert, German Resurrection or Deutsche Aufferstehung if my high school German of a half century back serves. This was a big choral/vocal work in praise of the Anschluss. I cringe at the thought of the text and do not believe that it has been heard in seventy years. It was Schmidt's effort to ingratiate himself with the new regime.

Close to the end of the war Hans Pfitzner composed a short orchestral piece dedicated to Hans Frank, the
top Nazi in the so-called Gouvernement General in Poland. It was entitled Krakauer Begrüssung and sufficiently rose his publisher's postwar hackles so that the opus number Pfitzner assigned to it was used instead in their catalogue for a new version of Das Christeleflein. No mention of the Frank opus. This same Pfitzner turned down a commission to compose new music for Midsummer Night's Dream because, in his judgment, the Mendelssohn could not possibly be improved upon. His refusal raised different hackles. 

I make no claim that these were "popular" pieces in the Third Reich - far from it, I expect. But they are both so tainted that they have not been heard in 67 years, minimum. Perhaps they could be presented with the Funeral March for Hitler that Robert Stoltz thoughtfully composed just before he left?

Edvin Komauer and Walter Abendroth - not Hermann - enjoyed official patronage.

Graener's situation was peculiar, too, for his inability to document fully his Aryan descent, costing him a teaching job.

Fidelio Finke was a Sudeten German who had to leave home after the war yet was given his only recordings by the DDR's Eterna label. Who knows?

And Kaminski was banned for a while but was eventually deemed sufficiently Aryan so that his music could be heard after all, just not for NSDAP events. How satisfying could that have been?

My guess is that we must consider each person trapped in those circumstances individually and ask ourselves what might we have done if faced with the pressures and the temptations they experienced.

It is curious that Fascism, whether in Germany or elsewhere, failed to generate the sort of musical treasures that bear Stalin's name, nothing for Salazar, nothing for Franco, nothing for Mussolini or the lesser fry - just Evita !

Best to all. 

   

Many thanks from Shamokin88 for the return of the Rubins; I will put up such symphonies as I have tomorrow.

[Marcel Rubin]

Marcel Rubin

Something has happened to the September 2011 Arbuckle upload of a handful of Rubin's pieces, including his 8th symphony. The URL leads to a page with no information or at least no information I can figure out how to use.

The suggestion was made that others could fill in the blanks of the other symphonies. I can supply 5, 7, 9 and 10 in addition to those subsequently uploaded but not 6 - and 8 has evidently flown the coop.

Best to all

Thanks for being willing to deal with this. The problem was exceeding subtle. If you look at the URLs for the various Zimmer symphonies you posted you will see that the http at the start of the URL for symphony 3 is preceded by a period. The others are not. My Mac choked on that mysterious little dot and refused to go look for the server. I pasted it into my browser absent the dot and had no problem. These are strange things, these computers and their whims.

Yes, marvellous. There seems to be a problem with number 3, however. I get a message telling me that the server cannot be found. Could you check it out please? Best to all.