Messages

The Lone Ranger (apparently both in its TV and radio incarnations) apparently used a lot of classical music aside from the Rossini, not all of them well known pieces. For instance, I found a TalkClassical thread where someone asked to identify the music in this clip. It ended up being a fast tempo version of Joseph Hellmesberger's "Storm Scene (Gewitterszene)" - not sure about its status in the 1950s, but that's quite an obscure piece these days. I don't think a complete lists exists in official credits, as the pieces were chosen because they were considered public domain compositions. Someone's put together a book with all the references he could find though.

Even here you have to be specific -- for instance , there is an Allegro Music in Tennessee, USA, which also happens to be 34 years old and also seems to be primarily a sheet music retailer, and it seems to be doing just fine (at least, no notice of closure on this website!). (There seems to be a *lot* of Allegro Music businesses out there!)

By various other hints I'm guessing that the place in question is the UK business here.

Many lesser known composers, in addition, have relatively few discs out there if they are relatively "unsung".

Lili fares better than some composers (she's not a *complete* unknown), but the number of CDs with Lili Boulanger is relatively small. With the selection slim, this isn't a situation like where you are picking your favorite Holst Planets out of the 83 commercial recordings made.

Sure, a few pieces are available in multiple recordings -- for example, for "Psalm 130", you can chose between the Nadia Boulanger conducted version (paired with Faure's requiem) or the Yan Pascal Tortelier conducted Chandos disc, or a disc by Mark Stringer of choral works. But if you are looking for, say, Faust and Helene, I think presently that's *only* available on the Chandos CD as far as I know.

It is my feeling that with the lesser known composers, you often have to more judge by the piece, because the CD it is on might be the only recording available after all. This means searching for the discs, listening to the audio samples, and see if this is what you are looking for.

The only caveat here is composer consistency, of course. For some composers it's definitely "buyer beware". Personally I think Lili Boulanger is a composer where, if you like her style, I think it's difficult to go wrong -- the quality of her works in her brief life is very high and her style is very consistent.

On the Ravel / Debussy angle, I will throw out a few composers of solo piano works that might be of interest that I can think of right now. (It's easier to think of impressionism influenced composers than the wide array of Romantic composers out there!)

First, I'll mention Isaac Albéniz -- "Iberia" is not an unsung piece at all, of course, but if you are new to the world of classical music you may not have heard of it.

Two composers who died young but wrote quite impressionistic works in their short life are Charles Tomlinson Griffes ("3 Tone Pictures") and Lili Boulanger ("Trois morceaux pour piano").

I think Florent Schmitt's piano works (like "Crépuscules" and "Ombres") are quite impressionistic overall, although there's some modernism particularly in the later works.

Cyril Scott's "Piano Concerto 1" and early John Ireland ("Decorations") are quite impressionistic, but a fair warning: both composers move quite away from this style in their later years.

Vítězslav Novák's "Pan" is not 100% impressionism, but in my opinion there's enough hints of such in the piece for me to recommend this for those seeking out pieces in the Ravel / Debussy style.

I am curious what you mean by "newish". This is a forum dedicated to unsung composers; however, most of the sung composers are in the top tier for a reason. For instance, for "piano music from the romantic and impressionist period", the first name that would come to mind for me (personally) would be the works of Sergei Rachmaninoff. The piano concertos as well as Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini are well known romantic-style workhorses for good reason. Same with the piano music of Claude Debussy, which I would put at the top of so-called "impressionism". If you are *completely* unfamiliar with classical music, I'd start there, to be honest.

If you know "the hits" already though, the good news is that there is plenty of other music that isn't quite as known, but still is of quality, which is more what this forum is about. Where to begin is an interesting question though.

I guess from my perspective one of the better places to sample the unsung side also is at Hyperion -- they have a "Romantic Piano Concerto" series that is now up to 77 volumes. If you like piano concertos, this series will allows you to survey quite a wide variety of romantic-era composers.

It appears at this time that you can link to the original New York Times article concerning this as well as the book itself in Google books.

I have not seen this review before, but my thoughts:

A) Richard Taruskin is a well known skeptic on "historically accurate" performances and the "historical accuracy" claims seems the beef of the argument.

B) Though I am far from an academic expert on this sort of thing, I personally share some of the skepticism on just how "historically accurate" you can get. Although I'm sure musicologists try their best, in the end, it is my view that some sort of interpretation and extrapolation will have to be made due to details lost in the passage of time, and the messiness history often is.

C) The New York Times review Mr. Taruskin wrote nonetheless throws around a few details (such as an IMHO unnecessary slights on the folk music background of Mr. Fedoseyev, and overplaying antisemitism on "the Bruckner problem") that in my opinion undermine his core arguments with a whiff of over-pompous arrogance.

"Unlistenable" is in the eye of the beholder. I personally enjoy complete film scores for what they are, and there is a community of film score listeners around that is much the same way.

At the same time, I would agree that most *complete* film scores will contain a lot of moments that more "throw-away", because they are more designed for what is going on the screen. (The same actually applies for other genres like ballet.)

For the concert hall, this is why a lot of composers who worked in film, made suites of film scores: hours of music designed for moving images, without the moving images, would not work with a lot of people. As far as recordings go though I'm personally glad to have "complete" versions.

I haven't listened to the Huppertz score in a while; from what I recall, it was pleasant enough, but I would not put Huppertz's score at the level of the top Golden Age Hollywood scores. At the same time, it's also a relatively rare example of a period silent era original orchestral film score, one that's probably more known than others out there due to the film it is attached to.

I do wonder if there are some silent film scores out there that are relatively better, but unrecorded (due to being attached to a lesser known silent film)... or perhaps some good scores that got lost completely like so much of silent film history has been. A few of my favorite film scores in more modern times were attached to mediocre to dud movies after all...

There are also *regions* where a composer remains mostly unsung too. My perspective is a United States one.

The Korngold violin concerto has been "sung" for a while, no question there -- unfortunately I failed to clarify this exception. But from my perspective, that seemed to be it in the States for a long time. I'm glad to hear Die Tote Stadt, some of his chamber works, and others of his other pre-Hollywood music are moving into the "sung" category over in Europe!

Maybe a little bit will sneak over here sometime. A quick check on Bachtrack shows a *few* non-Violin Concerto performances also making the rounds as well in the States (a couple performances of Much Ado About Nothing and a performance of the Piano Quintet in Seattle). It is, unfortunately, not quite as extensive as Europe yet, but actually it's more than I expected.

Generally speaking, forums with moderation in the technical / academic / logic direction tend to be overwhelmingly male dominated at least in who posts and participates. (It's even more the case if the medium is rather argumentative in nature, as Wikipedia is at present).

I cannot say what the demographics of those who merely observe are though -- remember that observers are the vast majority. Possibly the record companies might actually have better data on who buys the more obscure composers. I don't think accurate gender balance observations can truly be made based on who posts on a forum, except perhaps in the narrow context of above.

Generally speaking, the statistics I can Google (for example this, although a bit old) seems to show, for listeners overall, an overall slight lean towards females for classical music as a whole, with a similar lean for operas and a strong female lean for ballet.

As far as film music goes, in the past a few of the late Romantic composers did make some film scores, some of which actually still get replayed from time to time (Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky, and Ralph Vaughan Williams's score of Scott of the Antarctic via the "repackage" in Symphony 7). Others that I know had a finger in both pots include Shostakovich, William Alwyn, and William Walton, although I don't think you hear the film scores played too often from these composers these days. The converse also is true: some "Golden Age" film composers also tried to write more serious concert hall pieces, most of which are also largely forgotten. Though maybe undeservedly so (I remember liking Rozsa's concert works for instance.)

John Williams actually has a couple concert hall pieces! None of them I've heard stuck with me, to be honest.

Korngold's the major exception from this time (of what I remember): he's someone who primarily composed for film, but he also has one established concert hall repertoire piece too (which borrows a fair bit from his film scores, of course).

But I'll add that IMHO a lot of Korngold's concert work -- his pre-film compositions in Austria etc. -- is honestly quite "unsung" in my mind. Die Tote Stadt gets occasionally noticed, but the rest you hardly hear at all. The little bit that I've heard of his other work (particularly his other operas) seems quite attractive to me.

Within Bernstein's time period, I think you are right that he and Copland were the only two that successfully (from a "creating works that are still played today" point of view) had their hands in many pots at once (film, musicals, concert hall pieces, etc.)

Film music is the only place I can think of where there actually are "towering giants". For instance, I think it would be fair to characterize John Williams as a "towering giant" of film cinema scores. His scores from the late 1970s / early 1980s (Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Superman, etc.), are widely seen as spearheading the revival of the "Golden-Age-Of-Cinema" (1930s-1950s) style of symphonic score. This (often late Romantic in nature) style ended up dominating cinema for a couple decades. (Somewhat outside the Romantic / orchestral realm, I'd also say Hans Zimmer is a "towering giant" with his influence on the modern symphonic-electronic hybrid score, beginning with 1995's "Crimson Tide".)

Film music is not always made for casual listening, as Alan says, though. And I have no idea about it's durability. Generally speaking, most of the film scores of Golden-Age-Of-Cinema composers (eg Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Hermann, Franz Waxman, etc.) have largely faded away in the popular mind, after all.

The few exceptions I can think of are where both a film has staying power, *and* the music had a key thematic hook or went beyond pure pictorial. Something like Max Steiner's score to Gone With the Wind comes to mind here -- the "Tara's Theme" portion is fairly well known in popular culture even now. You aren't usually going to hear "themes" in concert halls (the only thing that seems to pop up there regularly from the above Golden Age group is Korngold's Violin Concerto), but a few "big themes" might live on in popular culture regardless. I'm pretty sure we can say this is the fate of, say, the well known leitmotifs of Star Wars.

As far as the future of pure concert hall music goes, though, I honestly have no idea. There are many modern composers, but none really seem to catch the public imagination in the concert hall realm, even if they are also successful in other composition areas. Our local orchestra did play Tan Dun's "Water Concerto" once, but in the popular mind Tan Dun is more associated with the soundtrack of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Most of the scores I see for this indicate that it was arranged by a Robert M. Barr, probably this person who was a noted community band leader. Some searches also indicate they are on many concert band lists for "Grade 3 level" band compositions, which would indicate it is made for intermediate-level students.

So this explains the out of tune nature, but does not explain why Mr. Barr plucked such a relatively unknown composer out of thin air it seems. Most of the other arrangements I can see (this list for instance) seem more standard repertoire.