American Music

[JimL]

In general or in specific? I seem not to be tracking very well but there's also Delius, Stenhammar (Florez och Blanzeflor), Sibelius' Ferryman's Bride op33 (also for mezzo and orchestra), Reznicek's Chamisso-variations (for bass-baritone), Bloch's 1914 Psalm 22, etc.

I think the baritone in question is a baritone horn (a kind of small tuba) not a baritone singer.  My brother used to play it in the high school marching band.

[eschiss1]

Oh ok - sorry, sorry... and now... I shall have to see how much there is that I can find for baritone-horn and orchestra- for I am curious. (Yes, looking through scanned-in band parts online I've seen baritone horns or cornets or something- it's not always clear on the parts which are which since, I'm guessing, the -intended- audience would already know! - rather like- well, many other examples- like why CPE Bach wrote a book on ornamentation when that tradition was beginning  to fall apart and had to be written down, if I understand correctly. Anyways.)

[TerraEpon]

]I think the baritone in question is a baritone horn (a kind of small tuba) not a baritone singer.  My brother used to play it in the high school marching band.

Indeed, it's in the same range as a euphonium (and trombone), but they are different, though often don't have separate parts written for them (and in the US, baritones are pretty rare, and thus usually their parts are in fact played on euphonium).

[Dundonnell]

I must say that I can't help liking the Hovhaness 29th Symphony

[Sicmu]

Interesting to see a bartione paired with an orchestra rather than a band.

The most famous use of a Baritone Horn with full orchestra is certainly the extensive solos this warm instrument gets in the fisrt Mvt of Mahler's seventh. The american Baritone Horn is actually the german Tenor one, not to be confused with the Tenor Wagner Tuba using the same mouthpiece as a french horn while the other horns need a trombone one 

[TerraEpon]

I must say that I can't help liking the Hovhaness 29th Symphony

There's a commercial recording on Delos, with the solo part on trombone. It's a very nice piece yes....though like with many of Hovhaness's works, more of a concerto than a symphony.

[jowcol]

Music of Bernard Rogers

At long last, I am happy to say that I have just posted several works of Bernard Rogers from the collection of Karl Miller.  Having listened to about half of this, I can say without doubt that he is definitely a candidate for poster child for unsung composers, and this should be a major bonanza.  Some of the sources were pretty lo-fi, but my thanks to Karl for spending more than a week on doing everything he could to improve them.  He's provided some technical notes on some of the sources and restorations, which I will reproduce in the downloads section.

I haven't found much about Rogers with a quick search, but we'll start with a photo and 2 quick bios.


Rogers is on the left!  Thanks for the correction, Shamokin88!

Wikipedia Bio
Bernard Rogers (4 February 1893 – 24 May 1968) was an American composer.
Rogers was born in New York City. He studied with Arthur Farwell, Ernest Bloch, Percy Goetschius, and Nadia Boulanger. He taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, The Hartt School, and the Eastman School of Music. He retired from the latter school in 1967, and died in Rochester, New York.

Bernard Rogers composed five operas , five symphonies, other works for orchestra, chamber music, three cantatas, choral music and Lieder.

He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.[1]

Archive.Org  Bio:

Bernard Rogers (1893-1968) was professor of composition and chair of the composition department at Eastman from 1930 to 1967. He was born in New York City, and studied architecture before turning to music. His early composition teachers were Hans van der Berg, Arthur Farwell, and Ernest Bloch. After the successful premiere of his symphonic elegy, To the Fallen, by the New York Philharmonic in 1919, Mr. Rogers was awarded a Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship for study in Europe. In 1927, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and with Frank Bridge in London. He began to teach composition and orchestration at Eastman when he returned to the United States in 1929. In the ensuing 38 years, he taught more than 700 composers, many of whom went on to achieve international prominence. Mr. Rogers' work as a composer included four symphonies, three operas, several major choral works, and numerous works of chamber music. His book The Art of Orchestration has been acknowledged as a classic in its field since its publication in 1951. He received honorary doctorates from Valparaiso University and Wayne State University, and was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1947.

I pulled the bio from  this page, which also features with 4 very clean transfers of 78s of neglected American artists conducted by Hanson, free to download.  I would not hesitate to snag the Rogers Soliloquy for Flute and the Barlow.

http://archive.org/details/AmericanWorksForSoloWinds

I've often wondered if we should be making an effort to help place the music we are saving on archive.org.

The Music:

Anyway, you might be eager to see what I've uploaded.  If you are looking for the best sound and a lovely work—go straight for the Nightingale Suite in the Second Volume.

Music of Bernard Rogers Volume 1

1-5: Symphony No.4 "To Soldiers"
Battle Fantasy; Eulogy; Fugue and Epilogue
CBS Symphony Orchestra
Thor Johnson, conductor
[15 May 1949]  (I know this has been posted before, but check the notes on the download page. This may be a better source)

6-8:  Symphony No.4
Eastman Rochester Symphony Orchestra
Howard Hanson, conductor
[6 May 1948]


9:  Symphony No.5 "Africa" (1962)
Visions; Tribal Drums
Symposium Orchestra
Composer, conducting


Music of Bernard Rogers Volume 2.

1-10: Song of the Nightingale, Suite (1939)
Prelude; The gardens of the porcelain palace; Expedition of the Chinese gentlemen; Berceuse; A court festival; The clockwork nightingale; Death and the emperor; Song of the nightingale; Happy ending
Peabody Orchestra
Gunther Schuller, conductor

11: Symphony No.3 in C
"On a Thanksgiving Song"
Rochester Philharmonic
Howard Hanson, conductor
[27 October 1937]


Music of Bernard Rogers Volume 3

1Apparitions for Orchestra
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra/Max Rudolf
[date unknown]

2-3 Four Pictures after Hans Christian Anderson
Eastman Rochester Symphony Orchestra/Howard Hanson [28 April 1945?]

4- 8 Three Japanese Dances
Cleveland Orchestra/Louis Lane
[date unknown] (Not the version I've seen on CD...)

9 Portrait for Violin and Orchestra
Josef Gingold, violin
Cleveland Orchestra/George Szell
[18/20 October 1956]

10 Suite "Silver World" (1949)
A Hobby Horse; Chinese March; A Princess; Tug of War
Eastman Little Symphony/Frederick Fennell
[date unknown]


Happy Hunting, and let me know if there are any problems or concerns.

[Dundonnell]

Joy is unconfined

Profound thanks to Karl for all his work on these recordings and to yourself for posting them

[jowcol]

"Unconfined joy" is receiving a care package with more then 50 discs to share!   I'll be busy the next couple of months...  Which means you will be as well...

[Dundonnell]

Nothing new there then

[shamokin88]

Wonderful stuff.

Many thanks.

But isn't the photo Deems Taylor?

[shamokin88]

Shades of the Army/McCarthy hearings. The photo has been cropped! Here is the link - the other guy is Bernard Rogers. http://wallpapers.brothersoft.com/deems-taylor-57905.html.

A site for the radio broadcaster Norman Corwin has a photo with Rogers at the piano, facing the viewer. Leaning against it both Taylor and Corwin plus a singer - whose name I forget.

[jowcol]

Thanks for correcting the photo-- (although that will be on the MP3 files)--  It was funny, but the cropped version I found as identified as Rogers...

[eschiss1]

Listened to Sessions' Montezuma recently (libretto by Borghese). Even though I've been a fan of Roger Sessions' music since the early 1990s, I admit that I was expecting listening to a 2-hour work by him to be something of a trudge and a trawl, I fear. 

I'm not surprised that I didn't get the whole opera in one go, but it was a much more sheerly enjoyable experience than I was expecting, much more diverse in musical material and means, more humorous in libretto (though indeed I knew, and sympathized with, the general political idea that did not however smush everything else out of the writing) (and "they say all cats are grey in the night" while an -- interesting way of putting what the conquistador wanted to say, was definitely an amusing one! ... )  --- well, generally, by now I should remember to give a composer more credit (and it wasn't his first opera (Lucullus- still haven't heard), and definitely not his first vocal-orchestral work either (e.g. Theocritus- which I have heard, and like). So experience counted for, if I still worried before listening...)

Thanks!!

People here are a treasure.

[jowcol]

Music of Meredith Willson

This was a surprisingly enjoyable work, with wonderful scoring and melodic lines, and is a lot more than one might suspect from the person who wrote "The Music Man".   If you like Rhespighi's tone poems, you'll be right at home with this work.  I know that I'll need to get the Naxos version.

One thing that annoys me is that most of teh reviews of read of this work seemed  to damn it with faint praise.  I like my share of edgy, serious stuff, but I can't resist a well-told story, and that's what I'd call this work.


I've posted the 1940 premiere of Willson's 2nd Symphony in American section of the downloads folder, and have some of my obligatory biographical information below.   There is a brief intro by the composer himself, but he was rushed, and you'll hear why.

Naxos Bio

MEREDITH WILLSON

Meredith Willson was one of America's most talented artistic personalities. As a composer his idiom, style and sources of inspiration were always American. Meredith was born in Mason City, Iowa on 18 May 1902. It was a family tradition to gather every evening around the piano in the living room to sing favorite songs. As a boy, Meredith was the proud owner of the first mail-order flute ever seen in his native city. The fact that he promptly sat on it, bending it to resemble a scimitar, may have been inadvertent. But it may also have been intentional, because he was bitterly disappointed to discover that he had to play it sideways, over his shoulder, instead of where he could see what was going on.

At fourteen, armed with a new flute, his father's prayers and a bag of his mothers fried chicken, he set off for the Damrosch Institute of Musical Arts in New York, for the start of what was to be a brilliant career. There, young Meredith took private flute lessons from Georges Barrère, composition from Mortimer Wilson and conducting from Henry Hadley. To help meet expenses during his musical schooling he began playing in motion picture theaters in the Bronx. At the age of seventeen he auditioned for John Philip Sousa, who signed him up for a nationwide tour with his famous band. He remained with Sousa for three seasons, touring the United States, Mexico, Cuba and Canada. In 1925 Willson joined the New York Philharmonic as flutist, performing under such conductors as Toscanini, Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Goossens, Reiner, Stravinsky, and others.

In 1932 he joined NBC as general musical director of the Western Division, with headquarters in San Francisco, at radio station KFRC. He was a busy man for the next ten years, directing sometimes as many as seventeen musical radio programs a week and finding time for such extra-curricular activities as conducting the Seattle Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

For nearly four years during World War II he was addressed as Major Meredith Willson, head of the music division of the Armed Forces Radio Service, which produced such memorable programs as Command Performance and Mail Call for GIs all over he world. He came out of the service determined to embark on a personal crusade to do something about what he felt were the trite musical programs on radio and the tired format into which commercial announcements had fallen. In his zeal to make commercials palatable, Willson conceived the "Talking People," a speaking chorus to deliver the sponsor's message, and various other ingenious devices. He also developed his own radio personality as a comedian.
As a composer of popular songs, Willson apparently had a Midas touch. "You and I", "Two in Love" and "May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You" swept the country within a few weeks after they were published. He also wrote marches, anthems, and musical scores for a number of films, notably The Great Dictator and The Little Foxes. His autobiography, And There I Stood with My Piccolo, became a best seller.

Meredith Willson achieved his greatest triumph with his musical revue The Music Man, for which he wrote the book, the lyrics and the music. It opened on Broadway on 19 December 1957 and became an instant success. The sparkling score and the hit chorus 76 Trombones made Willson a household name. He followed this with another Broadway hit, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960). Both were made into movies. In addition to his two symphonies, Willson composed a symphonic poem, The Jervis Bay, O.O. McIntyre Suite, based on the writing of the famed columnist, Symphonic Variations on an American Theme, Song of Steel, premièred by John Charles Thomas, Radio City Suite, a choral work, Anthem of the Atomic Age, and numerous shorter orchestral pieces in a lighter vein, including Sneezing Violins, A Child's Letter, Piccolo Polka, and The Marguerite Waltz. Meredith Willson died in Santa Monica, California on 15 June 1984.