American Music

[eschiss1]

Ah, will have to check out the uploaded Bloch poems- they've been recorded a few times but I like them quite a lot. I have the Fritz Mahler/Hartford Symphony recording now reissued on a Vanguard CD (with Bloch's violin concerto and Bloch's first rhapsody performed by the recently-deceased Roman Totenberg (yes, father of Nina).)

The poems are
I. Danse (poco animato)
II. Rite (Calmo (Andante moderato))
III. Cortege funèbre (Lento assai).

[jowcol]

Early Recording of Edgar Stillman-Kelley



The Lady Picking Mulberries
Prince's Orchestra (recorded circa 1910)

This is an interesting novelty, but a short instrumental work that was likely written for the early phonograph.  I don't have more to go on here other than the notes above-- but it seems the Kelley is very under-recorded, and another "Indianist".

At least there is a fairly detailed Wikipedia entry on Kelley:

Edgar Stillman Kelley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edgar Stillman Kelley (April 14, 1857 – November 12, 1944) was an American composer, conductor, teacher, and writer on music. He is sometimes associated with the Indianist movement in American music.[1]

Life
Kelley was of New England stock, his ancestors having come to America from England before 1650. He himself was born in Sparta, Wisconsin.[1] His mother was from a musical family, and herself was skilled in music; she became his first teacher. Kelley's own college career was interrupted by bouts of poor health. He was a talented artist and writer, but he decided to devote his life to music after a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Consequently, he traveled to Chicago at 17, there to study with Clarence Eddy and Napoleon Ledochowski. Two years later he went to Stuttgart, where he studied organ, piano, and composition. His teachers there were Frederich Finck, Wilhelm Krüger, Wilhelm Speidel, and Max Seifriz.[2] His friendship with Edward MacDowell began in Stuttgart, and later Kelley worked at the MacDowell Colony.

Kelley graduated from the conservatory in Stuttgart in 1880, and performed around Europe for a time with a number of orchestras. Upon his return to the United States, he came west to San Francisco, where he worked as a church organist and was a music critic for the Examiner. He also became active as a composer, writing incidental music for a production of Macbeth that garnered him much attention. An interest in theater drew him to New York City in 1886, and there he married Jessie Gregg on July 23, 1891; the two then returned to California for four more years, during which time Kelley composed, conducted, lectured, and taught. In 1896 the couple returned to New York, where Edgar was hired to conduct an operetta company. He also taught, at the New York College of Music and New York University,[2] and in 1901 replaced Horatio Parker for a year at Yale when the latter went on sabbatical.[1] The following year saw the Kelleys move to Berlin, and for eight years they lived and worked in Europe, lecturing, teaching, conducting, and performing in an attempt to expand European interest in American music. Kelley, though, wished to spend more time composing, and in 1910 took a post at the Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, where he would remain until his death.[2]

Kelley and his wife divided their time between the Western College and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music; Kelley taught composition there, and later served as dean of the Department of Composition and Orchestration. Among his pupils was C. Hugo Grimm, who would himself later lead the department.[1] His wife lectured there as well. The couple retired in 1934 but continued to travel while maintaining a house in Oxford. Kelley died in Oxford in 1944.[2]

Music
Kelley was a Romanticist in the vein of Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, and Arthur Foote, and brought much of his German training to bear in his compositions. Even so, he was always interested in bringing non-Western influences into his work. For his orchestral suite Aladdin, one of his early successes, he studied the music he heard in San Francisco's Chinatown, and used oboes, muted trumpets, and mandolins to imitate Chinese instruments. His New England Symphony is based on themes found in bird songs, as well as American Indian and Puritan music. For incidental music to a New York production of Ben-Hur in 1899, he based his composition on Greek modes. This music was to go on to become his most popular work; it is said to have been performed some five thousand times in English-speaking countries by 1930.[1]

Kelley's best-known composition was an oratorio, The Pilgrim's Progress, composed on a text by Elizabeth Hodgkinson and based on the eponymous text by John Bunyan. It was first performed in Cincinnati in 1918, and was frequently revived thereafter, both in the United States and in England. He also wrote program music, including orchestral suites after both "The Pit and the Pendulum" and Alice in Wonderland; his first symphony was based on Gulliver's Travels, and depicted Lemuel Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput. His output also included numerous pieces of chamber music.[1]

Kelley had very definite ideas about American music and its creation, and was not shy about sharing them. Expressing his views, he once wrote that

the American composer should apply the universal principles of his art to the local and special elements of the subject-matter as they appeal to him, and then, consciously or unconsciously, manifest his individuality, which will involve the expression of mental traits and moral tendencies peculiar to his European ancestry, as we find them modified by the new American environment.[3]

A good deal of Kelley's music was published by Arthur Farwell's Wa-Wan Press in the early years of the twentieth century.

Other work

In addition to his work as a composer, Kelley was active as a writer on music, continuing after his early experience with the Examiner in San Francisco. Included in his output were a number of books, including Chopin the Composer and a work on Beethoven.[2] His important article "The Bach-Schumann Suites for Cello" appears in Music: A Monthly Magazine for November 1892, 612-19; he owned a unique copy of the six suites (now lost?). The most notable of his composition pupils was Wallingford Riegger; among his other students were Frederick Ayres, Joseph W. Clokey, James G. Heller, Rupert Hughes, and W. Otto Miessner.[1]

Miami University maintains an archive devoted to Kelley and his wife; it contains correspondence, music manuscripts, books, and other material related to the composer's life and career.[2] In addition, his house and studio, built in 1916, remains on the Miami University campus, and is made available for the use of incoming faculty and administration.[4]

Recordings
Little of Kelley's music has been committed to disc. The Aladdin fantasy for orchestra has been recorded as part of an anthology of American orchestral music, and pianist Brian Kovach has recorded his complete output of piano music; both recordings were released by Albany Records.



Also-- this site has a LOT more about Kelley-- http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/westernarchives/kelley/bio2.php

[jowcol]

Emma Lou Diemer: Flute Concerto (1963)
(Soloist unidentified)
Sewanee Symphony Orchestra
Mark Thomas, Conductor
THE Mark Thomas?  Better known as an Admin at UC?
21 July, 1968




Biography (From her web site)

Emma Lou Diemer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father, George Willis Diemer, was an educator (college president); her mother, Myrtle Casebolt Diemer, was a church worker and homemaker. Her sister, Dorothy Diemer Hendry, was an educator, poet, writer (married to Col. Wickliffe B. Hendry; their children are Betty Augsburger, Terri Sims, Alan Hendry, Bonny Gierhart). Her brothers were George W. Diemer II, an educator, Marine fighter pilot, musician, and John Irving Diemer educator, musician (his children are George W. Diemer III, René Krey, Jack Diemer, Dee Dee Diemer).

Emma Lou played the piano and composed at a very early age and became organist in her church at age 13. Her great interest in composing music continued through College High School in Warrensburg, MO, and she majored in composition at the Yale Music School (BM, 1949; MM, 1950) and at the Eastman School of Music (Ph.D, 1960). She studied in Brussels, Belgium on a Fulbright Scholarship and spent two summers of composition study at the Berkshire Music Center.

She taught in several colleges and was organist at several churches in the Kansas City area during the 1950s. From 1959-61 she was composer-in-residence in the Arlington, VA schools under the Ford Foundation Young Composers Project, and composed many choral and instrumental works for the schools, a number of which are still in publication. She was consultant for the MENC Contemporary Music Project before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland where she taught composition and theory from 1965-70. In 1971 she moved from the East Coast to teach composition and theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB she was instrumental in founding the electronic/computer music program. In 1991 she became Professor Emeritus at UCSB.

Through the years she has fulfilled many commissions (orchestral, chamber ensemble, keyboard, choral, vocal) from schools, churches, and professional organizations. Most of her works are published. She has received awards from Yale University (Certificate of Merit), The Eastman School of Music (Edward Benjamin Award), the National Endowment for the Arts (electronic music project), Mu Phi Epsilon (Certificate of Merit), the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards (for piano concerto), the American Guild of Organists (Composer of the Year), the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers/ASCAP (annually since 1962 for performances and publications), the Santa Barbara Symphony (composer-in-residence, 1990-92), the University of Central Missouri (honorary doctorate), and many others.

She is an active keyboard performer (piano, organ, harpsichord, synthesizer), and in the last few years has given concerts of her own music at Washington National Cathedral, St. Mary's Cathedral and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

Emma Lou lives in Santa Barbara, California, five minutes from the Pacific Ocean.

[Mark Thomas]

THE Mark Thomas?  Better known as an Admin at UC?

Amongst my many accomplishments, I don't number conducting, more's the pity. 

[jowcol]

THE Mark Thomas?  Better known as an Admin at UC?

Amongst my many accomplishments, I don't number conducting, more's the pity. 

This WAS a perfect opportunity for you to increase the size of your internet footprint.  But your honesty got in the way.

[Mark Thomas]

I'm the son of a policeman, my feet are big enough already! 

[eschiss1]

According to a review of a 2011 performance, the movements of Walter Piston's 1966 2nd piano trio are Molto leggiero e capriccioso - Adagio - Vigoroso.

[jowcol]

Variations for Orchestra(1964), by Jackson Hill


Variations for Orchestra
National Gallery Orchestra
Richard Bales, Conductor
Radio Broadcast, Date unknown.   
( I welcome ANY input from you scholars out there...)

From the collection of Karl Miller

A lyrical and colorful work.  I'd be interested in hearing anything else by him.

Bio information from the Bucknell University site:


JACKSON HILL, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1941, was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Ph.D. in musicology in 1970). A composer from the age of 14, he studied composition with Iain Hamilton at Duke University (1964-66) and Roger Hannay (1967-68). He has served as a choral assistant at Exeter College, Oxford, and as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University.  He studied Buddhist chant as a Fulbright Fellow in Japan in the 1970s, and Japanese traditional music has been a strong influence in his work.  He has received numerous awards and prizes for his music, which includes choral, solo, and chamber music, and as well as a chamber opera and three symphonies.  Hill's music has been widely performed in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including performances at the Tanglewood, Ravinia, Chautauqua, and Edinburgh festivals.  Recent commissions have come from Lichfield Cathedral, Chanticleer, and The King's Singers.  His composition Voices of Autumn was part of Chanticleer's Grammy nomination in 2003.  He has taught at Duke University (1966-1968) and since 1968 at Bucknell University, where he has served as Associate Dean, Presidential Professor, and Chair of the Department of Music.

[jowcol]

Quintetto Energicio, by Andrew Rudin


Marshall Taylor, Alto Saxophone
Bill Zacagni, Baritone Saxophone
Anthony Orlando, Percussion
Donald Liuzzi, Percussion
Andrea Clearfield, Piano

NOTE: WRONG LINK POSTED--- I'LL FIX IN A COUPLE OF DAYS--

Live performance, Date/Venue unknown

From the collection of Karl Miller

This selection may seem to be a little more "out there" than some of my recent postings, and the Bio below may mention a couple factors (Rochberg, Electronic Music, Nonesuch Record label.... )  which, without listening,  could mark it as a candidate of deletion from a well known hard drive.  But after listening, this is more of a work of "chamber jazz", and is rhythmically engaging,  so I decided to post this.  Let me know if you all feel this one goes over the edge-- it may help better inform my decisions in the future.

I pulled the following Bio from his web site.

Rudin's reputation was established in the 1960's through his association with Robert Moog and a pioneering series of synthesized compositions, most notably his Nonesuch album, Tragoedia. Throughout the 1970's many of his compositions were theatrical in nature, involving collaborations with ballet and modern dance, film, television, and incidental music for the stage. His one-act opera, The Innocent was produced in Philadelphia in 1972 by Tito Capobianco. A number of these works blended electronically synthesized sound with traditional instruments and voices. Particularly of note among these works is the inclusion of his music in the soundtrack of the film Fellini: Satyricon. Among the dance groups and choreographers with whom he has worked are Dance Theatre Workshop, Jeff Duncan, Murray Louis, The Pennsylvania Ballet, London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Louis Falco, and four collaborations with Alwin Nikolais. The 1980's saw the completion of his full-evening opera Three Sisters, on a libretto by William Ashbrook from the play by Chekhov, as well as many works for traditional instruments, both orchestral and chamber music. After his graduation from The University of Pennsylvania, where he studied primarily with George Rochberg, he joined the faculty of The Philadelphia Musical Academy, remaining there for the next thirty-seven years, as it eventually became part of the present University of the Arts. During this time he taught music history, theory, and composition, directed the new music ensemble, and headed the electronic music studio. He taught in the graduate division of the Juilliard School from 1981-1984. Since his retirement in 200l he has worked as a broadcaster for WWFM, The Classical Network from Mercer County Community College, and served on the board of directors for Philadelphia's Orchestra 2001. He continues to compose extensively. His professional affiliation is BMI. He lives in Allentown, NJ.

[jowcol]

Bruce Saylor: Peans to Hyacinthus (1980)

Houston Symphony Chamber Orchestra
C. William Harwood, Conductor
February 7, 1981
Radio Broadcast




From the collection of Karl Miller

Bruce Saylor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bruce Saylor (born April 24, 1946, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American composer.
•   
Biography
Saylor was born in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. In 1952, his family moved to Springfield Township, just outside the city, where he attended suburban public schools. Active as a musician in high school, he played, sang, and conducted. During this time, Saylor also functioned as the organist and choirmaster of a small Anglo-Catholic parish in the city. He attended the Juilliard School of Music from 1964 to 1969, where he studied composition with Hugo Weisgall and Roger Sessions. From 1969 to 1970, he studied with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome under a Fulbright fellowship. He received his PhD in 1978 from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he studied composition with Weisgall and George Perle, and theory with Felix Salzer.

Saylor won numerous prizes and scholarships during his years at Juilliard as both a student and a teaching fellow there. In 1970, he began teaching at Queens College. From 1976 to 1979, he taught at New York University, then was appointed a Mellon Foundation professor at Queens. He has won fellowships and awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles E. Ives Scholarship and Music Award), the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. As of 2012, he is a professor at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens as well as at the City University of New York Graduate Center in Manhattan.

Works
Saylor's musical idiom evolved from highly dissonant neo-classicism, though dense chromaticism, to a more streamlined harmonic language. Though he has written intrumental works such as Turns and Mordents for flute and orchestra, Notturno for piano and orchestra, Archangel for large orchestra, Cantilena for strings, and much chamber music, Saylor's vocal music dominates his output. His two-act opera Orpheus Descending was premiered in 1994 at end of his stint as composer-in-residence at Lyric Opera of Chicago. J. D. McClatchy fashioned the libretto from the Tennessee Williams play. He has also written two one-act operas: My Kinsman, Major Molineux, after Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Scrimshaw Violin, after the story of Jonathan Levi. The poetry of James Merrill has inspired Songs from Water Street, Five Old Favorites, incidental music for live readings of Voices From Sandover, and instrumental music as well. His vocal chamber music has most often been performed and recorded by his wife, the mezzo soprano Constance Beavon, who created Saylor's monodrama It Had Wings, a story by Allan Gurganus. Saylor has written ten substantial pieces for chorus and orchestra, among them The Idea of Us and The Book in Your Hearts (both to texts by J. D. McClatchy), The Star Song (Robert Herrick), Dreams (slave narratives and spirituals), and Proud Music of the Storm (Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson). He has written several elaborate scores for Nine Circles Chamber Theater, among them The Inferno of Dante and Falling Bodies. He has also been composer in residence at The Yard, an artists' colony for dancers and choreographers on Martha's Vineyard.

Additionally, Saylor has composed numerous works for religious or ceremonial occasions in a tonal idiom: O Freedom! for President Bill Clinton's Second Inaugural, Grand Central for the rededication of Grand Central Terminal, Fanfares and Echoes for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, In Praise of Jerusalem (Psalm 122) for Pope John Paul II's visit to New York City, two Christmas recordings for soprano Jessye Norman, and concert arrangements of sacred music by Duke Ellington for Norman's Honor! festival for Carnegie Hall in 2009. Saylor has written dozens of anthems, hymn tunes, and service music for church and concert use.

[Sicmu]

I have fixed the link for Dawson's Symphony No.2

[eschiss1]

I can't seem to find much biographical information about Dawson, or even birth / death dates, by the way?

[Ser Amantio di Nicolao]

At least there is a fairly detailed Wikipedia entry on Kelley:

Why thank you 

(Many of the Indianists' biographies on Wikipedia are my work; I had a LOT of free time once a year or so back, and decided to put it to good use.)

It'll be nice to put some music to the name, finally.

[reiger]

Very limited info indeed on Dawson! A genealogical site yielded this:

Carl Alfred Dawson, born 19 Jan 1917, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 7 Jun 1994, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Might this be our man? 

Otherwise I too see nothing online or in any American composer reference material that I've got.

[eschiss1]

Hrm. Maybe. Thanks!!