The neglected: how to get them respected

[ignaceii]

Well, I am glad my post got your attention.
I am from Belgium. Great composers like the very young died Guillaume Lekeu and Jongen are rarely heard.
As to radio stations, I know Radio. stephansdom and they do a very good piece of work.
Even more obscure is audiophile greece.
My country fellow composer Benoits pianoconcerto I heard on audiophile is great.
And yes, there is hope.
The young man recording Liapounov.
Trifonov playing Glazounovs 2nd pianoconcerto with Gergiev at the proms.

People. If they believe in it, they can. The young german pianist Moog is one of them.
Hamelin plays everything.
So I do not agree with the first comment on my thread.
Dusseks pianosonates have been played in total at Wifmore hall with huge success.

People will wonder, who was that.
Remember that Dusseks scores and Ries scores even went further than Beethoven. In some pieces of course.
Schubert was only discovered by Schnabel in the beginning of the 20 th century.

Our ears are overloaded with copies and copies of those hallmark works.
Refresh them. Make the people aware that Mozart call CPE BAch our father. Not papa Haydn.

Lots lf things have damaged the chronology of the history of western music.
Lots of composers gave their hands to the "great" and were buried afterwards.

When, like me, chronically ill listen the whole day to that standard repertoire or even just the big names, I tell you, at times you feel like leaving classics and go for jazz or whatever.
It is too unilateral.
Conductors have a great responsibility here. But none of the great went on a discovery tour, they nicely conducted their Brahms, Mahler, Beethoven... Still today.

Ah. It will never change.
When you like Dvorak, well tou will like Fibich. But nobody knows or wants to know.
And where are the musicologists, the academics ? Nowhere...

RIP.

[ignaceii]

And by the way. The same goes for unsung soloists. Bozhanov, winning I do not know how many competitions, having to reset the chopin competition rules as the jury was so devided over him.
An old lady, having heard lots of the great chopin interpreters, said she had never heard Chopin by Bozhanov since Michelangeli.
But he is left dead by the industry. Rather a Lang, or Wang, with few golden medals, or even none at all, what ever the metal.
Politics play encore. Chinese... Not the real hard working Europeans. Of course there are, I just set an example. Bozhanov should go like Glenn Gould. Record... If they do not want him.
Tsjaikovsky competition. What a joke this year. Completely influenced by Gergiev, even Putin...
Glad our frenchman took the critics prize...
Lang, ambassador of the Leeds competition. He never attended it. Just marketing.
So here too. We loose little jewels in favor of big gun fire from the East.

Take it or leave it.

[eschiss1]

"Schubert was only discovered by Schnabel in..."

Clarify, please. As written, this is not true. (Certainly there was enough interest in his music for an edition containing first publications of his unpublished symphonies - nos.1-6 - to come out in the 1870s - and many new editions, partial and a few almost-complete, of his piano sonatas, sprinkle the 19th century publication lists. As to performance history, that's harder to determine quickly, without doubt, but I doubt Schnabel "discovered" him; efforts by Schumann, Sullivan and others, iirc, led to performances of his later symphonies, iirc in 1829 and 1865 (C major and B minor resp.) ; the Vienna Philharmonic historic archive website lists 19 performances of Schubert works between 1849 and 1870, and at least 74 -more- or so between 1870 and 1899, many hosted by a "Schubertbund". (The B minor symphony wasn't given its San Francisco premiere until 1912, but there was still US interest before then- look at the Library of Congress website for editions of Schubert works "re-edited" and republished in the USA by American publishers, which would only do so if they knew that such things would sell... one of them, e.g., a new "edition" (under weak US copyright laws of the time, just a re-fingering, often! but sometimes a simplification for beginning performers, too...) of the scherzo of the Op.78 piano sonata - the one that was usually called Fantasy, at the time.)

[eschiss1]

ah yes, I mirrored that last one at IMSLP. here's the link One also sees a late-19th century cello and piano arrangement of the same Menuet (from the Schubert sonata), and Tarrega arranged it for guitar...

(Dussek gets mentioned- there's someone who deserves the attention he gets and more still. I did not know he wrote  3 (late-ish) string quartets (or any at all, I mean) until I saw the CD of them at my local library, for instance.)

[ignaceii]

Anyway, after pages of reflections, for which I am thankful, my basic question, rests unresolved.
HOW to get them respected. HOW managed pianist Lititsa just by showing her capabilities on youtube to get a contract with DG, and lots of concerts.
The question remains.
And if you tick in Wiener Philharmoniker or Berliner in Spotify or Qobuz you see the shameless narrowness of their repertoire.
I would not like to be member of these giant orchestras.
It is sad after all that and conductors and managers know so little about the western music and their many Gods, big or smaller.
And if I see Gergiev conducting his own Tsjaikovsky with score, I know enough.
Barenboim, Abbado, Eschenbach, Zacharias do not need the score for whatever piece. By coincidence, these conductors are also mostly great solo pianists.
But that aside.
A Fibich on the program, it won't happen.
For me, no problem, I have not the health to attend concerts, so yes, the mentioned internet radios are very good.
Add audiophile greece. Look at their site. The classical part, audiophile classical mostly plays unknown composers, Weinberg, Atterberg,... Take note.

[Double-A]

You are right that this discussion can not resolve the problem.  I want to take issue though with one detail in your sad summary:

And if I see Gergiev conducting his own Tsjaikovsky with score, I know enough.
Barenboim, Abbado, Eschenbach, Zacharias do not need the score for whatever piece. By coincidence, these conductors are also mostly great solo pianists.

The habit of performing from memory always reminds me of circus animals:  It has nothing to do with the musical merit of the performance, yet it is all but mandatory for soloists and more and more for conductors too.  I know that Busoni among others has written that if you don't know a piece by heart you don't know it well enough to perform.  This may very well be true for Busoni, but it was arrogant of him to assume the same for everyone else.

Moving on:  If you make performing from memory mandatory you will end up damaging the very unsung repertoire you care so deeply about.  People will have to waste time memorizing scores which will narrow their repertoire.

[eschiss1]

as I recall, at least one (20th-century) composer (initials KSS) very much insisted his (and I presume preferred that others') scores _not_ be performed from memory, regarding this as more a demonstration of a parlor trick than anything relevant to musical values. He wanted to see the score in front of the (usually pianist) performer (on the increasingly hypothetical occasion he attended a concert himself.)

[ignaceii]

Sad ?
A summary cannot be sad.
The contents it reveals can.
I hope you meant the last.

[eschiss1]

Well, ignaceii, it would help if instead of aiming for poetic conciseness, you said who, what, when, where, why (and without quoting entire blocks of posts one can still do that without leaving the rest of us feeling a bit at sea... it seems you're referring to something in Double-A's last post, but given that fact I'm ... still confused.)

[Alan Howe]

A summary cannot be sad.

Of course it can. A summary is no more and no less than its contents. If its contents are sad, the summary overall is sad...

[Double-A]

Maybe I should clarify what I meant by "sad summary".  It meant "summary conceived in sadness".

[ignaceii]

Cannot help I am dutch.
Yes the summary is somehow tuned, not really conceived, in sadness.
After all, the more replies the less we get ideas on getting our unsung composers out of their jails to say it with a semaphore.
Let it be.

[Santo Neuenwelt]

The initial thrust of this thread was, if I am not mistaken, how can something be done to 'popularize' or at least bring attention to deserving unsung composers.

In my estimation, the problem is different for orchestral music vs chamber music. In the first place, the audiences are, for the most part, different. I served on the executive board of a large chamber music series for 20 years in the Chicago area, and I can testify to the fact that well over 75 percent of the audience at the concerts were chamber music players, i.e. amateur players. Obviously, one cannot make a similar statement about orchestral concerts. The audience there consists of general music lovers, some of whom may be players. Also, the executive and programing boards of chamber music series tend to be players themselves and, this too, is important. since, generally speaking, making a profit (versus actually losing money) often, though not always, is not something that is uppermost in such boards minds allowing them the flexibility to program unsungs if they so choose.

It has often been said of many famous composers such as Beethoven that they saved the music which was most important to them for their chamber music compositions. Whether or not that is so, one thing can be said, and that is that the chance for reviving the music of some unsungs is far greater in the area of chamber music than of the larger public offerings such as orchestral music and opera.

That being the case, the problem is to get the music into the hands of players, primarily amateurs but also those professionals (and they are not in the majority) who are interested in exploring the wider literature of chamber music. Unfortunately, in the U.S. few among the better known professional groups are willing to record or program the music of the unsungs, even from American composers such as Foote, Chadwick, Cadman, Hadley, Huss, Beach to name but a few. It is, for the most part, European ensembles which are recording the music of unsungs. And, by doing so, they are performing an important service because few if any amateur players are willing to take a chance of obtaining music by an unsung without hearing it. I know this to be a fact, as we at Edition Silvertrust offer over 2000 chamber works of unsungs for which, except in the case of less than 10, we have illustrative soundbites. And I can tell you, that the works for which we have no soundbites are quite good, for example, quartets by Friedrich Gernsheim (the 2nd was recorded a few years ago, the others not)  or Karel Bendl. And yet, none of these works that have no soundbites sell. No one will take a chance.

So back to how do we get the music into the hands of players. First there is IMSLP, as important to musicians as Wikipedia is to knowlege seekers. But, as great as IMSLP is, there are many short comings. Time, for most musicians, as it is for all of us, is limited and there are not that many players who wish to spend their time piecing together the piano part to piano trios, quartets, sonatas or even putting together the parts to a standard string quartet. I shall not mention such problems as copious fingering, bowings, crooked or missing pages etc. And, IMSLP, as voluminous as its collection is, lacks many important unsung works. These can only be found in the libraries of private collectors and universities.

So much of the job of getting the music into players hands must fall to the music publishers. But it must be done at prices which the average musician can afford.

I wish I had an answer for how we might get the more public music of unsungs revived but I must say, it seems an almost insuperable problem. As late as 1980, there were six radio stations, among them even an AM station, that played classical music in Chicago. And one of these stations devoted itself almost exclusively to the unsungs being supported by loyal group of small time donors. Today, there is one station, a megastation, which plays nothing but the major knowns. One could argue we are lucky to have that. And, as one previous writer to this thread pointed out, orchestras all over the world are struggling.

[tcutler]

Apologies for chiming in without having read the entire thread, but something occurred to me. One reason unsung composers aren't respected is because many who condemn them probably have rarely if ever heard their music.

I'd love to listen to a weekly or monthly podcast that discusses and plays the music of unsung composers. Does such a podcast already exist? If not, disseminate the music in a free and convenient way--a podcast--and I imagine good things will happen.

[MartinH]

"...many who condemn them probably have rarely if ever heard their music."

Guilty. We've all done this, too. Looking back over 50 years of collecting and listening to music there is a LOT of it that I neglected and dismissed just knowing that I wouldn't like it for stupid reasons: the title, pictures on LP jackets, the composer's era, and their reputation. So it was quite some time before I tried the Elgar symphonies, any Sibelius symphony that wasn't 2 or 5, Pictures at an Exhibition, to name a few. I was taken in by Mahler, Schmidt, Raff, and others. When I finally got around to some of my neglected it was an ear-opening love affair. Now I can't get enough of Elgar or Sibelius.

What I'm suggesting is that musical blindness and ignorance can happen to anyone, exposed to the music or not. And there are still composers I just don't get - I've tried and tried, been to concerts, bought cds, but Mozart (other than the late symphonies) and Verdi (all of it) just leave me indifferent.