Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 1, No. 11 (1927-08)

450 The Phonograph Monthly Review vsi r 1 1 . 1 - 1 — —M ■ .i A Glance at Recorded American Music By Robert Donaldson Darrell (Continued from last month) III. The boundary between popular and composed or art music is obviously indefinable. Certain works of composers like Gershwin, who has been classed in the first group, entitle him to distinc- tion as a member of the latter group. And con- versely, many lighter works of the so-called serious composers are of a purely popular sort. (Victor Herbert, too, combines both classifica- tions : his operettas falling in the former and his operas in the latter.) The first American composers were totally under European influences, as was very natural. Early works were almost exclusively sacred in nature; indeed, this country's contributions to hymnology are both extensive and noteworthy, well represented in the recording companies' catalogues. Reference may be made to Mr. Appel's article on various Christmas hymns in the January 1927 issue of this magazine and to the recorded hymns of writers like Willis, Hop- kins. Lowell Mason, W. H. Neidlinger (also to be noted for his many children's songs—a number of which have been recorded in the Victor Educa- tional Series), Louis M. Gottschalk (known also for his piano compositions and his famous salon masterpiece. The Last Hope), etc., etc. Francis Hopkinson and William Billings con- test honors as the first American composer, but there are no figures of real importance until Stephen Foster and Louis M. Gottschalk; the lat- ter, a virtuoso performer, made considerable use of Creole and Spanish-American music in his piano compositions. Recorded specimens of the best of these are unknown; he is represented only by a hymn or two, The Last Hope, and his Grande Fantasie on the Brazilian National Hymn, re- corded by Guiomar Novaes for Victor. Stephen Foster, mentioned previously in connection with semi-folk music, should not be omitted here, as songs like 0 Susanna, My Old Kentucky Home, Old Folks at Home, etc., entitled him to a high rank among American composers irrespective of classification. The fame and appeal of such works are world wide; with Sousa, Foster shares honors for an influence more widespread than that of any other native composers. Particular stress should be made of the fact that in Foster's songs we find the first attempts (to what extent they are consciously planned would be hard to estimate) to synthesize various folk elements— negro, minstrel, etc.—into a new idiom presenting a worthy claim to the designation “American." The first native composer capable of working in the larger forms was John Knowles Paine, whose music to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus re- mains to this day an imposing contribution to our musical literature. Paine was an academic of the severest hue and his other works (for the most part) have little other than historical inter- est today. The leader of the American classicists is undoubtedly George W. Chadwick, whose long lists of compositions includes all forms from song cycle to symphony, and whose influence as teacher of younger composers has been of wide extent. None of his large works has been recorded (a statement which unfortunately holds true of all the other men to be mentioned, with but the two exceptions of Schelling and Gershwin). The dramatic Overture Melopomene, the ballade Tam O' Shanter, and above all the Symphonic Sketches, might deservedly represent him by recordings. In the last named, and particularly the Vagrom Ballad, he emerges from classical Europeanism with a distinctive native utterance. Holding the bridge of the Right Wing with Mr. Chadwick are Frederick Shepherd Converse and Henry Hadley; the former also an educator; the latter a noted conductor who keeps some of his multitudinous works alive by the artificial respi- ration of his own performances. Both are indefatigable in producing works in all forms and while both are lightly considered by the modern generation, the standing and influence they have had cannot be ignored. Converse's' works include operas (The Pipe of Desire, The Sacrifice), symphonies, symphonic poems (after Keats, Whitman, etc.), accompaniment music to a movie based on Percy Mackaye's The Scarecrow, a fantasy for piano and orchestra making use of iazz idioms, an orchestral fantasy, Flivver Ten Million, etc., etc., Hadley's even longer list in- cludes operas (Cleopatra, etc.), symphonies (North, South, East and West, Youth and Life, etc.) symphonic poems, choral works, in fact, almost all forms. Several of his smaller works have been recorded, a few for the Okeh Corpora- tion and a few for the Ginn Company's Educa- tional Series of records. Horatio W. Parker, best known for his prize opera Mona and the oratorio Hora Novissima, is represented on records by a popular work for male chorus, Lamp in the West (Columbia). Others who should be named among the older men, some of whose songs or piano pieces have been recorded, are F. F. Bullard (Stein Song and Sword of Ferrara—Columbia), Dudley Buck (songs), W. W. Gilchrist (hymns), H. H. Huss, L. A. Coerne, F. van der Stucken, H. R. Shelley, Henry Schoenefeld. Passing for the moment by MacDowell, leader of the American romanticists, we come to another list of men, most of whom are still alive, and who, while like the classicists strongly under the Ger- man influence, were inovators of a more or less daring sort in their day. Edgar Stillman Kelley