aworks :: "new" american classical music

Niagara Symphony (1854). William Henry Fry

Today I started reading Denise Von Glahn's The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape which discusses the Hudson River School of painters as an example of art successfully inspired by geography. Coincidentally, Kyle Gann has also just mentioned the Hudson River School of painters in a post about American romanticism. Both point out how 19th-century American painters, although educated in Europe, managed to develop a truly worthwhile aesthetic, unlike 19th-century American composers.

Gann emphasizes the dearth of early American compositional success:

Insofar as one can judge from available recordings, I have only found three pre-1890 American orchestra works of any notable interest: The Ornithological Combat of Kings (1836) by Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), the Niagara Symphony (1854, though it doesn't seem to have been performed before the current decade) by William Henry Fry (1813-1864), and Night in the Tropics (1861) by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869).

And The Sounds of Place has a chapter illuminated with works by Heinrich and Fry (and George Frederick Bristow).

Hard Times Come Again No More (1854). Stephen Foster

In an entertaining interview by John Schafer, Thomas Hampson waxes enthusiastic about American song and why this music is important. MP3 here.

Two facts I didn't know:

1. Stephen Foster lived a "desolate" life. Wikipedia: He had been impoverished while living at the North American Hotel at 30 Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (possessing exactly 38 cents) when he died. In his pocket was a scrap of paper with only the enigmatic, "dear friends and gentle hearts", written on it.
2. Composer and immigrant Kurt Weill wanted his name pronounced "wile" not "vile."

I think of Foster as being a genteel Kentuckian. And my recollection is of anti-German sentiment peaking in the US during World War I, for example, when this Indiana town tried to change its name from East Germantown to Pershing. I can't say what the atmosphere was like when Weill arrived in 1935 prior to the US entry into WW II. But, I suspect his shedding of origin was of his own volition.

"hard times come again no more" on napster (unfortunately, u.s. only): thomas hampson renee fleming kate & anna mcgarrigle and family mavis staples
the dog's name: "lenny"
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