Introduce yourself here.....

[mikehopf]

It might come as a surprise to many of you who are puzzled by my pseudonym " mikehopf", but my real name is... wait for it... Mike Hopf.

I won't bore you with my personal details except to say that I am an ex-Pom, now proudly Australian.

I have been an active , if over-enthusiastic, collector of music by unsung composers for over 40 years; primarily obtaining most of my rarities from former tape-partners in the 1970s & 1980s and spending most of my leisure time in exotic places browsing through secondhand record shops.

These other collectors have included such luminaries as Mike Herman (USA); Klaus Tischendorf ( Germany); Bernard Borne ( France); and Richard Noble ( England). Are any other fellow members still in contact with any of these gentlemen?

[Mark Thomas]

Hi Mike, remember me? I still hear from Klaus from time to time. He recently published a very fine thematic catalogue of Norbert Burgmüller's music.

[dax]

I feel rather out of place here by admitting that I'm a musician, 62 and resident in London.
I discovered this message board only recently having posted much at r3ok and sporadically at GMG, so it's good to see that interesting posters such as Vandermolen, Dundonnel and J.Z.Herrenberg are here also.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Welcome, dax!

[Mykulh]

Hi Mike,
  It's time to get in touch again as too many years have passed by and we have some catching up to do. Thanks for mentioning me among your "luminaries." E-mail me at mherman@mindspring.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Mike

[Ser Amantio di Nicolao]

Good to see a couple of other young'uns on the list. 

I'm 27, and I live in the Washington, DC suburbs.  In my daily life I am a functionary (as are so many others in this town).  I'm also known as "that classical freak", I think.  (Who knew displaying a picture of Amy Beach in your cube could cause so much consternation?)  I grew up with classical music all around; I've been going to concerts, and the opera, for as long as I can remember, and have been a choral singer since middle school, with a few years' break after college.  (For those who feel guilty about not being able to read music, don't feel too bad about it; I'm still not secure with sight-reading, and I've been singing for most of my life.)

I actually ended up here while doing a search for information on a Turkmen composer (which one, I can't remember at the moment).  And then got sucked in by the incredible selection of things by people I've always heard about, but whose music is as yet a mystery to me.  I downloaded the Ina Boyle violin concerto last night, and was gobsmacked by how gorgeous it was...I actually listened through it twice before bed.

My interests are, to say the least, eclectic, but hew mainly towards American (especially pre-1950 - thanks for the Mary Carr Moore, too) and British of the Vaughan Williams era.  (Speaking of Moore...one of my dreams is to someday resurrect her first opera Narcissa, and get it performed once or twice.  I can think of plenty worse things to put on the boards, judging by that concerto.)

I don't have much of my owo to offer, as my collection is mainly CDs, but I have some Slovenian discis whose copyright I'll need to check, but which appear to be unavailable outside of Ljubljana.  Other than that, there's always the Library of Congress...

[Dundonnell]

Some of us are still 'young in heart', dear lad

The Ina Boyle is utterly gorgeous, isn't it

[Ser Amantio di Nicolao]

Some of us are still 'young in heart', dear lad

The Ina Boyle is utterly gorgeous, isn't it

Stunning.  I wonder if she's going to be on Dutton's list any time soon.  (I also must confess, I wouldn't mind finding a copy of one of her choral pieces - it would be fun to show around my choir, if nothing else.)

All of these wonderful BBC broadcast bits remind me of the good old days when my local NPR station would play some things worth hearing.  (I still have fond memories of discovering Peter Schickele's second piano quintet and Elmer Bernstein's guitar concerto thanks to Performance Today.)  Nowadays all I get on the local radio is classical top-40.  I swear, they play Scheherazade at least every other night.

Which explains why I'm listening to Dorothy Howell after dinner instead. :-)

[Tartini]

Tartini here. Or actually Peter from Stockholm, Sweden. I share all your people's passion on this stimulating forum for unjustly forgotten music. I thought, after forty years of listening and collecting, that there were no more to discover. But I was wrong. New discoveries never cease, as it seems. Would like to thank for all the great music that is available here for listening. Without your contributions, I had probably missed the amazing music of such unsung composers like Raichev, Juzeliunas and Mukhatov. Unsung Composers is also a rich source of much knowledge. I'm impressed. Thanks all!

[Jimfin]

A tiny bit of Ina Boyle ('The Magic Harp', all nine minutes of it) appeared on one of the latest Dutton releases 'Dan Godfrey Encores', one of the more interesting pieces on there. It was the first time I'd heard any of hers, though I'd vaguely heard of her, as being cousin to Charles Wood. I shall check out that concerto soon (when I've waded through the masses of delights I'm finding on here).

[Ser Amantio di Nicolao]

A tiny bit of Ina Boyle ('The Magic Harp', all nine minutes of it) appeared on one of the latest Dutton releases 'Dan Godfrey Encores', one of the more interesting pieces on there. It was the first time I'd heard any of hers, though I'd vaguely heard of her, as being cousin to Charles Wood. I shall check out that concerto soon (when I've waded through the masses of delights I'm finding on here).

I noticed that the last time I drooled over their site.  Thankfully, finding it here has saved me having to order the CD. 

Ah, who'm I kidding?  It'll probably show up on my shelf sooner or later, next to the Carwithen and the Guirne Creith...

[Holger]

It's maybe a good time to introduce myself as well.

I'm 25 and I live in Germany, the next bigger city is Bielefeld. In fact, I'm a math student at Bielefeld University and currently working on my diploma thesis but that's a bigger issue which will still need some time.

I have been collecting music for years now - my interest arouse at the age of nine, I think. I play the cello and the piano. Russian and Soviet music has certainly been a key field of interest for me since I discovered Myaskovsky's symphonies at the age of 15 or so. I am trying to get recordings of every Soviet symphony issued by Melodiya as far as listed by Mike Herman, and I have already made substantial progress in this project.

Other fields of interest are Eastern European music, Scandinavian music and German music, in particular from the German Democratic Republic. In general, I am much interested in 20th century symphonism. I'm really fond of rarities and I do believe there is so much great music which still awaits to be discovered. I have been exchanging music with other collectors as well as buying LPs myself for quite some time now, which is why I do have quite an amount of rarities in my collection.

This forum has proved to be a marvellous place where I could already pick up a large amount of very interesting pieces. It's fine to be here.

[BFerrell]

Old, grouchy and a self-described "expert" on anything Finnish.

[shamokin88]

This is Shamokin88. I am 70, a Philadelphian by birth and by choice. My understanding is that passwords and user names should be hard to figure out. Shamokin88 is arbitrary - Shamokin is a town upstate in the hard coal mining area of northeastern Pennsylvania. I have no connections with it, although I have been there. There is a huge slag mountain on the edge of town, and I have a sympathy for places where people have worked very hard and struggled to maintain community for themselves even as history seems to pass them by and they have nothing to show for their efforts. The 88 is completely arbitrary but easy to remember.

I've done many things, copy editor and proofreader, a welfare caseworker, a kind of ombudsman for an insurance company, and in my later working years a fundraiser for a Quaker agency here in Philadelphia - I'm a Quaker. I served on the governing board of Friends House Moscow for eight years and attended some marvelous concerts, mostly at the Composers Union.

Thirty-five years ago I came to know Jerfilm in Minnesota and tapped into his generous cache of Melodiyas. This site has connected us once more.

I started going to Philadelphia Orchestra concerts with my grandparents during the early 1950s. I heard Beecham, Barbirolli, Villa-Lobos, Mitropoulos, Szigeti, met Stravinsky and Shostakovitch. My big issue was wanting to hear things that I could not hear - there were no recordings. So replying to a classified advertisement I came to know Lewis Foreman. His suggestion: get a tape recorder. That was in 1966.

Fair to say nothing has been the same since.

What I have sought for many years has been, frankly, a venue wherein I could share the results of my good fortune with others. Until I came upon this site I could not do that. Being 70 I have to put technical questions to my son Sam [25] but he has faithfully answered my pleas for help: Dad, it should be intuitive. Thanks, but you may benefit from his advice.

Who mattered along the way? Mahler, Scriabin. Vaughan Williams, Nielsen, Loeffler, Glazounov, Malipiero,
Hanson, Harris, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Martinu.

Seems good to me.

Blessings to everyone.

Edward

[Dundonnell]

I have just noticed that you uploaded Hilding Rosenberg's "In candidum" last Saturday for which many thanks

We have spoken privately by email.....but all I shall add is that you are doing a wonderful job in all senses of that description