Listening to Macdowell's wonderful Romance for cello and orchestra makes me wish he'd composed a concerto featuring the same instrument, just as an adroit rendering of the orchestral suites causes me to wonder what his symphony - had it been completed - would have been like. "Absolute" music, or a rendering of some theme ala Raff's seasonal symphonies? I've read all I can find on the subject and can find no indication of the direction in which he was leaning...
And there are a fair number of his piano pieces that await a first recording... :(
Did MacDowell ever work on a symphony?
It's mentioned in the Gilman biography that he did at least begin one...
Similarly to Macdowell, George Templeton Strong also composed some shorter concertante pieces for various instruments. I was confirmed to make recordings of them on Naxos - long ago -, but they were cancelled, alongside with many other interesting projects (including G.T. Strong's 1st Symphony torso, and two symphonic poems, which I had already started editing for performances). Among these concertante pieces, a lovely "Roaming" for Cello and orchestra was figuring as a new score. Other pieces were already available on old printed scores. It would have made an exciting CD, including also a very interesting Suite for Cello and orchestra ("An Artist's life") and two little poems for violin and orchestra, entitled "Americana". The 1st Symphony CD would have had early symphonic poems like "Totentanz" and "Darkness" as couplings. In style, the early G.T. Strong's music is similar to Macdowell's.
A few years ago when the Frye pieces were recorded (and I had NEVER had hopes of hearing the Santa Claus Symphony in my lifetime), I dared to believe that it might just be a harbinger of things to come - as far as little known American music was concerned. A cd of G.T. Strong pieces like you mentioned would be a dream come true...
Ah, Fry. The Niagara Symphony is among my favorite pieces to play to friends with the question "when do you think this was composed"? One of those cases in which a lack of training produces something truly original.
Macdowell had quite a protracted correspondence with the English composer and performer Kathleen Bruckshaw. This has recently been given to The Library of Congress. I presume the became acquainted when they were both in Germany.
BTW one very interesting book published/edited by Sonneck, the early-20th century LoC librarian, was a fairly comprehensive list/description of MacDowell first and early editions; this has been digitized. Well worth going over if such things interest you as they do me :)
Absolutely, and thank you :)
QuoteListening to Macdowell's wonderful Romance for cello and orchestra makes me wish...
Well, it doesn't tell you very much. It's a very slight, if charming piece giving little indication of what MacDowell might have achieved on a larger scale.
It tells me a lot - in the context of his entire orchestral output. Unfortunate that both he and Bennett were terminally over-worked.
It's 4 minutes long and rather lovely. But it's not a concerto slow movement. I'd like to think he could have written something equally fitting, but it's all speculation really.
MacDowell is said to have worked on a symphony in the 1880s but to have abandoned the project. Or rather, to have abandoned all but two excerpts from the sketches, published as his opus 30. As with the ABA for cello, they are attractive but slight.
MacDowell showed himself capable of writing a respectable sonata form development and recapitulation as early as the first movement of his opus 15 concerto. So it seems unlikely that he abandoned the project for the same reasons Glinka, say, left a symphony unfinished. More than likely he just wasn't ready for the symphony he wanted to write. In opus 50 he achieved the kind of writing he was aiming for earlier. If no symphony followed opus 50, we should not read too much into this, remembering that MacDowell's greater contemporary Debussy was himself not ready to write a symphony until 1904, by which year MacDowell had essentially "checked out."
I have listened to his Lancelot & Elaine and Hamlet and Ophelia and Tchaikovsky they are not. For example Krueger's recording of the former has garnered only 42 hits on YouTube since 2013. I don't mean to be hard on MacDowell but I don't think he could have advanced as a symphonist. The tone poems are attractive, competently orchestrated and totally forgettable.
I truly wonder if Romantic music has seen its day and could never make a comeback even if another MacDowell were to emerge on the scene. So where is classical music to go? The contemporary music being written today, with few exceptions, is unlistenable.
QuoteI truly wonder if Romantic music has seen its day
Well, there's Schmidt-Kowalski who wrote in a truly romantic idiom. Otherwise, there are composers who write in what I'd call a neo-romantic style, i.e. one with plenty of melody interspersed with passages of a more modernistic cut. Lee Holdridge probably comes into to this category - although one notes that he is primarily a composer of film music. And most music that could be described as fully romantic in style is probably associated with the movies these days.
Well, I've discussed this with musicians and many have their own favorite neo-Romantic composer but with a few notable exceptions like Lowell Lieberman nobody has advanced to the front of a very large pack. It's interesting that when the population was a 10th of what it is today (Romantic period) we produced a Chopin, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Listz, Grieg, and about 50 other genius composers who became famous all over the world, most in their lifetimes.
Today, we have advanced communications and 7 billion people and have yet to produce another Tchaikovsky--I mean someone who could knock the world on its butt with their superior melodic music comparable to Tchaikovsky. I can only think that the more we advance technologically the further we regress original music-wise. As you say, Alan, the best music sadly is to be found in films. For example here's a masterpiece of orchestration and mood by a film composer name Harry Gregson-Williams that I think could compete with the short tone poems of Liadov like Baba Yaga and it's from a cartoon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujAfhLLVM7E&list=PLMaHaORjlMMzUMFnpAcW6m1lwmtXz0oUB&index=11 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujAfhLLVM7E&list=PLMaHaORjlMMzUMFnpAcW6m1lwmtXz0oUB&index=11)
We're getting off-topic here, but it's frankly hard to imagine a replica romantic symphony being written today - it would be an anachronism. However, there are composers working in conscious connection with the past whose works communicate with audiences - they're just not writing in a romantic idiom.
Of course, we have produced an Andrew Lloyd-Webber. And a John Williams. The world has certainly heard of both of them...
I think that's probably it. What we saw yesteryear cannot be duplicated. And it's arguable whether it should be. :P
Of course, what this website is at least partly about is discovering whether the romantic era produced masterpieces outside the accepted canon. And the more we look, the more candidates we seem to find. Kiel's Viola Sonata, recently recorded on the TYXart label would be one. Lassen's unique Violin Concerto - not yet commercially recorded, but available for the first time this year on YouTube - would be another. And any one of Rufinatscha's five highly individual symphonies could also be cited. So, although we may give up on the present, let's continue to mine the past. There are riches out there...
Alan Howe wrote:
QuoteAnd most music that could be described as fully romantic in style is probably associated with the movies these days.
That's absolutely right. As a general rule once any artistic idiom (not just music) threatens to become so mainstream that the "man in the street" embraces it and it becomes common currency, then the artistic establishment moves on to a more "advanced" idiom which pushes the boundaries further, beyond what the general public will understand or enjoy. I can't think of an instance where the clock has been put back in any branch of the arts, either.
In inverse (?), I recall a suggestion, after a half-dozen or so (or more) film scores made use of twelve-tone technique etc., that - wrote some critics and composers - that movies/cinema might be the "natural place" for the use of these methods. (Well, critics, composers in critical/journalist mode, journalists will make various, often rubbish, pronouncements one way the other, composers- will compose (whether for a sponsor, or otherwise... but...))
QuoteI have listened to his Lancelot & Elaine and Hamlet and Ophelia and Tchaikovsky they are not.
Forgive the directness, J Joe, but it precisely that kind of social parroting that this forum seeks to replace with thoughtful commentary. There isn't a single composer discussed on this forum who has Tchaikovsky's particular mix of virtues and faults. Tchaikovsky is certainly no Bruckner. Bruckner is certainly no Chopin. Chopin is certainly no Rossini. as his Tarantella demonstrates.
The vast majority of music by Tchaikovsky that we listen to was either conceived or significantly revised after he was 30. The MacDowell tone poems you mention were written in the composer's early 20s. They are definitely less distinguished than Tchaikovsky's well-known tone poems. Lamia, the last of them is more intriguing. And the second suite for orchestra, written when MacDowell was 32, has much more to say than some orchestral music by Tchaikovsky. Unfortunately modern recordings of the suite are performed in a way that would end one's recording career if the work in question were not by an unsung composer.
I've offended and I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I probably didn't explain myself well. I realize that the two tone poems were early efforts of MacDowell and one I believe immediately preceded his Piano Concerto No 2 which of course put him on the map. I was in part recognizing the dichotomy of an immediate hit not managing to lift earlier efforts out of the "to be forgotten" file tray. Even Hamlet by Tchaikovsky or his Piano Concerto No 3 manages an occasional hearing by virtue of his name, but MacDowell's Lancelot and Hamlet doesn't get beyond a single recording which puzzles me. When I said totally forgettable I was commenting from a POV outside myself, maybe the way an occasional listener of classical music might react. I found the tone poems lovely, tuneful and well-crafted with that hallmark MacDowell European/American sound. But listeners who savor the "hits" might find these totally forgettable in that they carry no memorable tunes even though the atmosphere they create is beautiful, if anticlimactic. The one, Lancelot is almost like a Siegfried Idyll in that it rarely rises above a pianissimo.
Well, after McDowell came George Templeton Strong: although he was 4 years older than him, he lived until 1948, meaning 40 years longer.
Some of Strong's pieces are a bit more "modern" and dissonant than McDowell's, but formally still faithful to his early masters Jadassohn and Raff. He used to warn other composers, by saying that modern dissonance should be used "like cayenne pepper in culinary art". He had to realize that to return to Europe and settle down in Switzerland had not been a very good idea: Ansermet occasionally would perform some of his works in Geneva, and Toscanini had even performed (and broadcasted) his wonderful suite "Die Nacht" in 1939 in the USA - but this too, did not help very much to promote his music. Strong got a complex from having all kind of exciting modern music around him, he admitted himself to be old-fashioned. But judged Gershwin's music "much noise about nothing" and he considered Stravinsky 's dissonances "too easy to set", but he loved Mahler, Strauss, Glasunov and Ravel: they were "able to draw lines" and their music was "not cubism". Author William C. Loring, was perfectly right to entitle his biography of Strong "An American Romantic - Realist Abroad".
QuoteGeorge Templeton Strong used to warn other composers, by saying that modern dissonance should be used "like cayenne pepper in culinary art".
Something Charles Ives obviously never took to heart. :-\ Concord Sonata, anybody? ???
And good on him that he didn't!
QuoteAnd good on him that he didn't!
You are a Concord Sonata Fan? ???
My first exposure to MacDowell (in my early 20s) was the Sea Pieces, which spoke to me in a way that Schumann's piano works did (and do). I then proceeded to devour everything I could find by him - which wasn't very much at the time. Red letter day when I found a disc of the early tone poems via Records International, back in '89. I can say that even these early efforts - in my humble opinion - yield their rewards. May take more than a listen or two.
But then I've always been fascinated by those individuals who died before reaching their full potential...