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United States Music

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cilgwyn
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« Reply #30 on: November 21, 2012, 06:26:53 pm »

Well,poor old Foulds won't be getting any dosh from it,either way! ;D
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Dundonnell
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« Reply #31 on: November 21, 2012, 08:31:17 pm »

Regarding the Foulds....presumably we are talking about an off-air recording of the World Requiem which Chandos subsequently issued on cd(just as Hyperion did with the Brian Gothic). In which case, as a (now) commercial recording it falls outside our rules for posting. It is though an interesting case of the "chicken and the egg" ;D

....and no, to answer the other question. I was given no opportunity for anything even remotely resembling a grand, ceremonial, symphonic send off ;D The axe fell on my unsuspecting neck with brutal suddenness ::)
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cilgwyn
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« Reply #32 on: November 21, 2012, 11:53:38 pm »

Don't start talking about food now,Dundonnell,or I'll be raiding the larder! ;D As to the Foulds World Requiem. Erm :-[,well thank you very much to whoever provided that very brief upload. I suppose I'd better listen to it,now! ;D

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jowcol
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« Reply #33 on: November 23, 2012, 11:41:14 am »

Music of Eldon Obrecht


All private recordings (and likely premieres)  performed by the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra
Never commercially released.

1-4 Symphony No 1 in C on Shelly Motives(1950) - Premeire

Maxine Obrecht, soprano (composer’s wife)
Phillip Greely Clapp, conductor
Apriil 19, 1950

Symphony 2 (date not known)
James Dixon, Conductor

Symphony  3  (Premiere)
February 7, 1972
James Dixon, Conductor

From the collection of Karl Miller

Three unjustly neglected symphonies from a composer whose name may be  known in state of Iowa, if nowhere else.

Bio from, I believe, the Iowa Unversity website:

Eldon Ross Obrecht was born in Rolfe, Iowa on June 9, 1920. His father ran a movie theater, which provided some of his early musical experiences. His first piano lessons were given by the pianist who supplied the music for the silent films, a Mrs. LaChance. When movies with sound came to the theater, he was forced to find a new teacher. He began to study with Amy Ireland.

In 1933, the superintendent of schools in Rolfe decided that the school needed an orchestra. Obrecht was chosen to play one of the two double basses brought back from Des Moines. His early lessons were from Karl Spotvoldt, Sr., a member of Karl King's band who traveled from town to town giving lessons for thirty-five cents per half hour.

Upon graduation from high school in 1936, he sent a letter to the University of Iowa (then the State University of Iowa) in Iowa City, Iowa, to inquire about the possibility of studying music. The director of the school, Philip Greeley Clapp, having become familiar with Obrecht through high school music competitions, offered Obrecht a scholarship that helped make it possible for him to attend the University.

He began to study composition with Philip Greeley Clapp while an undergraduate, then continued as a graduate assistant at Iowa to earn his Master's degree in composition in 1942, with the Sextet in E Flat serving as his thesis. Maxine Schlanbusch was also a graduate assistant at Iowa. In 1943, she and Obrecht were married. They have four daughters, each of whom has some tieto music, as performer or teacher or both.

During World War II Obrecht joined the Navy Pre-flight School Band in Iowa City. Near the end of the war, he was transferred to the Philippines.

Obrecht spent the first part of 1946 in Boston studying with Ludwig Juht. It was his desire to find out if he could play in a professional symphony. This was determined when he was accepted into Washington D.C.'s National Symphony Orchestra. He performed there during the 1946 summer season and the 1946-47 season during which Clapp offered him the opportunity to return to Iowa to attain his doctoral degree and to serve as a teacher. He joined the faculty of the University of Iowa in the fall of 1947.

The Symphony in C, on Shelley Motives of 1950, was his doctoral thesis. This piece was performed by the University Orchestra under Clapp on Wednesday, April 19, 1950. The soprano part, in the two movements that are settings of poems by Shelley, was performed by Maxine Obrecht.

As a student and graduate assistant, Obrecht had attended Clapp's two-year History and Appreciation of Music course several times. As an instructor, he had also occasionally taught the course in summers when Clapp was away on vacation. This surely aided him in preparing to teach the program upon Clapp's death in 1953. Obrecht then took over the music appreciation classes and with them the WSUI radio broadcasts that Clapp had begun in 1920. He broadcast the lectures with musical examples from records and with guest faculty and advanced student performers until 1972, when the University's schedule and the WSUI¼s schedule came into conflict. After the School of Music decided that courses in music appreciation and music history should be separated, with the appreciation classes reserved for non-majors, Obrecht renamed the course "Masterpieces of Music."

During his tenure at the University, Obrecht taught studio double bass, music appreciation, music theory, and composition. He also collaborated with a colleague, Tom Turner, in writing a book on musical form and analysis. As can be seen in the bibliography of his music, only one of his compositions before 1965 uses the double bass as soloist. Until then he had avoided writing for double bass so as not to be stereotyped as someone who could write for only one instrument. He then decided that he knew the double bass better than any other instrument and needed music to perform. In 1965 he composed the first diversion. The diversions began as relaxation from larger works and figured prominently in a number of faculty double bass recitals that he performed in the 1970's and 1980's, Diversion I being used as a break from the Symphony No. 3.

Obrecht retired from the University in 1990, but remained as the double bass professor until 1992. Obrecht was known for many different talents. As a performer he served as the principal bassist with the Quad City Symphony Orchestra (with time off for World War II, the National Symphony, etc.). As a composer he wrote three symphonies, a concerto, and many other works. As a teacher he launched many students into careers, not all of which ended in music, and taught many non-musicians through his music appreciation classes and their broadcasts. Whatever hat he was wearing, he was always known for his positive attitude.


A news release from the University of Iowa about the second performance of his first symphony.

UI Symphony Will Play Music By Retired Faculty Member Eldon Obrecht Feb. 23

The second performance ever of a symphony by long-time Iowa City resident and retired University of Iowa Professor Eldon Obrecht will be presented on a concert by the University Symphony with conductor William LaRue Jones at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 23, in Hancher Auditorium on the UI campus.
The concert is part of the University Symphony's Signature Series of subscription concerts.

Soprano Susan Sondrol Jones will be featured as a soloist in the performance of Obrecht's Symphony in C. Other works on the concert are "Sensemaya" by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas and Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, the "Eroica."

"I'm still pleased with the dear old thing," Obrecht said recently about the Symphony in C, which he has not heard since its first performance. Composed as Obrecht's doctoral thesis, the symphony was premiered by the University Symphony April 19, 1950, in the Iowa Memorial Union. Philip Greeley Clapp conducted the performance, and Maxine Obrecht, the composer's wife, was the soprano soloist.

Subtitled "On Shelley Motives," the symphony features settings of two poems by English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. "As an undergraduate I took all the literature classes I could," Obrecht said. "One was a course in 19th-century English literature. That's where I got very much interested in Shelley and Byron, but especially in Shelley."

The symphony's second and fourth movements are settings of poems by Shelley. The text for the second movement is a poetic fragment, "When soft winds and sunny skies." The fourth movement uses the fifth stanza of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," which opens with a musical reference, "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is" and ends with a line that Obrecht, a life-long Iowan, finds particularly appealing this time of year: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

"Shelley had a very musical ear," Obrecht said after reading the text aloud. "Isn't that wonderful stuff?"







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« Reply #34 on: November 23, 2012, 11:54:42 am »

Music of Morton Gould

(I'll try to get a bigger picture next time  ;D



From the collection of Karl Miller
None of these are commercially available, to the best of my knowledge - sources described  below.



1-4:  Centennial Symphony: A Gala for Band (1983)
Centennial Symphony—written for the UT band for the 100th anniversary of the University of Texas in Austin.
University of Texas Longhorn Band
Morton Gould, Conductor
Private recording of April 9, 1983 performance.

5-7:   Soundings (1969)
Utah Symphony Orchestra
Ardean Watts Conductor
Radio broadcast, date unknown.

Remaining tracks are from an NPR broadcast hosted by Fred Calland,  called An American Salute, dedicated to Morton Gould on his 80th Birthday.
Most performances with the US Coast Guard Band,  led by Louis J. Buckley and Kenneth Megan
8.  Commentary
9. Cheers
10. Commentary
11-16:  St. Lawrence
17. Commentary
18. Red Cavalry March
19. Commentary
20-23:  Holiday Suite
24-25: Commentary
26: Child Prodigy (Gould on Piano)
27: Gavotte (Gould on Piano)
28; Commentary
29. March for Yanks
30. Commentary
31: Santa Fe
32: Commentary



Wikipedia Bio


Morton Gould was born in Richmond Hill, New York. He was recognized early as a child prodigy with abilities in improvisation and composition. His first composition was published at age six. Gould studied at the Institute of Musical Art, although his most important teachers were Abby Whiteside and Vincent Jones.

During the Depression, Gould, while a teenager, worked in New York City playing piano in movie theaters, as well as with vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as the staff pianist. By 1935, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for New York's WOR radio station, where he reached a national audience via the Mutual Broadcasting System, combining popular programming with classical music.

In the 1940s, Gould appeared on the Cresta Blanca Carnival program as well as The Chrysler Hour on CBS where he reached an audience of millions.
Gould composed Broadway scores such as Billion Dollar Baby and Arms and the Girl; film music such as Delightfully Dangerous, Cinerama Holiday, and Windjammer; music for television series such as World War One and the miniseries "Holocaust"; and ballet scores including Interplay, Fall River Legend, and I'm Old Fashioned.

Gould's music, commissioned by symphony orchestras all over the United States, was also commissioned by the Library of Congress, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Ballet Theatre, and the New York City Ballet. His ability to seamlessly combine multiple musical genres into formal classical structure, while maintaining their distinctive elements, was unsurpassed, and Gould received three commissions for the United States Bicentennial.

As a conductor, Gould led all of the major American orchestras as well as those of Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, and Australia.[1] With his orchestra, he recorded music of many classical standards, including Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" on which he also played the piano. He won a Grammy Award in 1966 for his recording of Charles Ives' first symphony, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983, Gould received the American Symphony Orchestra League's Gold Baton Award. In 1986 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

An active member of ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) for many decades, Gould served as president from 1986 until 1994. During his tenure, he lobbied for the intellectual rights of performing artists as the internet was becoming a force that would greatly impact ASCAP's members.

Incorporating new styles into his repertoire as they emerged, Gould incorporated wildly disparate elements, including a rapping narrator titled "The Jogger and the Dinosaur" and a singing fire department titled "Hosedown" commissioned works for the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. In 1993, his work "Ghost Waltzes" was commissioned for the ninth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. In 1994, Gould received the Kennedy Center Honor in recognition of lifetime contributions to American culture.

In 1995, Gould was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Stringmusic, a composition commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra in recognition of the final season of director Mstislav Rostropovich. In 2005, he was honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He also was a member of the board of the American Symphony Orchestra League and of the National Endowment for the Arts music panel. Most of his compositions and arrangements were issued by RCA Records, some of which are available from BMG, Sony and G. Schirmer.

Gould's original transcripts, personal papers and other pertinent pieces are archived in the Library of Congress and available to the public.[citation needed]

Gould died on February 21, 1996 at the newly opened Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida where he was the first resident guest composer/conductor. He was 82 years old.[citation needed]


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« Reply #35 on: November 23, 2012, 12:14:07 pm »

5-7:   Soundings (1969)
I wonder if Elliott Carter was aware of his compatriot's work title and decided to give it another outing some four decades later?...
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cilgwyn
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« Reply #36 on: November 23, 2012, 12:17:33 pm »

We wanted the big picture! ;D
I do wish someone would reissue Morton Goulds own recording of his 'Latin American Symphonette' with the LSO. An early digital recording on the Varese Sarabande label & never,as far as I can ascertain,released on cd. A fantastic embossed Aztec design on the front of the lavish gatefold sleeve & one of those now amusing warnings about possible damage to you're equipment. This is still the only time I have ever really warmed to Morton Gould. Exciting music,excitingly played & a truly spectacular recording. (The other items were quite good,too,but not as......!)I played it to death as a youngster & have always been disappointed by every other Morton Gould recording I have bought,since (although his third symphony on Albany has it's moments!).
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Dundonnell
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« Reply #37 on: November 24, 2012, 12:59:56 am »

Thanks so much to Shamus for making the Hilmar Luckhardt works available :) :)

I listened to the Symphonic Variations first and my first thought was that the music sounded rather sub-Rachmaninov but undeniably attractive. I then tried the Symphony No.3 and thought this is more like it, more of a serious visage, not great music but well-wrought, neo-romantic in the best sense and more genuinely my kind of music :)

Many thanks again :)
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kyjo
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« Reply #38 on: November 24, 2012, 01:30:55 am »

May I echo Colin's thanks :) :)? Luckhardt is a welcome new name to me-many thanks, shamus, for making his music available for listening :)!
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Dundonnell
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« Reply #39 on: November 24, 2012, 01:51:52 am »

Good Grief :) :)

The end of Part 1 of the Symphony No.4 is pure Vaughan Williams :)

I have never heard an American symphony which sounded so-British :o
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kyjo
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« Reply #40 on: November 24, 2012, 02:04:51 am »

Well, if Gomchiksumla, a Mongolian composer, could emulate VW's sound-world in his Symphony no. 1 (which is on YT), I'm sure the Americans could be highly capable of doing the same ;D! IIRC, there is some VW-ish pastoralism in some spots in Randall Thompson's symphonies :)...
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Dundonnell
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« Reply #41 on: November 24, 2012, 02:31:30 am »

Luckhardt's Symphony No.4 is really quite amazing :)

At times in Part 2 the vocal line begins to remind me of the embarrassing dreadfuulness of late Roy Harris...and then seconds later he cancels out that impression with his gorgeous modal, string lines ;D ;D

I am not sure what it all amounts to but my first impressions are of a quite lovely piece to which I shall return with huge pleasure :) :)
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Dundonnell
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« Reply #42 on: November 24, 2012, 02:35:03 am »

Well, if Gomchiksumla, a Mongolian composer, could emulate VW's sound-world in his Symphony no. 1 (which is on YT), I'm sure the Americans could be highly capable of doing the same ;D! IIRC, there is some VW-ish pastoralism in some spots in Randall Thompson's symphonies :)...

No "Gomchiksumla" when I type into into You Tube search :(
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kyjo
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« Reply #43 on: November 24, 2012, 02:52:57 am »

My apologies, Colin :-[! His name is Gonchiksumla and his Symphony no. 2 can be heard on YouTube as well :)!
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Dundonnell
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« Reply #44 on: November 24, 2012, 02:58:08 am »

Ha ::)

I have the Symphony No.2 in my download collection already ;D    Maybe I should actually listen to it ;D ;D
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