I am in the process of finally adding a country-by-country Index of the 400+ composers whose orchestral music I have catalogued at
composers.gulabin.comI have done Australia>New Zealand to date, with Norway, Poland and Portugal next up :)
One issue I want to raise
yet again is where to put certain composers ::)
Example: I have put Karol Rathaus in the Austrian section for no other reason than that he was born in 1895 in Tarnopol which was then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now in the Ukraine. Rathaus was, however, of Polish origin, worked in Germany, France and Great Britain and finally settled in the USA. He could, therefore, be legitimately described as Polish or indeed American.
We insist that Rachmaninov and Stravinsky remained Russian composers long after they had left Russia for good. Should we not, by the same token therefore, equally insist that Erich Korngold or Ernst Toch remain Austrian composers after they settled in the USA?
Hans Gal and Egon Wellesz-who settled in the U.K. therefore remain Austrian too ;D Tansman and Panufnik remain Polish (despite the fact that Panufnik took British citizenship and became Sir Andrzej) although both abandoned their country of origin.
And...the other issue has already come up regarding "Soviet Composers". Are the Ukrainians or the Georgians and Armenians born in the USSR now to be classified as "Russian" or as belonging to a part of the USSR now independent ??? ???
Any comments or advice would be most welcome :)
