Composer Catalogues: Orchestral and Choral/Orchestral Music

[Dundonnell]

Addition:

Alexander Tansman(1897-1986)

(also at composers.gulabin.com)

[Dundonnell]

Alfred Schnittke(1934-98) will be joining tomorrow ;D ;D

[Dundonnell]

To follow the modernist Schnittke is the romantic Hungarian Miklos Rozsa :) :)

[jimfin]

Ah, I only know Rosza for his music for Hitchcock's "Spellbound", a favourite film of mine. It's lovely stuff, though I am not usually interested in film music. I shall be interested to see what else he has produced. Keep up the wonderful work, Colin!

[Dundonnell]

Latest addition is the well-recorded American composer John Corigliano(1938)-.

[albert]

Thanks to Dundonnell, Albion and Christo, and wishes to anybody in the forum.
Returned by some days of holiday I am here. In the meantime I have lost a letter in my name.(Luckily for me I will be again absent a few days in order to attend concerts by Ivan Fischer, Jordi Savall, Garrick Ohlsson and Gianandrea Noseda).

[Dundonnell]

I suspected that it was your good self back again to keep me right ;D ;D

[Dundonnell]

Boris Lyatoshinsky(1895-1968) and Alexander Tcherepnin(1899-1977) now added.

[Dundonnell]

Tadeusz Baird(1938-81) and Lev Knipper(1898-1974) have been added.

[Dundonnell]

Catalogues added for Nino Rota(1911-79), Mieczyslaw Weinberg(1919-96) and Valentin Silvestrov(1937-).

[Dundonnell]

Just a reminder  ;D that all of the recent catalogues of the orchestral music of a range of Eastern European and Russian composers and which I have posted on this site have also joined the collection at composers.gulabin.com

By my calculations, there are now 377 catalogues on that site and I hope, very soon, to be indexing them by country as well as the present alphabetical listing by first name.

(Truth be told, I am beginning to run out of names of composers to catalogue ;D ;D)

[Dundonnell]

If anyone is wondering about the rhyme or reasoning behind my current choice of composers to catalogue.....it is now being determined by the existence of examples of their music being available for download from this site :)

[Dundonnell]

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.com

I 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 :)

[Christo]

My two cents.  ;)

In most cases, the solution is rather obvious. "Soviet composers" should be categorized according to the present nationalities, which happen to be former republics too, so in most cases the solution is obvious. Of course there are a few 'Russians' born in Ukraine for example, as e.g. Reinhold Gliere, who should be considered Russian. But even Khatsaturian, who was born in Georgia and made his his career in Moscow, is best understood as an Armenian.

The hardest cases are the ones you mention from the former Habsburg realm, like Karol Rathaus. In his case something like 'Austrian-Polish' is almost unavoidable. Often, one's self-identification would provide the best clue: Chopin wanted to be Polish, so he was; the same applies to Stravinsky, or indeed Julius Röntgen.  ;D

[Dundonnell]

I am perfectly happy with that, Johan :)