American Classical Music

[Andy]

Anyone have access to this article - I don't subscribe to WSJ so can't read and I'd like to.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-life-in-american-music-1471639326

[Guest]

I don't subscribe either but I just played this album. WoW!

If you want American Classical, with major league drum whacks, try Fanfare fro the Common Man - I mean huge dynamic timbre testers - give it a spin. I kinda doubt this is what the wsj article is about.

Sorry to fork yr thread - the article appeared to be about composer and kibitzer Virgil Thompson (1896-1989) claiming (complaining) American music had too much of a Germanic influence. But that's where we get cut off by the paywall.


Telarc DG-10078, 1982

Tick tick tick - time passes....

Well, okay a simple google search turned up this link to the article. After reading it I think my time better served with the Copland album. If that link does not work, google "Virgil Thomson german influence" and try the first entry returned. That's how I got there.

Of Thompson's commentary on music, the article says:

"If re-reading Thomson’s feuilletons today remains a bracing experience, it must be emphasized that his larger efforts are compromised by know-it-all slapdash judgments and contentious aesthetic biases that are more forgivable and delectable in a daily newspaper, where they may be balanced by others’ accounts. The longer pieces collected here are studded with howlers, of which I will cite two bearing on a Thomson specialty: American opera.

Recalling the inception of the Metropolitan Opera on page one of “American Music Since 1910,” Thomson records that “for its first seven years, from 1882 to ’89, [it] gave everything, including Bizet’s Carmen, in German.” In fact, the Met began in 1883 as an Italian house and was ambushed by Germans from 1884 to 1891 before the box holders took it back. This issue of opera and language, as Henry Krehbiel (miscalled “Edward” by Thomson in a paragraph extolling fact-checking at the Herald Tribune) acutely appreciated, would prove crucial to the failure of American opera in the decades to come."

And on it goes...

If you can't get at it, I managed to save as a .pdf.

[astrotoy]

Thanks for the .pdf file. I began subscribing to the WSJ in college, back in the early '60's, and quit cold turkey when Murdoch's purchased it in 2007. Particularly it was as a result of the blood letting, letting go some of the finest reporters, including a friend, who was the best health and science reporter in the country.

Anyway, two great albums of Virgil Thomson music are the Vanguard and EMI recordings of the Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, the former conducted by Stokowski and the latter by Neville Marriner. I have both in vinyl. The EMI version EMI ASD 3294 is one of HP's old TAS Super Discs, while the Vanguard - reissued by Chad Kassem as Analogue Productions AP001- is on the current list. Great music and great sonics.

Larry

[Andy]

I began subscribing to the WSJ in college, back in the early '60's, and quit cold turkey when Murdoch's purchased it in 2007. Particularly it was as a result of the blood letting, letting go some of the finest reporters, ....

+1 EXACTLY, the same story - and same timeline - plus - they then started running "filler" stories sourced from other news orgs like the NYT.

[Andy]

I don't subscribe either but I just played this album. WoW!

Fanfare fro the Common Man - I mean huge dynamic timbre testers - give it a spin. I kinda doubt this is what the wsj article is about.

Yeah - this is a terrific album, and for a completely different take on Fanfare for the Common Man, try the Emerson, Lake and Palmer interpretation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OLWgrr671g