Contemporary American Composers: Being a Study of the Music of This Country, Its Present; Conditions and Its Future, with Critical Estimates and; Biographies of the Principal Living Composers; and an; Abundance of Portraits, Fac-simile Musical Autographs, and; CompositionsHughes, Rupert
History
Contemporary American Composers: Being a Study of the Music of This Country, Its Present; Conditions and Its Future, with Critical Estimates and; Biographies of the Principal Living Composers; and an; Abundance of Portraits, Fac-simile Musical Autographs, and; Compositions
Hughes, Rupert
Composers -- United States -- Biography; Music -- United States -- History and criticism
Another organist of distinction is Frank Taft, who is also a conductor
and a composer. His most important work is a "Marche Symphonique,"
which was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He was born in
East Bloomfield, New York, and had his education entirely in this
country, studying the organ with Clarence Eddy, and theory with
Frederic Grant Gleason.
A young composer of many graceful songs is Charles Fonteyn Manney, who
was born in Brooklyn in 1872, and studied theory with William Arms
Fisher in New York, and later with J. Wallace Goodrich at Boston. His
most original song is "Orpheus with His Lute," which reproduces the
quaint and fascinating gaucheries of the text with singular charm. He
has also set various songs of Heine's to music, and a short cantata
for Easter, "The Resurrection."
An ability that is strongly individual is that of Arthur Farwell,
whose first teacher in theory was Homer A. Norris, and who later
studied under Humperdinck in Germany. Among his works are an elaborate
ballade for piano and violin, a setting of Shelley's "Indian
Serenade," and four folk-songs to words by Johanna Ambrosius, the
peasant genius of Germany. Among others of his published songs is
"Strow Poppy Buds," a strikingly original composition.
A writer of numerous elegant trifles and of a serious symphony is
Harry Patterson Hopkins, who was born in Baltimore, and graduated at
the Peabody Institute in 1896, receiving the diploma for distinguished
musicianship. The same year he went to Bohemia, and studied with
Dvorak. He returned to America to assist in the production of one of
his compositions by Anton Seidl.
Very thorough was the foreign training of Carl V. Lachmund, whose
"Japanese Overture" has been produced under the direction of Thomas
and Seidl, in the former case at a concert of that society at which
many important native works have had their only hearing, the Music
Teachers' National Association. Lachmund was born at Booneville, Mo.,
in 1854. At the age of thirteen he began his tuition at Cologne, under
Heller, Jensen, and Seiss; later he went to Berlin to study with the
Scharwenkas, Kiel, and Moskowski. He had also four years of Liszt's
training at Weimar. A trio for harp, violin, and 'cello was played by
the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and a concert prelude for the piano
was much played in concerts in Germany. Before returning to America,
Lachmund was for a time connected with the opera at Cologne.
_The Boston Colony._
To the composer potentially a writer of grand operas, but barred out
by the absolute lack of opening here, the dramatic ballad should offer
an attractive form. Such works as Schubert's "Erl-King" show what can
be done. Henry Holden Huss has made some interesting experiments, and
Fred. Field Bullard has tried the field.
[Illustration: FREDERICK FIELD BULLARD.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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