Sir Thomas Beecham—Some Personal Memories

Tempo ◽  
1961 ◽  
pp. 2-3
Author(s):  
Richard Arnell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
New Age ◽  
Symphony Orchestras ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Virgil Thomson ◽  
Carnegie Hall

I first met Sir Thomas Beecham in New York and in the Green Room at Carnegie Hall after a concert. Although I cannot remember which orchestra he was conducting, it was possibly the Rochester Symphony Orchestra. Due, I was told, to various feuds with important managements, Sir Thomas never conducted either the New York Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestras, at least not during the period I knew him there, from 1941 until his return to London in 1944. I had been introduced by his assistant John Barnett and was also armed with the encouragement of critic-composer Virgil Thomson, a friend and admirer of Sir Thomas, who had heard John rehearsing my overture, The New Age. This work was later rejected by the committee of the New York City Symphony, a group of unemployed musicians working under the W.P.A., a kind of dole. Partly from anger at what he thought an unjust decision, Barnett arranged my introduction to Sir Thomas.

Black Song, Dance, and Theater in pre-World War I New York City

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
World War ◽  
Performance Space

Between 1896 and 1915, Black professional entertainers transformed New York City’s most established culture industries—musical theater and popular song publishing—and helped create two new ones: social dancing and music recording. While Black culture workers’ full impact on popular entertainment and Black modernism would not be felt until after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age were decades in the making. Stage performers Williams and Walker and their musical director Will Marion Cook introduced full-scale Black musical theater to Broadway between 1902 and 1909; songwriters-turned-performers Cole and Johnson expanded the style and substance of ragtime songs along Tin Pan Alley; James Reese Europe created a labor union for Black musicians that got hundreds of players out of Black nightclubs into high-paying White elites’ homes, eventually bringing a 200-person all-Black symphony orchestra to Carnegie Hall for the first concert of its kind at the august performance space. James Europe’s Clef Club Inc. also caught the ears of Manhattan’s leading social dancers, the White Irene and Vernon Castle, in ways that helped disseminate Europe’s ragtime dance bands across America and, by 1913, became the first Black band to record phonographs, setting important precedents for the hit jazz and blues records of the postwar era. While James Europe would go on to win renown as the musical director of the Harlem Hell Fighters—the most-decorated infantry unit to fight in World War I—his prewar community of professional entertainers had already successfully entered into New York City’s burgeoning, and increasingly national, commercial culture markets. By studying some of the key figures in this story it becomes possible to get a fuller sense of the true cultural ferment that marked this era of Black musical development. Stage performers Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, behind-the-scenes songwriters Will Marion Cook and James Weldon Johnson, and musicians such as James Reese Europe’s artistic and entrepreneurial interventions made African Americans central players in creating the Manhattan musical marketplace and helped make New York City the capital of U.S. performance and entertainment.

Ortiz, William (1947--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marysol Quevedo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
York City ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
New York State ◽  
San Juan ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Morton Feldman ◽  
The Arts

Born in Salinas, Puerto Rico, William Oritz was raised in New York City. He studied composition at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico under Héctor Campos Parsi and Amaury Veray. He holds a master’s degree from SUNY at Stony Brook (1976), where his professors included Billy Jim Layton and Bülent Arel, and a PhD from SUNY at Buffalo (1983), where Lejaren Hiller and Morton Feldman were his professors. Ortiz served as assistant director of Black Mountain College II, NY, also teaching composition and music theory at the school. He has held the position of chair of the department of humanities and has served as band conductor for the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón. As a music critic he has contributed to The San Juan Star. Among his many works Oritz has completed commissions for the Casals Festival, the Guitar Society of Toronto, the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, and the New York State Council of the Arts. His approach to composition is characterized by an eclectic adoption of popular and urban music genres as part of his compositional palette. Early on he incorporated elements from urban street music, found mostly in the Latino and Black neighbourhoods of New York City and in the poorer neighbourhoods of San Juan, as reflected in Street Music (1980), Graffiti Nuyorican (1983), De Barrio Obrero a la Quince (1986), and Bolero and Hip-Hop en Myrtle Avenue (1986).

The Great Orchestrator

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Doering
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
American Music ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Arts Management ◽  
Radio Network ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Insight Into

This biography charts the career and legacy of the pioneering American music manager Arthur Judson (1881–1975), who rose to prominence in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. A violinist by training, Judson became manager of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1915 under the iconic conductor Leopold Stokowski. Within a few years, Judson took on management of the New York Philharmonic as well as several individual artists and most of the important conductors working in America. In addition to his colorful career behind the scenes at two preeminent American orchestras, Judson founded a nationwide network of local managers and later became involved in the relatively unexplored medium of radio, working first with WEAF in New York City and then forming his own national radio network in 1927. Providing valuable insight into the workings of these orchestras and the formative years of arts management, this book is a portrait of one of the most powerful managers in American musical history.

Villa-Lobos's Commissioned Compositions

Tempo ◽  
1984 ◽  
pp. 28-31
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Peppercorn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
York City ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
International Recognition

On 26 November 1944 Heitor Villa-Lobos made his United States debut with the Janssen Symphony Orchestra in Los Angeles, followed during the ensuing weeks by appearances as composer-conductor in Boston, Chicago, and New York City (where he was also interviewed about his composing methods by Olin Downes, then music critic of The New York Times). All these events changed the composer's life completely: he was suddenly catapulted into the limelight, lionized and feted by prominent persons from musical and cultural life at a reception at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A long-sought dream had unexpectedly come true: international recognition as a composer and as Latin America's foremost musical figure of his generation.

Chaikovskii’s Visit to Prague in 1888

Slavic Review ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland John Wiley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
High Point ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time ◽  
Carnegie Hall

The foreign travels of Petr Il'ich Chaikovskii have never been a particular issue to scholars of his life and work. Even in such demonstrably important cases as his visits to the opening of the Bayreuth Festival and to Paris during which he heard Bizet’s Carmen for the first time, his tours—which brought him as far as New York City for the opening of Carnegie Hall—are treated perfunctorily, without objectivity, balance, or due regard for the impact his travel may have had on his music. This is not surprising, since Chaikovskii was not by profession a touring virtuoso; it is his musical composition which looms large in the biography as a whole. An experience which was called “the high point of earthly glory” the composer was destined to achieve, however, merits examination in detail. Chaikovskii himself claimed his visit to Prague in February 1888 constituted the “best and happiest days of [his] life” and brought him a “moment of absolute bliss.” An investigation of why Chaikovskii considered his stay there important is essential. Because the exploration of these questions depends on a scrutiny of Russian sources, this article will also be an investigation of how documents are used (or misused) to write history.

Horizons

Industry ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 47-74
Author(s):  
William Robin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
New Music ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Symphony Orchestras ◽  
American Composers ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Bang On A Can ◽  
The Relationship

The downtown marathons of Bang on a Can might seem worlds away from the American symphony orchestra, but in the mid-1980s they shared a common context: David Lang worked for the New York Philharmonic in this period as an assistant to composer-in-residence Jacob Druckman. His assistantship was part of the granting organization Meet the Composer’s Orchestra Residencies Program, which placed American composers in residencies with symphony orchestras and fundamentally reshaped the relationship between new music and the marketplace. The program’s most high-profile success, the Philharmonic’s 1983 Horizons festival, captured an unprecedented audience for new music via its heavily publicized theme of “A New Romanticism?” And Lang’s subsequent work with the Philharmonic provided him with experience and connections, as well as a growing ambivalence toward the orchestral sphere that shaped the maverick mindset of Bang on a Can.

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