In 1949 Mieczyslaw Horszowski spent time in Sao Paolo to give concerts and visit a recording studio. Some fifty years later, unknown lost test lacquers were salvaged and brought over to New York by the Brazilian pianists Ciro Dias and Joao-Antonio Parizoto-Filho who handled them like the treasures they are. While many of the discs were playable, a missing set of the Chopin Piano Sonata in B minor, Op.58 wasn’t retrieved until a few years later.
Horszowski with Granados
Horszowski played the work throughout his life and recordings survive from performances given in his nineties but to opportunity to hear him at the youthful age 57 would prove fascinating. Thanks to new audio software, three movements escaped the fate of the first movement, with the chipping of its sonic surface leaving gaps that rendered it unplayable:
Too late and too bad, but at least we can hear the other movements. It’s important to rescue these artifacts and save them before the elements and space-saving actions of negligence destroy culture.
Before arrivals came from all corners of the earth, our Native Americans had ongoing traditions that others were – and still are – unaware of. One of the first to explore their culture was Natalie Curtis Burlin (1875-1921),
a pioneering musicologist who went West in her twenty-eighth year to record and document the singing and ceremonies of our primary residents. Her astonishing work is preserved on a website.
While Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924)
was based in New York, he often met with Curtis. According to her website,
The Indian themes Curtis published caught the attention of other musicians and composers interested in folk music, including Percy Grainger, Kurt Schindler, and Ferruccio Busoni. Grainger and Curtis became good friends, and Grainger continued to use Curtis’s arrangements in his concerts and lectures throughout his career. In Europe as a teenager, Curtis had studied briefly with Busoni, and he had continued to follow her work. In 1911, Busoni asked Curtis to send him a selection of Indian melodies that might serve as suitable themes for an experimental composition. He used the melodies she sent as themes for his Indian Fantasy [and Indian Diary for solo piano].
A Cheyenne war song from her book on American Indian music was used by Busoni as his Indian Diary’s second piece, performed by his pupil Edward Weiss (1892-1984) in 1952:
Busoni channeled the outlines of the rhythms and war cries into a modernist setting, an example that paralleled the way Bartók was then expanding his musical language. Note at 0:57 – 1:02 how Busoni quotes a phrase from his own Piano Concerto, a surrogate self-insertion into the narrative.
Another European who temporarily resided in the United States was the composer Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904).
Dvořák and his family in New York, 1893
His patron Brahms had offered to will him his life savings if he and his family would relocate to Vienna from Prague but the Czech composer turned down Brahms’s offer for lifetime support, preferring his homeland and not to exist in the Austro-Hungarian capitol as a second-class citizen. Such a sensitivity occurred on a daily basis as his people were under German-speaking rulers and when he discovered music of the African-Americans, it transformed his music. Informing Brahms of his composing a symphony using themes from their Spirituals, Brahms implored him to send the music his way to be proofread by himself and offered to a better publisher. Dvořák’s presence in the United States as a teacher led to his advising budding African-American composers such as Will Marion Cook, the future mentor of Duke Ellington. Right after hearing this new music, he spoke to a reporter: In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.
When the Kneisel String Quartet premiered Dvořák’s American Quartet at Carnegie Hall in 1894, it deeply influenced a young African-Canadian composition student Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943)
Nathaniel Dett
who followed Dvořák’s developing his art through African-Americans’ sacred music. As a university-trained composer he used European practices such as modulations and structures to infuse his rhythmic syncopations. Jett’s Juba Dance was seized by the Australian Percy Grainger, who fortunately recorded it in 1922, heard here in a new restoration that extinguishes the notion that pre mic recordings (into horns) mask colors and details. It mirrors developments in the emerging Jazz genre and opened a path that led Dett to compose an oratorio for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, a bridge covering disparate realms.
Percy Grainger (1882-1961) learned to speak Norwegian and Danish while collecting folk music in Scandinavia and was an early exponent of mixing Nordic and Asian music into an otherwise restrictive Classical sphere. Their examples were noted by Henry Cowell (1897-1965),
a composer who grew up in a San Francisco replete with friends of Chinese, Irish, and Italian backgrounds, sharing their traditional music from such an early age that it became his as well. His astute observation on the pitfalls of co-opting traditions into a more palatable and commercial venture initiate a well-defined 1946 essay co-authored with his wife Sidney Robertson Cowell on the use of folk music.
How WILL vou TAKE your folk music: longhair, Broadway or straight? The first two are easy to find on records, and the last, the real mountain music, was fairly well represented during the days when the talking-machine companies wanted to build up their market in rural America. But such music is the rarest of colllectors’ items today. For a good many years the record companies have been playing it safe, assuming that city people are too frail to stand the shock of hearing the real thing in the old mountain style. So we have been carefully spoon-fed on diluted versions, mixed with as many elements of familiar popular or symphonic music as possible, so that folk music won’t prove too hard on our nerves. It is hard for those of us who are familiar with American music outside of the big cities to understand why such careful translation into urbanese has so long been considered necessary. The wonderful things in the old Bluebird and Brunswick catalogs, for example have all been allowed to go out of pririt. Yet the few that turned up in the drives to gather old records during the war were grabbed instantly by city collectors, and dealers’ lives were made miserable by demands for more of them. The result is that today you can get Roy Harris’ “Folksong Symphony” and Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” both of which use American tunes in serious symphonic composition, without any pretense that the result has anything to do with folk tradition, except rather indirectly and incidentally. You can also get a lot of pieces which use titles implying some connection with folk music, although that connection is usually so remote as to be more hopeful than real.
Cowell later noted that whenever sagging, tedium, or saturation started to impede innovation in Classical music, traditional music came to the rescue, as seen in Brahms’s attraction to Hungarian and Czech music, Debussy and Ravel’s being enamored with primal Russian elements and the Javanese gamelan, and how Bartók found himself by in situ contact with remote musics in Transylvania and North Africa, a search that led him to a far greater destiny than the lesser life of enduring the limits of a pianist’s career on his composing, as he placed second to Wilhelm Backhaus in the Anton Rubinstein competition held in Paris, 1905.
Meanwhile back in America, an insurance executive was quietly experimenting with dissonance before it gradually became tolerated on the music scene. Charles Ives (1874-1954)
had the good fortune to belong to a time when small towns had marching bands that blared out popular rhythms and melodies, and an unanticipated concurrence of two oncoming ensembles playing diverse pieces delighted his curiosity and fathered his explorations. Composers often convey the excitement of their creations when recordings exist of their own performances, such as Ives playing and singing his patriotic They Are There:
Another example is the performance of a forgotten work by the Russian-born American composer Leo Ornstein (1895-2002)
Leo Ornstein, age 95
who took themes and rhythms from Tatars dwelling relatively undisturbed in pre-Soviet Russia. A piece derived from this contact was lost. In the words of his son Severo:
”
This piece was written sometime during the 1920s or 1930s but was never published. Sometime in the late 1940s Ornstein received a request for a copy, but he was unable to locate the manuscript. Recalling that he had taught the piece to a former student, Andrew Imbrie, he wrote asking Imbrie for a copy. But Imbrie was likewise unable to find the score so instead he made and sent Ornstein a tape recording of the piece. Ornstein then made an abortive effort to remember the piece, but quickly gave it up. What is presented here is the recording Imbrie made, followed by a snatch of the brief effort Ornstein made to recall it.
Force and impulsion explode in the composer’s own struggle to resurrect it, a reminder of the way of the frenzy experienced by the creator is usually reduced in the hands of others.
At a New York party around 1930, the upcoming Canadian virtuoso pianist and composer Colin McPhee (1900-1964)
Colin McPhee (seated) with Benjamin Britten
heard 78rpm shellacs recorded some two years earlier in Bali that were brought back by anthropologists. McPhee’s reaction was such that he decided to abandon Western music at that moment and soon moved with his philanthropic wife Jane Below to the isle, living there for many years, documenting the music. Here is one of the discs that inspired him to exit from the West, retrieved from a collection that contains McPhee’s own discs, some of which exist in one known exemplar, saving lost music that had been out of reach to the Balinese themselves and the rest of the planet, the case of a world music trek that led to an unforseen and fortuitous repatriation.
When hostilities in the air, McPhee returned to New York with music he had transcribed from the gender wayang, their shadow puppet theater genre, published as Balinese Ceremonial Music for Two Pianos. His colleague Benjamin Britten was in the States and the two headed into a studio to record Gambangan.
And with Asian music being played on Western instruments with equal temperament tuning came Minimalism, a dreadful label meant to cover vastly differing music that uses evolving repetitive patterns. It fortunately helped bury the rotting academic dissonant style of overly structured music so much better seen than heard, considered an intellectual highbrow experience, by injecting new life into the culture’s bloodstream. It even meant that the piano would be replaced, by electricity, and sonically sculpted. One of America’s greatest composers, Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), began her musical life by wearing a cowboy hat and playing in accordion bands at Texas rodeos. Her interest in electronics opened a path of innovation and lifelong discoveries.
Until now, America’s newness as a continent, its unique mix of people from all over the planet, made it a hotbed for the musical and cultural innovation that occurs when contact is made between forces meeting for the first time and blending their experience without the pressure of the commercialization that Busoni despised. May their works continue!
How lucky can one get? New things appear on the path as sound archaeology mixes and messes with varied eruptions so let’s hang out here and check what’s turned up.
The oracular backwards percussion that inhabits Strawberry Fields Forever was a bare inkling of what lay ahead for a curious boy on the threshold of becoming a teenager.
David Lynch later shared some good news in a dream sequence.
Twenty-five years after it reappeared with something new added as a plethora of a tasty language also summoned forth Brooklyn’s Au Revoir Simone:
Their joy in using analog synthesizers syncs into new graphic representations of David Borden’s The Continuing Story of Counterpoint.
David Borden with decoy and early Moogs.
Six parts that thrive with a vocal line that has its section busily bombinating within a modular tail chasing that clairvoyantly implies what may follow as inevitable or a drop down into a sudden revelation, accumulating a psychic interplay as these pieces proceed in time.
Trumpets with electronics have gone further. Grasshopper, from Brooklyn, brings in the right kind of modal terror:
Nate Wooley began mixing his brass with electronics much earlier and has a new large scale work in The Complete Syllables Music, of which this is an excerpt:
Overstimulation continues with Arbiter projects soon to appear that will divine pagan, wanna-be Westerner, and occult fairy tale in the origins of Russian music, the sage pianist Mieczylaw Horszowski will be heard
fathoming two bottomless Beethoven works that resonate in a foundation given to him by his teacher, whose own master had been Beethoven’s assistant, and two linked cellists Tibor de Machula with his teacher Felix Salmond astonish by revealing what has been hidden inside their otherwise well-known instrument,
and Veena Dhanammal, whose grandson T. Viswanathan (skip ahead to 2:38 for his performance)
was preparing liner notes but suddenly died three days after we began to reawaken her.
Dhanammal was a blind veena master who was recorded in the 1930s and was grandmother of the dancer Balasaraswathi:
New books appear and one came quite close. Alex Shoumatoff stopped in on the last day of his 69th year with more good news (in front of Beatrice Muzi’s recent sculpture):
An indefatigable explorer and environmental activist, Shoumatoff’s latest book has arrived to shake up any and every user of the insidious palm oil that lurks where you least suspect it and must lead to saving the deforestation of the planet’s lungs:
Busy time with nature and music on everyone’s mind. Let’s not allow culture and our Earth to spiral into a Totentanz.
We’ve been engaged in searching within Russia’s soul and how its classical music grew from a mere dozen into a global phenomenon. Just a miniscule teacher-pupil chain led from the local works of Glinka into the far-fetched paths of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Scriabin, the development of conservatories, professional orchestras that wield an influence felt everywhere. All in a half-century of feverish fervor. Their music divided early into a faction seeking to rival the West and take up its theory while another shunned foreign influences to delve into Pagan rites, folk music, fairy tales, the occult, mythic dreams, and explore the unfathomable East.
This give and take was not lost on Ravel and we will close in on a Menuet included in the Tombeau de Couperin to encounter varied approaches. First comes the highly-touted style of Walter Gieseking,
a player upheld as an exemplary master of works by Ravel and Debussy.
The record company’s London producer kept the mic at an Impressionistic distance to muffle snorting caused by the pianist’s nasal polyps, dragging the vinyl’s listeners into a Turneresque landscape.
Next is Marcelle Meyer, who also recorded Ravel’s complete solo piano works. Meyer was very tight with Jean Cocteau and a literary elite, seen here with the poet Raymond Radiguet who died at age twenty-three.
Her performance dates from the time of Gieseking’s:
Madeleine de Valmalète cut her first shellacs in a Berlin studio in 1928, her twenty-ninth year. De Valmalète lived a week beyond her 100th birthday, which she celebrated walking to chat and embrace each and every guest. She was the second woman in France to obtain a driver’s license and the first pianist to record the cycle. (photo at her centennial celebration:)
Her Tombeau is published on Arbiter CD 144:
From Cairo comes Henri Barda, whose family hastily left Egypt during Nasser’s revolution. Settling in Paris he studied with Lazare-Levy after having had lessons with Ignace Tiegerman.
The complete Tombeau from a 2012 concert is on YouTube and within the cavernous hall we experience his Menuet:
For those of you who have troubled to hear all four, we now close in on to the middle section’s climax, a dream within a dream that dissolves into the opening’s return. Here are all four playing this excerpt and note how some will give emphasis to the right hand whereas others show how the left hand creates a rough awakening that bears lingering shards of the oneiric journey, followed by a slower tempo, as if one has need for a moment of regaining consciousness. I leave it to your ears to observe who is doing what and would welcome any comments. . .
A pioneer who took the guitar away from flamenco and into global concert life, Andres Segovia was an innovator who luckily commissioned composers for what seemed to be a new instrument as many could not imagine it apart from café settings. I managed to hear three recitals of his when he was past eighty: twice at Lincoln Center, which had such wretched acoustics that if you wiggled in your seat he would be drowned out and the 92nd St. Y where his music was finally audible.
Segovia’s earliest recordings project a romantic who occasionally sentimentalizes with slides that slither into being overly expressive. A Bach example from c. 1927 shows his novelty in transposing keyboard and violin music, something Bach did all the time in each and every direction as the integrity of his notes could succeed with any format.
Prelude, Allemande, & Fugue:
One piece new to the non-guitar world was Francesco Tarrega’s tremolo study, written right before Segovia’s birth but not well known beyond a few musical circles.
This piece and othesr from his nation are among the best facets of his art as he thrived in their origins and how they fired composers like Albeniz to take them into his Modernism:
Slightly younger than Segovia was Diego del Gastor who went quite far with Flamenco and merits as much attention as Segovia (thanks to Anna Wayland for bringing him to everyone’s attention!)
Hitting the concert circuit, Segovia and others had the Madrid impresario Quesada arranging tours throughout South America. One time he collided with Spain-loving Artur Rubinstein and Ignaz Friedman. The pianist’s granddaughter Nina Walder (seen with grandpa Ignaz and her brother Paul)
managed to have an informal talk (in French) with him and one excerpt is translated in my Friedman biography:
In Argentina, Friedman toured with Andres Segovia, who was eleven years younger: the two were fast friends. Segovia recalled:
“ [Friedman’s itinerary] was fuller than mine because it encompassed Brazil and Chile and I was simply engaged for Buenos Aires, other large towns and in Uruguay only Montevideo. So he went twice to Chile, twice to Brazil. I had to go to Mendoza and knew that Friedman was going to play there, not a public concert, but a private one in the most exclusive casino in Mendoza. I attended his concert at this special aristocratic club. Naturally the public gathered there was not musical, an audience of rich people who had nothing to do with music and I remember something very funny. During the concert he noticed immediately that they were not musical. At the end of a variation on a theme of Paganini [La Campanella] he fell asleep during the trill to attract the attention of the audience. There was a colonel wearing many decorations which were later abandoned as they hadn’t had any wars in Argentina and this colonel slapped Friedman’s shoulder and said ‘What did you play- is it Mozart or yours?’ Can you imagine! Friedman answered ‘LISZT’: the colonel said ‘Ah!’ and disappeared.
“The next day we took the train to Buenos Aires and we passed through a desert which created a dust, such a fine dust that entered through the window’s cracks and one had to ask always for a damp towel from the conductor to line the windows. When we arrived I saw placards for [Artur] Rubinstein’s concert. So I tell Friedman ‘We are going tonight.’ Friedman refused but then accepted. The impresario Quesada reserved a loge that faced Rubinstein. He started with a Chopin Nocturne. Then, as Friedman was preparing himself to suffer the Chopin, Rubinstein suddenly saw Friedman and completely lost his nerves and played in a very nervous way. Ignaz took my arm, saying ‘this is not right, this is not so!’ and I said ‘It’s not me who’s playing.’ Then came works of Albeniz. Albeniz wrote his music in a terribly difficult way. Sometimes [Rubinstein] simplified or played it wrong and it was I then who took Friedman’s arm saying ‘It is not so!’ Afterwards we went to see him and Friedman said ‘Artur, good, very good, especially Albeniz.’ Then when I came, ‘Artur, good, very good, especially Chopin.’”
Sit back and brush up on your French as Walder and Segovia let their conversation go wherever it cares to:
part one:
part two:
Nina Walder, Lydia Friedman Walder. (Friedman’s Blüthner piano, living room in Villa Friedman, Siusi, Bolzano, summer 1982)
Rubinstein and Friedman knew of each other since 1910 if not earlier. According to Rubinstein, they shared an evening in Lemberg (L’vív). Rubinstein sat backstage as Friedman played the first half, then the joined forces for a Chopin’s Two-Piano Rondo.
The younger Artur described how his crowd was impatient to hear him and out he went to dazzle in the second part of their show and that Friedman took being bested in a gentlemanly way!
Ella Brailowsky (wife of the pianist Alexander) once described Rubinstein’s Memoirs as fiction. My favorite part are any and all sitings of Kapnik, a shnorrer (moocher) who always seemed to empty Artur’s pocket, as if he had some blackmail and had to be paid off: Kapnik always impressed as being a fictitious realization of Rubinstein’s alter-ego who was compensated as a way of keeping a disliked part of himself at a distance.
Now, now, now! Rubinstein is an adored cultural figure and his admirers fiercely defend his memory and legacy but if we imagine that he “bested” Friedman back in 1910, why don’t we hear Rubinstein’s very first recordings, made for the Favorit label in that year? For some reason they have always been excluded from any “complete” edition.
First the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody no.12 (abridged due to the 4 minute playing time of a shellac):
Then a Strauss-not-sure-whose-arrangement-this-is of the Blue Danube Waltz.
Friedman’s earliest recordings came a little over a decade later and here are two examples of his Chopin: the Prelude no. 19 and Etude in G-sharp minor Op. 25, no.6 (one take for both:)
(photo: Ignaz Friedman, his only known color photo, location/date unknown)
It was a joy to discover Friedman’s playing when I was sixteen and hearing him after being introduced to Rubinstein’s Chopin one month earlier came as a revelation that compelled a 27 year of hunt to get his biography in print. An LP set for Danacord in 1985 came about when visiting the legendary Jesper Buhl in Copenhagen and his enthusiastic consent to restore and release all of Friedman’s known recordings.
Celebrating the Danacord release in Geneva, 1985 with Lydia and Nina Walder
They were later poorly and inaccurately released by others on CD format but one example of his art is on Masters of Chopin (Arbiter 158) and for those eager to pair off Friedman and Rubinstein at their height, have a listen to Friedman playing the Chopin Second Sonata’s Funeral March and Presto and then place it against anyone else’s!
Before a country like ours became standardized to death, before mass media linked and limited our goals and souls, our new world was a frontier rife with wanderers, enigmatic stragglers who embezzled, seduced and abandoned, purveyed mysteries, enlightenment seasoned with fraud wherever they set up alongside genuine visionaries, practitioners of traditional customs.
Master chronicler Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Leadbelly, brings forth a character haunting the societal landscape bequeathed by Mark Twain and Faulkner: the Medicine Man. His identity was captured in a 1930s Library of Congress recording.
Before singing his first note, Leadbelly’s twelve-string Stella guitar projects its melody within a restless narrative accompaniment that opens onto an unstable world of sudden arrivals and longed-for departures. His divine perspective that gazes downward onto a populace recounts their stories before targeting a detailed description of their actions and then giving voice to the protagonist himself, all anchored by a unique rhythm that supports the momentum of lyrics and their suave delivery.
The Medicine Man
Oh the Medicine Man, [the?] Ba’,
He’s traveling through the land
Oh the Medicine Man, [a’] Ba’,
He’s traveling through the land
Got the grip in his hand, Baby,
And he’s doing the best he can
Got the grip in his hand, Baby,
And he’s doing the best he can
That was a Doctor who used to sell medicine
And got to be a blind man
And he’s sitting on side the road begging all he can
And everybody come on and seen him that knowed him
And you know that he was a good doctor
And everybody in the Black [sic?*] started to do something for the good doctor
And he had his old medicine case in his hand
And everyone invited people to come on and go on and let him know who he was
Oh the Blind Man, oh Babe,
He’s sitting on the road again
Oh the Blind Man, Baby,
Sitting on the road again
Got the grip in his hand, Baby,
Got the grip in his hand
Got the grip in his hand, Baby. . .
I’m the Medicine Man, Baby,
And I’m on the road again
I’m the Medicine Man, Baby,
On the road again
Oh I declare, Baby
I’m setting on the road somewhere
Baby I declare, Baby
I’m setting on the road somewhere
With a grip in my hand, loaded,
I’m doing the best I can
Got my grip in my hand, loaded . . .
*hard to discern this crucial word. . .
Could this song be an evocation of something Leadbelly had witnessed or heard about? Nearby Choctaw Indians had medicine men in their lives and ex-Slaves would have sought after them and anyone else for the health care that they and their descendants are still denied.
Or is this mythic narration a risque blend of truth that also opens onto an allegory for a hand-held grip residing in a Medicine Man’s trousers? Either way, he would have been in demand and this irresistible song from a remote time etches its mantra-like ritornello into you for good!
When a cello plays you expect its low range to provide a buttress that stabilizes its highest singing registers that copy operatic and lieder singing. Before the mid-19th century cello works were infrequently composed, apart from Beethoven’s five sonatas, one by Chopin, as most composers shied away due to the difficulty in balancing it against other instruments that would invade and obliterate its tessitura. Bach alone fathomed its depths. He also wrote for viola da gamba (leg viola) but ventured far with an unaccompanied instrument to offer dance rhythms and polyphony. One wonders if he was aware of Marin de Marais. . .
Tibor de Machula (1912-1982) playing Bach came as a jolt. So many violinists have Hungarian pedigrees, as did a smattering of cellists who were of lesser interest to the music scene due to their smaller repertoire but de Machula’s approach has reshuffled the pecking order. Cello playing flourished mostly by apeing violin and vocal styles, something that negates any hidden and unique properties in its ties to earlier and distant instruments. All the mannerisms and limitations that burden older styles,the sliding, egomaniacal display, publicly airing one’s nervous system, or regression into gelid remoteness like Heifetz’s, is now becoming a freeze-dried abstraction lacking healthier origins. The riddle of what lies within a cello comes through an instrument that spanned the Silk Route and was adapted into European versions: the morin huur, a two-stringed horse-headed Mongolian fiddle.
Although Hungary was repressed under Russian domination, one escape route came by their extensive UNESCO funded research into salvaging and publishing traditional music and uncovering their own origins beyond Transylvania. One team entered Mongolia in 1967 when it was closed to many non Soviet-bloc countries.
The Hungarian team located Dorzhdagva, a master of whom photos have yet to surface, who plays and sings to epically recount his instrument’s origins, imitating a horse’s sway and rhythm:
His fiddle richly emanates overtones, an integral part of their throat singing, with possible origins in Buddhist chant that inevitably grasps harmonics, prominent in Tibetan and Japanese monastic orders.
Csangos, the Hungarian settlers who remain on the far-eastern extremity of their European settlements transform a cello into a percussion instrument that they call the gardon, imitating the morin huur’s trot.
As Hungarians continue to name boys Attila, one wondered if something inaccessible or lost remained when playing classical music on the cello. De Machula had an early debut in Budapest and was welcomed at the Curtis Institute of Music in 1927 (age 15) where he studied cello with Felix Salmond for three years. Soon after returning to Europe he became principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1936 (age 24), remaining there until he was offered to lead the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam in 1947. Aside from too few studio recordings, live performances were limited by his orchestra’s schedule and it is rare to hear him in action. De Machula’s daughter Barbara created a documentary film on her father (http://www.tibordemachula.com).
Barbara de Machula generously provides us with Bach’s Cello Suite in D major from a 1976 recital. We hear part of its opening Prelude:
I was stunned not only by de Machula’s playful polyphony, his courage to project low tones that are usually restrained under the sonic carpet, but a sound evoking the morin huur itself, one that arrived when Mongolians and nearby groups migrated West to the Danube. The lowest string envelops the music with an aura of overtones to project a colorful and captivating Bach. Like the Hungarian pianist Irén Marik, de Machula displays a uniqueness in Hungarian master musicians who grasp a work’s entirety, instantaneously, and then labors to have the body realize what they have intuited. De Machula’s bowing channels the morin hour’s soul with a rhythmic life of its own that creates a synthesis of instructed, genetic, and personal elements. The cello seemingly plays itself
There were fewer active instrumentalists when Pablo Casals (1876-1973) picked up his cello. They tended to accept predominant violin styles as a guiding model for approaching other string instruments.
Casals emerged from a narrow void to forge his own cello practice. He seemed reluctant to allow elements of traditional music to overlap with Bach, whereas flamenco and cante jondo were seized by Albeniz, Falla, and Debussy for their compositions. His cello viscerally rang out, expressing himself and his instrument in a Schumannesque-Brahmsian manner. A 1930s performance of the same Prelude is played by Casals:
Jack Bruce (1943-2014), a classically trained cellist, composer, bass player, and singer shared his love for an instrument that dominated before life made him into a rock star.
Arbiter is preparing to release performances by de Machula and his teacher Salmond that will bring to light their eclipsed traditions.
One explorer of Central Europe and Mongolia is the Berlin-based American composer Arnold Dreyblatt (http://dreyblatt.net), who absorbed Csangos and Mongolian idioms to create a musical language that expands into text and installations. Instruments have are excited, rewired to create layered overtones and circulate in a flurry above solid grounded pitches that release them.
These sublime roots continue to inspire a composer’s investigative wanderings.
He would enter dressed like a CIA operative who tried to act inconspicuous while delivering internal espionage capers. Sunglasses shielded his eyes as he hypnotically intoned texts with precise metrics that supported his myths. Robert Ashley’s half-sung narrative practically breathed down the neck of his subjects, coming as closely as one ever could to their physical presence while suddenly leaping out into a divine perspective via altered states of phonemes and consciousness.
Ashley began composing dissonant academic music but that soon gave way to electronics and his gift for writing led to texts that place him as a Faulkner of the Corn Belt:
. His greatness as a writer rivals and often surpasses his musical ideas.
This in-and-out of mundane and divine regions was traversed at the breathtaking speed of a rapid voiced volley of overlapping cosmic ironies. To hear Ashley speak of his passion for reading financial journals in order to ferret out their hermetic language and how he could embed it in his works brings us within the workshop of his ingenious creations and how they and he acquired an identity.
As the Soviet Union was thawing in 1990, more individuals were able to travel outside the Iron Curtain for the first time. When I came there in 1987, the U.S. Embassy’s cultural attaché had a rolodex with phone numbers of the underground cultural protagonists. Artists were plied with Russian publications such as A-Ya, a magazine covering work of emigrées, defectors or busy away from the censors. Printing on heavy paper was essential as copies had to reach to hundreds of readers, hand to hand on the samizdat network that kept everyone informed of what the official media prohibited. According to Elizaveta Butakova of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London
“A-Ya was a tri-lingual magazine published in Paris from 1979 to 1986. Published in Rus- sian, French and English, it featured contemporary non-conformist Soviet art of the period and was edited by the unofficial sculptor Igor Chelkovski, who had emigrated to Paris in 1976. A-Ya featured some of the most important Russian artists of this period, including Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev and Komar and Melamid, and yet its importance has been understated.”
Our diplomats paved way to collectors, underground musicians, jazz fanatics, a classical musician banned from playing in major cities but cosy with a housekeeper whom he impatiently kvetched at to hurry up with our tea, and pianist Sviatoslav Richter’s sexy assistant (Georgian-Ukrainian) who received me in his apartment on Bol’shaya Bronnaya Street while he away in Germany.
Dmitry Ukhov spoke faultless English and was as up to date as anyone in the US on the Jazz scene, an avid listener to and familiar with Indian raga scales, classical music old and new and more. On the morning of a lecture scheduled to introduce Russian composers to Ashley, David Borden, Steve Reich, Arnold Dreyblatt, La Monte Young, and John Zorn at the House of Composers, an early phone call informed that I was not to present any new music but instead bring over the guitar and cover American Blues and the music by Reverend Gary Davis. It was a genre rife with anti-authoritarian messages that the older male caryatids couldn’t detect. Suspecting this to be a power-ploy cooked up by their malignant cultural tsar Tikhon Khrennikov, a Stalin-era apparatchik-composer assigned to serve as Shostakovich’s official antagonist, Dmitry and I first stopped down the street near Dom Kompository to pick up two elderly sisters. Ukhov kindly shlepped my guitar while I hooked one sister onto each arm in dry, invigorating zero-degree weather. The composer nomenklatura did not seem particularly happy when recognizing that Scriabin’s two daughters were smilingly accompanying the American. These were the people who purged many of their friends. A photo album had many faces cut, for to have them recognized after their deportations would have risked the sisters’ lives.
Elena Scriabina Sofronitskaya had been Vladimir Sofronitsky’s wife and is seen in a documentary of Vladimir Horowitz’s return to Moscow, the memory of which was still shuddered over by the US embassy’s staff, recalling how the maestro’s windows had to be covered with mylar to prevent any light from entering his bedroom at Spasso House, the Ambassador’s residence and how his mandatory Dover sole had to be flown in fresh, daily from Helsinki, whisked through their diplomatic pouches and rushed over by an embassy driver to the main kitchen.
Ukhov’s New York arrival was timely as Phil Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation was hosting the debut of clarinetist-composer Roberto Paci Dalò from Rimini, Italy. In the audience were John Cage, Leroy Jenkins, and several other composers and performers that Ukhov had only heard on clandestine recordings. After a slight nudge he approached several and appointments were eagerly made as his presence was a novelty at that time. I tagged along and one visit yielded a few inspiring hours with Robert Ashley at his Tribeca loft, a time when that area was industrial and largely uninhabited. Here’s the conversation that ensued on a December day in 1990:
A pity if scholars and researchers directly aim for a target while overlooking its neighborhood! If you want to enter a building, isn’t it best to become aware of what lies nearby and how they fit together? History’s like this and the crucial leads surface whenever the search goes astray. My recent biography of Ignaz Friedman
gathered significant leads on the most disparate paths. Anyone merely content with uncovering Ignaz Friedman’s Berlin Pariserstrasse address might have overlooked Max Beckmann (self portrait), an artist two years younger than Friedman, who lived down the block. As they probably breathed in the same night vapors I wondered if any interaction happened between Friedman, a late Romantic musician who dwelled in the golden decay of the 19th century, and forerunners such as the young Beckmann who were labelled as “expressionist.”
Alfred Döblin, another major writer in Berlin who echoes Beckmann’s aesthetic in prose kept a diary that offers his reaction to a Friedman piano recital, illustrating how the 20th century’s primary goal was to destroy the previous one’s aesthetics: their opposition helping me diagnose the motives behind later performers and critics who sought to suppress an earlier pianist by reviling a style had become alien to them and their supporters. Döblin writes:
I began to listen to Chopin, or rather, to Herr Ignaz Friedman. In my Kalypso one can re-read in detail about the composer’s contribution to the carrying out of a work. The singer sings because she has a voice, not because she is Mozart. Mozart represents the primary source and Art consists of its dematerialization through a posterior spiritualism.
And so I continued listening to Chopin dancing on wobbly stilts, passing in front of me. Together with him, Friedman played with involvement and willingly: he projected quite well on the stage. Often he made spellbinding leaps in front of him, almost in a more refined way than Chopin, succeeding well in highlighting the delight, lightness, and superficiality, aware of the delicate. But when it comes to Chopin, Herr Friedman puffs himself up into an edema and his cheeks swell in ardor. After the effort, he was leaning back flirtatiously and smiled in affectation up to the point of being saccharine. Well, well, in this way I was able for a moment to take in a whiff of the “sweet” spirit of Chopin.
{Excerpt from Evans. Ignaz Friedman, Romantic Master Pianist.]
One of the greatest musical losses came when three biographies of Vladimir Horowitz overlooked Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, the pianist’s wife.
Just from having grown up in the Toscanini home, a central musical force in Milano, would have placed her recollections as uniquely invaluable social documents, but as Horowitz learned English, he grasped it as a business language and was surrounded by the perfunctory brown-nosing sycophants festering in “high-end” music’s commerce and acted the clown to keep them at a distance from his inner world. Posthumously uploaded videos show a couple of disparate souls who adored each other and how Wanda must have inherited a discerning ear from her father, the conductor Arturo Toscanini as her comments on what Horowitz should play reveals her role in as life as a safe harbor, one that grounds him from going astray. Imagine what she could have offered about the close people in their lives such as Rachmaninoff and Toscanini, the entire musical scene of half a century, all lost unless interviews or hypothetical diaries magically appear. Their experiences in Europe were entirely overlooked by monoglot authors who didn’t dare across over the Atlantic to chart foreign sources, such as Carlo Zecchi who knew the pre-war Horowitz and lived until 1984. Views of Horowitz’s art and life will remain incomplete until recollections of and by Wanda turn up. David Dubal told me that at Horowitz’s funeral, he asked Wanda why did Horowitz suffer so much anxiety and depression for most of his life: “Pogrom.”
Locating Friedman’s family made one curious about his wife Manya, a tall devout Russian-Orthodox noble who accepted a short atheist Jew in her life –Friedman. He would goad her on returning from church: “So, how was the turnout today?”
Manya passed way in 1969, some twenty-one years after Friedman. She too was hardly questioned about Friedman but luckily her family’s history involves contacts with the writers Lermontov and Tolstoy, the latter a relative by marriage. Manya’s mother Vera Schabelsky Schidlowsky
lived in Petersburg and spent time in southern Voronezh at the family’s Gobtarovka estate which she depicted in miniature paintings (circa 1880s, author’s collection):
The family often spent time with the Tolstoys but made sure that impressionable young Manya would not overhear any of his heretical pronouncements. She came to know his daughters and was close to Tanya Albertini, a grand-daughter.
Tanya aided refugees in Italy during World War II. When I met her in 1983 she was all excited as her daughter had an upcoming wedding. “I married Albertini, an Italian, and now she is about to marry a man from Spain. Look how mixed we are and will become! This is the best way – when everyone mixes it becomes harder to hate!” She and a remote relative in Recanati, hometown of the poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, offered other clues to their family, including some allusions to Friedman.
A remarkable event in Vera’s life came when her wishes to marry the Tsar’s brother were quashed by having a lower rank and she married his assistant “on the rebound” and had Manya with him (one assumes her husband was the father, although Manya’s face slightly resembles Vera’s beloved Grand Duke).
In the biography, several events lead us to a close-up of a character used by Dostoyevsky and a work of Tolstoy’s. From the Friedman biography we enter a remote corner in 19th century Russia that reaches further than one could anticipate, one in which the source of a Tolstoy novelette was exposed:
Again Vera’s marriage began to disintegrate. The couple embarked with two-year-old Manya on a journey to consult a living legend, a doctor of souls sought after by multitudes of pilgrims: farmers concerned about changing weather patterns and their crops, the sick and injured seeking cures or miracles, and those tormented by a crisis of faith. Some had made their journey barefoot, in the fervent hope that Father Ambrose would provide the answers to their woes. In the desert town of Optina- Pustyn, the family entered the grounds of the celebrated monastery where Father Ambrose had received Leo Tolstoy, before their meeting ended abruptly after a clash of views. Dostoyevsky also visited the monk’s cell, and left with a burning image of the believers’ ardor and the holy man’s perspicacity. He later shaped Ambrose into Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov:
It was said by many people about the elder Zossima that, by permitting everyone for so many years to come to bare their hearts and beg his advice and healing words, he had absorbed so many secrets, sorrows, and avowals into his soul that he could tell at the first glance from the face of a stranger what he came for, what he wanted, and what kind of torment racked his conscience. Indeed, he sometimes frightened his visitor by this knowledge of his secret before he had even time to utter a word.
When Vera and Boris Schidlowsky [Vera’s husband and Manya’s father] presented themselves, the holy man first blessed Maria, who presented him with a rabbit. Ambrose turned to the parents before they could utter a word, declaring, “You are not meant to be married. Part from one another and devote your lives to the church.” The family returned to Voronezh with Ambrose’s photo.
Boris entered a monastery, but after six months, Tsar Alexander III approved his petition to leave the church: “I’ve heard of officers wishing to become monks, but never a monk wanting to become a hussar.” Boris soon rejoined his old regiment.
(Vera became Abbess Valentina)
Russian society learned of the event, as did Vera’s second cousin Sophie Behrs, Tolstoy’s wife. Three years later, Tolstoy began crafting a short story, Father Sergius:
(Father Sergius: 1917 Russian silent film directed by Yakov Protazanov)
concerning an aide-de-camp to Tsar Nicholas who, a month before his marriage to a beautiful lady in waiting, suddenly cancels their wedding, disposes of his worldly possessions, and becomes a monk. “Prince Kasatsky” has finally realized that his fiancée is the tsar’s mistress, a fact known to everyone but him. He retires to a monastery as a disciple of its abbot, a pupil of Father Ambrose.
These many elements of inter-related cultures and ethnicities open a window onto the culture embodied in Ignaz Friedman’s playing. This Chopin recording
set me on a journey that grew from hearing the shellac aired in 1972 to a book that started in 1981, published in 2009, ending up with the author even more enamored with the playing of his pupil Ignace Tiegerman. I wish to express utmost gratitude to Henri Barda, a master musician based in Paris and musical heir to Friedman and Tiegerman by continuing their energy and way of channeling music, for his suggesting that Wanda Horowitz receive some much needed attention.
Friedman’s uncharted life was solved and some unreleased recordings by him and Tiegerman were restored with others for this edition:
(photo: Carl Nielsen, Emil Telmanyi (1892-1988), Frida Møller and Hans Børge Nielsen depart for Frankfurt in 1927)
You find a classical musician from long ago whose sounds are more convincing than anyone around. What do you do when you stumble onto a lost culture? Were there more like him and why was it inaccessible? Take some suppression and obtusity, add a dash of mayo, and you have the recipe for an undernourished music scene with inadequate nutrition in which all sounded prefabricated. I had to hunt for Ignaz Friedman but found no resources available.
One highly-touted professor of bibliography was running a coolie-labor sweatshop by having grad students input data into something known as RILM. Lured by requirements or the need to know how knowledge is labelled and sorted, it held out hopes that anything relevant to classical music resources would be codified. Instead it proved to be SLIM and is still useless as it lacked anything relevant to Friedman. “How did you not take Barry’s class?” his book-editor widow inquired when I presented her a proposal. “I knew better!” was my tacit reply as she turned down the manuscript on unpublished writings of a Liszt-Brahms pupil.
The only road is the lone road, of empirical serendipity, desultorily leading to what the trail of musicological writings cannot access as the vivid sources are alive or preserved in sound. Having been taken in as family by Rev. Gary Davis and his wife Annie,
I entered their private world and was exposed to what lay behind a master musician’s art. A month after Davis’s death I first heard the long gone Friedman on a recording, who had the same energy as Davis, proving that a higher echelon spanned all genres of music. As Friedman had performed throughout the world, it seemed likely that anyone of a certain age could have heard him or even known him and so began a journey to over thirty countries over two decades. A methodology arose of entering a new city, getting maps, finding libraries and archives, contacting any older musician and something or someone always turned up, from Iceland to South Africa and Singapore.
Friedman had a rocky marriage and left his wife and daughter behind in Berlin to ride out what turned into World War I in the safety of Copenhagen. His career was enlivened by contact with members of cultured societies and diplomats who allowed him to have supplies sent back to deprived war-torn Berlin through their diplomatic pouches. Many interviews turned up in Danish archives and one day in the August of 1983 an intriguing lead appeared. Danacord, a record label based there had just released recordings of a Hungarian violinist who had premiered the Carl Nielsen violin concerto. Its liner notes mentioned how Emil Telmanyi was brought to Denmark by Friedman in 1910 where he soon married Nielsen’s daughter and became their foremost violinist. He experimented with a bow-maker to create a curved device able to play Bach’s Chaconne with unbroken chords and recorded all the unaccompanied works.
Albert Schweitzer showed interest and is mentioned in Telmanyi’s autobiography.
i called the label at once to learn from by Jesper Buhl, their guiding light, that Telmanyi was not only alive but actively conducting a local orchestra and lived nearby. I soon caught a commuter rail up to their northern town of Holte, chugging past Norreport’s bricks and breweries, heading into greener countryside. Not too far away, a soothing walk along woody curving streets led to the Telmanyi house. His wife Annette and daughter Ilona provided a warm welcome. Annette and Emil married after marriage with Nielsen’s flapper daughter flopped. Annette was a pianist and string player and their three daughters formed a family chamber ensemble. Telmanyi was in his ninety-first year and was curious about why I was looking into Friedman. It seemed no one had asked much about his earlier life and he encouraged me: “What you’re doing is important!”
He brought over scrapbooks of chronologically organized program books, knowingly flipping through some 1909 recitals. one had a Frigyes Reiner as his accompanist, later known as Fritz, a formidable tyrant of the Chicago Symphony. He related his meeting Friedman in Berlin when he gave the continental premiere of Elgar’s Violin Concerto in 1909 and Friedman caught him backstage.
Telmanyi’s hands were arthritic, his eyesight failing, but he lovingly caressed his violin: an Amati. “Imagine, this instrument was already an antique in Mozart’s time!” His music study had an overheard projector to enlarge music scores so that he could see enormously magnified lines to learn new works for each season. He was engaged in absorbing Mozart’s First Symphony, going through it part by part.
We sat down and Telmanyi began answering. One aims to dive deep into a subject but the ground his talk broke opened an entire musical universe lived in by a still active protagonist whose fresh mind and sharp memory vividly brought to life events from the 1890s and on. Luckily he left an autobiography, written in Danish. Our first encounter was recorded and includes surprises about Friedman, Busoni, Bartók, conveyed with an infectiously sympathetic spirit.
The cassette recorder’s battery died and left a mouse-like chatter rising into subsonic frequencies before it bit the dust but only now could most of it be saved through software. It breaks off in the sound track when Telmanyi went full steam into musical examples.
A month after meeting Telmanyi I was introduced to the Budapest-based harpsichordist János Sebestyén, a living historical treasury who opened doors to Antal Molnar, then two years older than Telmanyi (and would be gone within months after he received me), who was not only the violist in the Waldbauer-Kerpely string quartet that took part in Debussy’s appearance as a pianist on his 1910 Budapest visit. Molnar reached high up, aided by a stool to pull down a hefty book, one among many red identical volumes on crowded shelves and sang a melody that he had found and transcribed when accompanying Bartók and Kodaly into the field before World War I, delighting in a work that still overwhelmed him after having gone as a Third Man to capture folk songs. János’s weekly radio program were themed to review what had happened in Budapest decades ago on varying anniversary dates of his show, allowing pre-totalitarian life to return in full under the guise of nostalgia. One who offered advice to archivists who began restoring x-ray plates containing radio broadcasts of Bartók at the piano, he managed to get a copy of Telmanyi with the composer Erno Dohnanyi playing Schumann’s D minor violin sonata, broadcasted in Budapest c. 1939-1940.
The Soviet-controlled regime has fizzled out and János is no more, but a website conveys his style and society. It’s time to share the performance, warts and all (notes were lost whenever a new disc was set up on the recording turntable). The duo had given numerous sonata recitals over two decades and we are fortunate to hear them in the act, as Dohnanyi soon declined, in part from his loathing to practice and both came more to life in concerts than within the pressures and limits of a recording studio.
Although I approached Telmanyi with one question, I ended up leaving with more open doors than I can ever count. We had two more meetings over the years. He passed away in 1988 in his ninety-sixth year. At our last get-together, the image still remains as he and Annette held hands, seated on their couch as we were taking leave, both breaking in to advise Beatrice Muzi and me (whom I would soon marry) to see how their happy marriage came from getting each other to laugh and, eyeing one another, an erotic attraction.
