Paris Conservatoire Research Articles

The Genesis of a Music Library: SUNY at Buffalo

PART 1 BY CAROL JUNE BRADLEY SUNY AT BUFFALO AND ITS MUSIC DEPARTMENT The University of Buffalo was chartered by the New York State Legislature on 11 May 1846. A medical school was the sole academic department until a school of pharmacy was added after forty years (1886), soon joined by law (1891) and dental (1892) schools. Changes in curricular standards for medicine prompted the university to begin arts and sciences courses in 1913. The first graduates of the full four-year baccalaureate program received their degrees in 1919. Gradually, other schools--business administration, education, social work, and a graduate school--were added. In 1918, the first lecturer in music was appointed: Buffalo-born pianist Harry Cumpson, who had studied in Paris, Berlin, and New York City. [1] From then until 1933 there is only sporadic data about musical instruction within the university. In 1932, the Marion B. Lockwood Chair of Music was created by the last will and testament of Marion Birge Lockwood. [2] That chair permitted a few courses in a nondegree music program directed by Robert C. Hufstader, another western New York musician. Musical instruction proceeded through subsequent years, both as courses taken for credit and as noncredit participation in ensembles, to 1952, when Cameron Baird assumed chair of his newly established Music Department. Baird, retired president of the Buffalo Pipe and Foundry Company, was devoted to music; after his retirement in 1949 he became a full-time musician. The physical site of Baird's new Music Department--in a residential street on the perimeter of the university campus--had been the home of a former assistant dean. In 1955, Baird selected architect Paul Schweikher to build the first in a complex of buildings planned as a Fine Arts Center. Severe cost overruns and a fatally flawed architectural design stalled the project, leaving an unfinished music building; the projected Fine Arts complex was terminated by both Baird and the university. [3] But the University of Buffalo's Music Department was launched. An endowment from Frederick Caldecott Slee, another successful Buffalo businessman who was an amateur musician, provided for a master-teacher of harmony, counterpoint and fugue, equal to a professor at the Paris Conservatory, [4] a Slee Professor. In addition, Slee endowed an annual concert cycle of the Beethoven string quartets, to be played in Slee's prescribed order. Both bequests survive to the present. The first Beethoven cycle was performed by the Budapest Quartet in 1955; the first Slee Professor, Aaron Copland, occupied the chair from September 1957 to January 1958. Copland was succeeded by Carlos Chavez, Leon Kirchner, Ned Rorem, and nearly a score more on a visiting basis; in 1968, the professorship became a permanent position within the faculty of the Music Department. [5] Under that arrangement, Lejaren Hiller occupied the chair from 1968 to 1981; John Clough, since. Somewhat paralleling the development of the Music Department was the creation of the New York State university system. On March 12, 1948, the Legislature of New York State enacted three separate laws: The first bill established the State University of New York; the second provided for the creation of locally-initiated and state-aided community colleges; and the third bill embodied the fair educational practices legislation. [6] The legislation created a SUNY Board of Trustees to (1) pull together the existing thirty-two public colleges into a single, coordinated body; (2) plan the development of two health and medical centers; (3) revise the curricula of the teachers colleges; (4) establish such four-year liberal arts colleges, professional and graduate schools, research centers or other facilities, including an integrated university located on a single campus as necessary; and (5) draw a master plan for establishing and developing community colleges. …

Sound Diffusion in Composition and Performance: An Interview with Denis Smalley

have been conducting with leading composer-practitioners of electroacoustic and computer music whose contributions to the art and technology of sound diffusion have been key to its development and growing acceptance through the last four decades. These discussions cover the aesthetics of, compositional approaches to, and technological realizations of sound diffusion. Topics include the dynamics of sound diffusion; stereo and multitrack solo-tape diffusion with multispeaker configurations in composition and performance; spatial composing; the diffusion of tape-plus pieces; diffusion as drama or aural cinema; present and future developments in sound diffusion in loudspeaker orchestras and multispeaker diffusion systems such as the Acousmonium (Desantos 1997), the Gmebaphone (Clozier 1997), and BEAST (Harrison 1998); the Spatialisateur (Jot 1997); advances in the field of ambisonics and Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) multichannel systems (Elen 1998); and specialized multiple-speaker systems (Stockhausen 1996). The present interview with composer Denis Smalley (see Figure 1) took place at City University in London on 2 April 1998. Denis Smalley, composer, is professor and head of the Department of Music at City University, London. He received his first degrees in New Zealand, specializing in composition and performance. He studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire and investigated electroacoustic composition with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris before moving to the UK, where he completed his doctorate at the University of York. He was senior lecturer in music and director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the Univer-

Valerie Walden. One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840. Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv, 311 pp. ISBN 0-521-55449-7 (hardcover)

Valerie Walden. One Hundred Years of Violoncello: A History of Technique and Performance Practice, 1740–1840. Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xv, 311 pp. ISBN 0-521-55449-7 (hardcover). Un article de la revue Canadian University Music Review / Revue de musique des universités canadiennes (Volume 20, numéro 2, 2000, p. 1-155) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

The Fair Sax: Women, Brass-Playing and the Instrument Trade in 1860s Paris

On 29 August 1865, an audience of critics and the general public gathered at the Salle Herz in Paris to witness and pass judgment on the results of an experiment set up three years earlier by the instrument manufacturer Alphonse Sax Jr, who aimed to demonstrate not only that women were capable of playing brass instruments, but that it was in their interests — on moral, health and potentially even career grounds — to do so. Although this concert of brass-band music, with supplementary items for harp and voice, marked the band's third public appearance (they had performed at the Palais d'Industrie in December 1864 and at a brass-band competition in Orbec earlier in August 1865), it was their first appearance at a major concert venue and represented their début in front of the massed Parisian press. When they walked on stage, members of the audience sniggered at the sight of a group of young women carrying brass instruments covering the entire range from the portable cornet to the heavyweights of the bass section. Plainly dressed, with only moderately full skirts, they proceeded to play an arrangement of Partant pour la Syrie, a popular romance set as a quick march, which was then thought to be by Eugénie de Beauharnais, and which under the reign of her son Napoléon III had gained the status of a national hymn. The march had been arranged by the group's conductor, Laure Micheli, who directed the ensemble in two other pieces. To wide acclaim, Émilie Lacroix then played a set of variations for cornet à pistons, arranged by J.-B. Dias, on the tune Le carnaval de Venise. The remaining members of the sextet are shadowy figures: Mlle Dias on second cornet (presumably the sister or daughter of the arranger Dias), Mlle Suzanne Legrand and Mme Neckra in the alto section, and Mlle Marie Legrand (presumably the sister of Suzanne) and Mme Worms playing bass instruments. The supporting artists were all women: the singers Mlle Marcus (also referred to in the press as Mlle Marens or Mlle Marius) and Mme Neulat de Chambon, and the harpist Mlle Waldteufel (a joint first-prize winner at the Paris Conservatoire and former pupil of Antoine Prumier); Suzanne Legrand doubled as accompanist for the singers.

Nadia and Lili Boulanger: Sister Composers

Although Lili Boulanger's reputation as a composer is growing, her elder sister, Nadia, remains better known as one of the most important composition teachers of the twentieth century than as a creative artist in her own right. Yet, Nadia helped prepare the ground, musically speaking, for her younger sister; she set a text, Les sirenes, for chorus and orchestra in 1905 that was set by Lili six years later, and, perhaps not surprisingly, they had many musical interests and influences in common. The sisters were born into a cultured family (Nadia in 1887, Lili in 1893), the only two survivors of four daughters. Their father, Ernest Boulanger (1815-1900), had some success as an opera composer after winning the Prix de Rome in 1836 and ended his long career as a singing teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. One of his last pupils was Raissa Myschetsky, who claimed to be a Russian princess (though there is no evidence to support this), and the pupil and master married in 1878. At Lili's birth, their father had asked Nadia to vow that she would always take care of her sister, and throughout her life, Nadia kept her word, feeling her responsibility all the more because Lili never fully recovered from a bout of bronchial pneumonia contracted at the age of two. Nadia knew that, as their father was in his seventies when they were born, it would eventually fall to her to support her mother and sister. She entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of ten and aimed to win as many prizes as possible in the shortest possible time. As early as 1903, she won a first prize in harmony, following this in 1904, before her seventeenth birthday, with first prizes in organ, fugue, and piano accompaniment. She reached the final round of the prestigious Prix de Rome competition for the first time in 1907.1 That year her cantata Selma failed to win a prize, but the following year she placed second (although she created a stir in the preliminary round when she wrote an instrumental fugue instead of the vocal fugue demanded by the judges). In

The Concert as Political Propaganda in France and the Control of "Performative Context"

Some time before his death in 1910, Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, the professor of music history at the Paris Conservatoire, received an unusual guest. As he recounts in an undated letter, his visitor was a member of the monarchist Action Franraise, with which, despite his position at a Republican institution, he harbored covert sympathy.1 The mission of this singular call was astutely to solicit the musician's advice concerning the planning of an evening of both literature and music for the benefit of the nationalist league. The professor responded with caveats, pointing out the difficulties of such a venture in a season already crammed with so many competing concerts in Paris. But he gradually proceeded to expatiate on his philosophical opinion of the project and the idea of using concerts to inseminate nationalist ideology in France:

Henry Adams, Avant-gardist in Early Music

In 1912, when the eminent American historian and author Henry Adams was seventy-four years old, he discovered French medieval music. His work on Chartres had thoroughly acquainted him with medieval France but not with any music. He knew the poetic texts of the trouveres and troubadours, was certainly aware that many, if not all, had been sung, but he had not given the totality of the style any further thought. The sudden discovery of the music roused Adams to a state of almost ecstatic curiosity. Miss Aileen Tone, whom he had recently engaged as a companion, could play the piano. She also possessed a pleasant, natural voice which she had put to good use in the chorus of the Schola Cantorum in New York. The conductor, Kurt Schindler, had given her 6 Old French Christmas Carols which he had published in 1908. They were his transcriptions and piano arrangements drawn from a collection of French chansons by Jean-Baptiste-Theodore Weckerlin, the librarian of the Paris Conservatoire. Henry Adams, enchanted by both Aileen Tone and her music, promptly bought her a Steinway, which he placed in his library; and from November 1912 into the first year of the war in Europe nothing seemed to agitate him more profoundly than his search for, and growing knowledge of, French medieval music.' My first incentive to write the following pages came from a music historian's natural curiosity to identify and posssibly locate the spe-

Pentecost Music (1977)

Giles Swayne first attracted wide public acclaim with Cry (1979), his wordless evocation of the book of Genesis for twenty-eight solo voices premiered in 1980. On either side of this remarkable work came the two orchestral pieces listed here: Music (1977) was first performed by the Manchester-based BBC Northern Orchestra in 1981; it was this same orchestra, by then renamed the BBC Philharmonic, for which the BBC in turn commissioned Naaotwa Lala (1984). Both works are nicely presented as study scores with individually chosen cover designs; if Music (a facsimile reproduction of the composer's elegant manuscript) may be judged just fractionally too small for comfort, no such complaint attaches to the beautifully produced Naaotwa Lala. Although Music plays without a break, it comprises nine interlinked sections whose titular headings serve to illustrate the character content. They also describe the form of a work whose clear-cut harmonic pacing was not only to inspire the timeless harmonic reflections of Cry but also eventually to inaugurate a whole group of vocal and choral pieces (mainly for SATB, with or without organ) setting, or setting out from, biblical or religious texts and written during the decade beginning in the late 1970s. It is certainly of more than coincidental interest to discover that Music was the first work to be written following a number of visits Swayne paid to Olivier Messiaen's composition class at the Paris Conservatoire during 1976-77; these postgraduate encounters were evidently to prove deeply thought-provoking for a composer who, as a previously reluctant Catholic, had until then shown himself determinedly secular and often aggressively modernist in musical outlook. It was at any rate in Music that he suddenly found himself free to explore a whole new/old vein of quasi-modal inspiration. While in no sense a narrative one, the biblical scenario suggested by its title seems nonetheless to have encouraged a focus on harmonic procedures of a positively form-defining kind. In one large movement subdivided into nine smaller ones, and with song and dance elements strongly to the fore throughout, ostinato is used both to measure structural paragraphs and to create and sustain the kind of long-term contrasts heard to such impressive effect in the double exposition comprised by the first three sections: Tongues of Fire I, The Arch, and Darkness. Here, the whole-tone scale rubs shoulders with a twelve-note pileup of superimposed fourths and with a six-note motive that serves both as reference and as the source of an endlessly proliferating series of modal cells that center around and intermittently return to the note D - as when the long climactic build to the top of The Arch sinks quickly on to the low pedal D that underpins the first half of Darkness, before emerging into the harmonically neutral light of a harp arpeggio built from fourths and that again spans all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. It is upon such broadly based harmonic purpose that the first chapter of the piece closes. Almost at its halfway point, three shorter sections open out to form a central scherzo. Settling for a uniform speed, and for the new tonic focus of E[flat], the layer-upon-layer awakening of a Messiaenic Dawn Chorus leads to the brief and lightly scored Pentecost - Dance I and then, pausing only to reflect on the whole-tone harmony of At the still point . …

Organists and organ playing in nineteenth-century France and Belgium

Preface Acknowledgments I. Prelude: Music for a Revolution Part One: Performers and Programs II. In the Wake of the Storm: 1800-1809 III. Years of Rebuilding: 1810-29 IV. The Romantic Dawn: The 1830s V. Contrasts, Conflicts, and Conquests: The 1840s VI. Mid-Century Masters and Their Programs VII. New Horizons: The 1860s VIII. Tragedy to Triumph: The 1870s IX. Renaissance Achieved: The 1880s X. Years of Fulfillment: The 1890s Part Two: The Organist as Church Muscian XI. Historical Background XII. Organ and Liturgy XIII. Notes on the Repertoire Part Three: Great Schools and Famous Teachers XIV. The Paris Conservatory Organ Class: Sejan to Franck XV. The Brussels Conservatory Organ Class: Fetis to Mailly XVI. Lemmens, a Closer Look XVII. Widor as Teacher XVIII.Guilmant as Teacher XIX. The Niedermeyer School XX. Organ Study at the Niedermeyer and Gigout Schools XXI. The Schola Cantorum XXII. Postlude Appendix A. Organ Performers by Cesar Franck Appendix B. Students in Franck's Organ Class Appendix C. Oragan Performers by Camille Saint-Saens Bibliography Notes Index

The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, and Their Effect on the Career of Erik Satie

Erik Satie is now thought of as a precursor and a man of ideas whose unconventional career took its direction from his continual rethinking of every aspect of contemporary music and aesthetics, largely as a reaction to nineteenth-century tradition and excesses. Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, whose ultimate aim for her stepson was a brilliant career as a pianist with an official seal of approval from the Paris Conservatoire, provided just one example of such a tradition, whilst her husband Alfred, the gifted and impulsive dilettante and a Romantic at heart, might well be seen as another. In fact, it is easy to conclude that Eugénie's academic approach helped to turn Satie into a left-wing revolutionary, whilst the uninspired salon music of both his parents made him determined to become a serious professional composer. But that is by no means the whole story, for Erik was very close to his father, even if he disliked his stepmother, and Alfred's love of the music-hall (whose songs he both wrote and published) was enthusiastically inherited by his son. Even after Satie abandoned his work as a cabaret pianist around 1911, the influence of this popular medium still ran as a thread through his later compositions. Similarly, he was often forced to resort to his stepmother's profession of piano teaching to make ends meet, and in the 1920s he delighted in moving in the exalted social circles that his aspiring stepmother had only dreamt about as she mounted her bourgeois musical soirées in the Boulevard de Magenta in the 1880s. Like Alfred and Eugénie, Satie also spent much of his composing time with short piano pieces that he hoped would reach a popular market, and dance music runs as another thread throughout his career, just as it did in their own compositions. Above all, Satie's parents provided domestic surroundings in which music played a substantial part, with the emphasis on the present rather than the past, though it remained for Satie alone to take music into the future.

Interview with Jean-Claude Eloy

Green: Can you tell us about your musical training? Eloy: Yes. I am a child of tradition, you might say. I decided to make music my profession very early. I was a pianist originally and did all my studies in music at the Paris Conservatory. I had tried to compose since childhood and, by the time I was 17, decided composing would be my profession. Green: What about your compositional studies? Eloy: I became a student of Darius Milhaud at the Conservatory. Then I had the opportunity to study with Pierre Boulez at the Academy of Music in Basel, where I spent two years. I was 20 years old and I jumped into that class with great expectations. So you could say that I am one of the oldest Boulez pupils and disciples. When I think back to this period it already seems very far away in my mind. Green: What influence did Pierre Boulez have on your music? Eloy: I had attended the Domaine Musical concerts since I was 17 and I had been analyzing the music of Boulez from his Second Sonata to Le Marteau Sans Maitre. When I came to the Basel class, I brought a score that was extremely influenced by the Mallarm6 pieces by Boulez. When I showed it to him, he laughed and said: Well, it looks to me like something I know very well! Early Compositions

The Training of Actors at the Paris Conservatoire during the Nineteenth Century

The original Ecole royale dramatique, forerunner of the Paris Conservatoire, was opened in 1786, which makes it an institution of truly venerable antiquity compared to our own stripling Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, founded relatively recently, in 1904, by Sir Herbert Tree. Its establishment on the eve of the French Revolution came as the culmination of thirty years of projects, argument and disappointment. The idea appears to have been first mooted by three of the leading actors of the Comédie-Française Lekain, Préville and Bellecourt, who on 4 September 1756 appended their signatures to a ‘Mémoire précis, tendant à constater la nécessité d'établir une Ecole Royale, pour y faire des élèves qui puissent exercer l'art de la déclamation dans le tragique, et s'instruire des moyens qui forment le bon acteur comique.’ In their exordium, the authors drew particular attention to the fact that the provincial theatre companies, which had traditionally formed a reservoir of acting talent for the Comédie-Française, could no longer be relied on to maintain the supply. They offered no explanation why this should be, beyond hinting that the quality of these tributary companies was declining. The real reason for the crisis in recruitment, which was undoubtedly making itself felt during the closing years of Louis XV's reign, can be deduced from the pages of Papil-lon de La Ferté's Journal, beginning with the entry for 28 February 1767, in which he reproduces the gist of a memorandum he submitted at this time to the Due de Duras, one of the Gentilshommes de la Chambre principally concerned with the welfare of the Comédie-Française. It was largely a matter of relative earnings. A good provincial actor could count on an annual income of some 7–8,000 livres; if he were outstanding enough to warrant an order being despatched demanding he should make his début in the capital, he would, rather than try and make ends meet on an income of 1200 livres which was all the Comédie-Française could offer him, as like as not escape abroad. In addition, as La Ferté discovered when, in the summer of 1767, he left on a recruiting drive to the French-speaking provinces of the Netherlands, there was considerable reluctance to take up a position in Paris where, as he reported to Duras on his return, ‘les comediens les plus mediocres que j'ai vus dans mon voyage m'avaient annoncé qu'ils renonceraient plutôt au théâtre, que de venir s'exposer aux cabales des Comédiens Français et aux mauvais traitements que l'on faisait subir aux débutants’ – a reference to the notorious hostility of the permanent actors towards newcomers who might have designs on the parts in which they fancied themselves.

SATIE, KOECHLIN AND THE BALLET ‘USPUD’

ERIK SATIE AND CHARLES KOECHLIN were almost exact contemporaries, Satie born in Honfleur on 17 May 1866 of mixed French and Scottish parentage, Koechlin in Paris on 27 November 1867 into a family of Alsatian anncestry. According to Koechlin they first met at the publishers Baudoux & Cie around 1892,' when Satie, aged 26, was in his Rose-Croix period and living in Bohemian poverty in Montmartre and the more orthodox Koechlin, aged 25, was about to enter Massenet's composition class at the Paris Conservatoire. The year 1892 also saw the composition of Satie's extraordinary ballet Uspud, which Koechlin copied out in 1927 as a tribute to a friendship that had lasted unmarred until Satie's death in 1925. Satie and Koechlin were united in their uncompromising attitudes to music and their relative isolation as composers. Both sought to preserve their independence at all costs, free from concessions and hypocrisy, even if it led to material hardship. Both observed strict self-discipline in their art as a necessary counter to their cherished freedom of expression, and both deliberately clung to a childlike naivety that allowed their music to stay young as they grew old. In his perceptive article in La Revue musicale in 1924 Koechlin praised Satie's 'instinctive and absolute independence', recalling Kipling's 'cat that walked by himself' and all that the feline parallel entailed in terms of 'supple elegance, sobriety of action, precise paw-thrusts in malicious play and the discreet sensibility that the common herd persist in misunderstanding'.2 And after the scandalous ballets Mercure and Rela^che of 1924, when most critics and even earlier enthusiasts had deserted Satie, Koechlin remained constant in his admiration, as can be seen from the lecture he delivered at the Sorbonne on 13 December 1927.3 However much others thought that Satie had perpetrated a betrayal of his art at the end of his life, Koechlin still supported the Satie he had known, who had preserved his 'moral dignity' to the end and was the living embodiment of the proverb that many a true word is spoken in jest. So Koechlin in 1927 reiterated his belief in the classicism of Satie's Socrate and predicted that Satie's music had a future of its own as well as great significance for the future of music. In the 1940s Koechlin's opinions still remained unchanged. He told the composer Francois Berthet in 1943 that 'Socrate will survive much longer than [Honegger's] King David or [Poulenc's ballet] Les Animaux modees'.4 'Quality ' Charles Koechlin, 'Erik Satie', La Revue musirale, v/S (1924), 194. The meeting may have taken place rather later than Koechlin remembered, perhaps in 1895-6. His first works to be issued by Baudoux were the Rondels to poems of Theodore de Banville (1890-94), published in 1896 (P1. No. 225). As the plate-numbers show, this was only a few weeks after Baudoux's publication of Satie's three act-preludes for Josephin Peladan's 'Pastorale Kaldeenne' Le Fils des itoiles, composed in 1892 (P1. No. 220). 2 'Satie', p. 193. 3 'Conference sur Satie et l'Ecole d'Arcueil', unpublished MS, 40 pp., in the collection of Madeleine Li-Koechlin, L'Hay-les-Roses. All material from this source is quoted by kind permission. I am indebted to Mme Li-Koechlin for freely providing me with original source material for this article. Letter of 9 May 1943 (Li-Koechlin collection).

Louis Lombard's "Our Conservatories" (1892)

This address was originally delivered to the officers of the New York State Music Teachers Association in Syracuse on June 27, 1892. It is here reprinted from the 1897 edition (called the third and published by F. Tennyson Neely, London and New York, under the title The Art Melodious) of Lombard's very popular book Observations of a Musician (originally published in Utica, New York, in 1893). Whatever the title, the work sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into French, German, and Italian. Louis Lombard, one of the most extraordinary figures in the musical life of both the United States and Switzerland, was born in Lyon, France, on December 15, 1861, and died in Genoa, Italy, on November 1, 1927. He began his musical study in 1870 at the conservatory in Marseilles and completed his work in violin, song, and harmony at the Paris Conservatoire. In 1876, after the death of his father, he was engaged for a tour of the United States and remained in this country, after several trips abroad, until 1900. He took up the study of languages (he was master of eight) and began to compose and conduct. His first works were published by C. Berdan in Detroit, Oliver Ditson in New York, Theodore Presser in Philadelphia, and E. D. Buckingham in Utica. He became an American citizen in 1886, settled in upper New York State, and in 1889 founded and directed the Utica Conservatory of Music (which is still in existence) on the model of the Paris Conservatoire.

Maurice Ravel and Alzheimer's Disease

Maurice Ravel was a man of this century, and we know more about him, including his medical care, than we do of many musicians of older times. The story of his later adult life is of particular interest, especially the rapid decline in his intellectual powers that occurred during his most productive years. We recognize this syndrome now as presenile dementia, or Alzheimer's disease. I believe that one may deduce from the available evidence that Ravel had this disease. Maurice Ravel was, arguably, the premier composer of the 20th century. Born in 1875 in the Pyrenees, he entered the Paris Conservatory in 1889 and was later a student of Faure. With Debussy, he led the French musical impressionist movement, characterized by fluidity of style within classical forms, a refutation of the ponderous romanticism of Richard Wagner. Ravel excelled at piano composition and especially at orchestration, often scoring works of others

Three Original Pieces, Composed for the Sight-Reading Examinations at the Paris Conservatoire, for Flute and Piano

Three Original Pieces, Composed for the Sight-Reading Examinations at the Paris Conservatoire, for Flute and Piano

Physicinas-musicians.

PHYSICIANS-MUSICIANS* E. LEE STROHLA ROBERT W.JAMIESON.t AND W. G. DlFFENBAUGHl The profession of medicine and the art of music have been closely allied since ancient times. Apollo, according to Greek and Roman mythology, was the god of medicine, music, and poetry [I]. To Homer, the greatest of poets, go the laurels for his successful use of music as a therapeutic agent in the difficult field of surgery. It is only now, after nearly 3,000 years, that music is being used in surgery, though from rather a different aspect than to check the flow ofblood from the wound of Ulysses, as was originally done [2]. In our operating rooms at RushPresbyterian -St. Luke's Medical Center, classical music is available, at the option of the surgeon and the patient, prior to and during the surgical procedure. The association of medicine and music was especially marked in the nineteenth century. Contributions to music during that period can be focused on many outstanding physicians. There were many less well known physicians who were also musicians. Christian Fenger was born in Jutland, Denmark, in 1840 and ultimately reached Chicago, where he attained phenomenal success as a surgeon, pathologist, and teacher. His teaching attracted men who became the leaders of medicine in the Midwest, among whom were James B. Herrick, Ludwig Hektoen, Frank Billings, Lewis L. McArthur, John B. Murphy, Howard Taylor Ricketts, H. Gideon Wells, E. R. LeCount, Louis J. Mitchell, C. G. Buford, Samuel C. Plummer, Weller Van Hook, Henry Baird Favill, Bayard Holmes, Stanley P. Black, W. T. Belfield, and M. L. Harris [3]. Fenger's original plan was to be a civil engineer, but he yielded to his father's wishes and took up the study of medicine, carrying on the family tradition ofone great physician in every generation. He received the degree of doctor of medicine from the University of Copenhagen. Christian's brother, Sophus Fenger, a physician, had migrated to *This paper was read before lhe Chicago Literary Club, February 1973, and is published here with their permission. tAddress: 5830 South Stony Island Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637. fAddress: 1725 West Harrison Street, Chicago, Illinois 60612.§Address: 122 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1974 | 267 Egypt and was practicing medicine in Alexandria. Christian joined him there and carried on Sophus's practice while he was on a long vacation. Christian Fenger possessed a musical talent, which was recognized by the khédive ofEgypt, who utilized it in a successful manner. A performance of the opera Aida was to be a part of the festivities celebrating the opening of the Suez Canal. The khédive had commissioned Verdi to write the opera. He realized that the musicians of Egypt were incapable of producing an opera on European standards, and, knowing of Fenger's musical ability, he delegated him to produce the opera. On opening night, the opera, attended by royalty from many parts of the world, was a brilliant success, not only as an artistic production but as an accomplishment for Fenger. Fritz Kreisler was born in Vienna in 1875. He was a child prodigy of music and became a world-renowned violinist. At the age of 12 he won the Grand Prix of the Paris Conservatory, and when he was 20 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome. After a successful tour of the United States as a concert violinist early in his life, he gave up music and began the study of medicine, later becoming an officer in the Austrian army. Nevertheless, he abandoned medicine for music and made it his lifelong career. Leopold Auenbrugger, who was the father of auscultation, wrote great librettos for the opera. He composed the music for the Salieri opera The Chimney Sweep and became a great favorite of Maria Theresa. Florient Kist was one of the most famous Dutch musicians. As a physician , he practiced at the Hague. A player of the flute and cornet, he composed great music for these instruments. He also organized musical societies and founded ajournai dealing with music. William Kitchener, born in 1775 in England, was considered eminent as a physician-composer. He was a graduate...

Music for the Children of Marshall McLuhan

* The name Luigi Cherubini doesn't loom very large on today's musical horizon. Every once in a while the overture of his Medee appears on a symphonic program; and in Europe his opera Les Deux Journees is performed occasionally. This opera has been translated into German as Der Wassertrdger-the Water Carrier. With the Age of Aquarius upon us, with its symbol the water carrier, it may be that some enterprising impresario will produce it for its astrological, if not musical, interest. Even in his own day, in spite of the fact that Beethoven said some kind words about his music, Cherubini was considered dull and pedantic. Yet this man has exercised a most profound influence upon every musician and upon every serious music student. For in 1795 when the Paris Conservatoire was founded, Cherubini was one of the so-called inspectors and a dominant member of the special commission appointed to compile a treatise on harmony for the school. He went on to write solfeggi, which are probably still taught there, and a Treatise on Counterpoint and Fugue. In 1822 Cherubini was made Director of the Conservatoire and for the next twenty years, in spite of a well publicized quarrel with his student Berlioz, he ruled French music education with an iron hand. If I use Cherubini as a symbol of

Dispersal of the Cortot Collection: 290 Treatises in Lexington

A fine private library reflects the opportunities and interests of its collector, stimulates him intellectually, and perhaps gives him altruistic pleasure as he sees that his books are useful to others. A collector's library lives and grows as he does, and when he dies, his library becomes a shadow of the being to whose interests it owes its peculiar form and existence. If it is a manifestation of narrow parochial curiosities, one is not surprised to see it sold for ninepence a barrow load (to recall the sermons of Theobald Pontifex). If the collection is a great one, containing rare and even unique items, one might expect it to gain a new master and to continue existence on its own, but this is not likely to be the case. The true collector enjoys the collecting as well as the collection, and the individual in possession of funds sufficient to acquire a significant collection intact is probably rarer than the availability of such collections. Large, long-established public and private libraries which may have ample resources are apt to find too many duplications to justify the acquisition of complete units. They will need, rather, to fill in small, and not so small, lacunae here and there. The odds are against preservation of a substantial private library through outright sale. The fate of the Cortot collection is a case in point. Alfred Denis Cortot (26 September 1877-15 June 1962), a man of great talent and broad interests, was a pianist, teacher, and conductor. In 1905 he formed a trio with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals which achieved wide fame. He was appointed professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1907. As early as 1902, at the age of twenty-five, he had conducted the French premi&re of Richard Wagner's Gotterddmmerung. Some idea of Cortot's musical abilities may be gleaned from the following recollections of his friend Henry Pruni&res (1886-1942), the noted French musicologist who was, apparently, the catalyst of Cortot and collecting.

Rameau's Originality

Our fixture card tells us the main purpose of the lecture which M. Fédorov intended to give us this evening—‘A major point to be considered will be reasons for the decline and revival of Rameau's popularity’. Those words led us to expect evidence from periodicals published since 1764, and perhaps from concert programmes and theatre records. Few musicians could be better equipped for this task than the Librarian of the Paris Conservatoire, yet M. Féderov would not have promised ‘reasons’ for a decline and revival if he had intended to reveal only his literary discoveries without comment upon Rameau's measure of our common humanity, and upon changing taste in the arts. So while we lack M. Fédorov's researches, we may still undertake what he proposed as his ‘major point’. And that is why, though I have never embarked upon any study of Rameau worth calling research, I hope that nobody here will say ‘Sir, you presume!’ if I accept your Secretary's invitation.