COMMEMORATIVE COLLECTION
OF
PEZZI PERFORMANCES (1928-1953)
The photograph on the front of this booklet was e-mailed to us by Edward Ancona who, jokingly, added that “a contrabassoon version of the lamp is also available for basements.” Ed, upon graduation from Eastman, spent one season (1941-42) as third bassoonist doubling on contra-bassoon with the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra before being drafted into the US Navy where he became an electrical engineer and, upon completion of service, was employed by RCA and subsequently NBC in Burbank California.
His career at NBC included an Emmy award for work on Bonanza, but his contribution that persists to this day was in developing the system of color synchronization whereby a television does not need to have the hues reset every time a channel is changed. (His biography on imdb.com is worth reading.)
His respect and admiration for his favorite professor was so profound that he continued to correspond with “Papa Pezzi” until 1967. Eight years later, shortly after Diana and I moved to Los Angeles, we encountered Ed playing bassoon in the Burbank Symphony when I was hired to play harp for a performance of the Mahler Second Symphony (Resurrection). Also in the orchestra, as second bassoon, was Ed’s son, Ted. (Ted’s own son, Jon, also carries the “double-reed gene” and plays on the bassoon his grandfather bought so many decades earlier with the help of his dear professor from Eastman. Ted’s daughter, Samantha, plays oboe and English horn.)
Following that unexpected reunion with Diana in 1975, we exchanged Christmas cards every year as well as e-mail and an occasional phone conversation. Sadly, Ed died in November of 2005 at age 84 but we still correspond with Ed’s widow, Dorothy (who we have never met) and Ted.
[Note: One copy of the CD collection was sent to Dorothy in 2013 who gave it to Ted and family. She died the following year and Diana kept in touch via e-mail with Ted through 2015.
Any exercise of estimating what will be remembered in the future is really only guesswork with little more than instinct to guide. Indeed, Cicero is credited with having told the Roman Senate that legislation ought to be enacted whereby no two soothsayers be allowed to greet one another publicly without first laughing hysterically.
In putting together notes on this CD and, specifically, what significance these selections held for the artists involved at the time as well as audiences then in attendance, benefit of some 20/20 hindsight helps in terms of what an audience of 2012 finds memorable although, obviously, less clarity is available as to what music-lovers of 2032 or 2052 will feel … especially when “voting with their wallets.”
The word “classical” (think of Aristotle, Shakespeare or Beethoven) tends to connote endurance and not losing the appeal that propelled the work to prominence in the first place. The term “popular” has a more ephemeral, transitory feel although some works that were initially popular (Michelangelo’s David) remain (as of this writing) classics all these centuries later.
And yet, roughly a decade ago, a Xerox cohort, (a 21-year-old dubbed “Bubble-Head” by Diana) was telling me how her toddler nieces and nephews found her ideas of what music was “hot” (or not) as those of an old f••• [euphemism for flatulence]. Since, at the time, I was a little over twice her age, I could not resist asking about various “popular” people whose names were not totally unknown or forgotten to me although I would be hard-pressed (then or today) to name many of the songs which propelled them to popularity (and large sums of money).
“Bubble-Head” had two posters of her “faves” in her cubicle. One was Britney Spears and the other was Justin Timberlake. When I asked about Michael Jackson (this was before the criminal complaint had been filed that resulted a couple years later in his acquittal) she said he was “retro.” When I asked about Madonna, she (in near reverential tones) proclaimed “Madonna is forever!” Today, of course, if one mentions only the first name “Justin,” most youngsters probably think of Bieber. (Even Johnny Depp was recently amused that his pre-teen daughter was only impressed by his press clippings after he had a brief unplanned joint appearance with Bieber in Berlin.)
Will anyone reading the above, however many decades from now, draw a blank at the names Beethoven or Shakespeare? Or, perhaps, Depp or Bieber?
My reason for dwelling, maybe excessively, on the question of endurance is to provide some degree of context regarding “classical music” (alternatively called “serious music” and, even on occasion, “long-hair music” in my youth). Most of the principal bassoonists in symphony orchestras today studied under pupils of Vincenzo Pezzi. Indeed, John Hunt, the guy who sat a few feet from me playing bassoon in the US Army Band (1972-75) was a pupil of David Van Hoesen (who succeeded Professor Pezzi at Eastman) and, upon the retirement of Van Hoesen, succeeded him.
But the question of how enduring symphony orchestra concerts, recordings and broadcasts are, at least in late 2012 as these words are being strung together, is harder to answer in any meaningful way. For most of the 20th Century, the Philadelphia Orchestra was considered (along with the Boston, [Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit] Symphony and the New York Philharmonic) one of the best in the world. Last year the Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy protection. Whether or not they will emerge successfully (as have some other business enterprises, e.g., Delta Airlines) is anyone’s guess.
Adjusted for inflation, the lifetime earnings of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Shakespeare, Michelangelo – combined – probably are dwarfed next to those (thus far) of Beyoncé Knowles-Z, Madonna or Bieber.
Is Lady Gaga already passé? Given my ignorance in matters of “popular culture,” that question is better answered by someone else. Were that not the case and I somehow attained some degree of “expertise” in such things, a reminder is in order that numerous experts have been famously wrong.
Thomas Edison predicted that, if George Westinghouse ever installed any system of home delivery of electricity based on alternating current, massive numbers of accidental deaths would result. Edison also sold all his shares when his name was dropped from the company that would become “General Electric” and, most egregious, foresaw (within his own lifetime, based upon “obvious axioms” of economics) almost all furniture in homes and offices being made out of concrete.
Baseball Hall of Famer, Tris Speaker of the Boston Red Sox, said that Babe Ruth was making a big mistake by deciding to give up pitching in favor of concentrating upon batting. Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, in 1943 was said to have predicted that “there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
One final personal note demands utterance at this point. By virtue of having been born almost too late, I never had opportunity to meet my father-in-law and consequently can never know how he would have told me to address him, much less refer to him in the third person.
About the only almost illuminating thing that comes to mind in that connection is the comment I made thirteen years ago as those copies of the Pezzi-Frascolla volume went into the mail. After months of looking at the photographs, reading and re-reading texts of letters and articles that Diana used in order to flesh out the relationships of the “players in the drama,” I could not help but feel as though I had gotten acquainted, even if only on the most tangential level, not only with Diana’s parents but, also, grandparents, aunts and uncles and even some of the cousins who were already dead by the time Diana was born. My comment was, “I am going to miss those ghosts.”
In going through the photos and papers, especially those on topics concerning music and the bassoon, Diana showed me how her father was in the habit of writing notes, presumably to himself but, perhaps also for her or others looking at these artifacts years later, often with a red X over a picture or paragraph of text followed with pencil annotation of some sort. In the case of photographs, especially some of the earliest ones in large groups where he was playing an instrument other than bassoon (serpent, sarrusophone, etc.), he would mark “V. Pezzi.”
Accordingly, and since I am possibly one of the last relics of an age where the instruction remains indelibly etched into my brain to refer to someone senior to me as “Dr. ______ ”, “Mr. ______ ”, “Mrs. ______ ”, or “Professor ______ ”, until told by that person, “Oh, call me … ” but not wanting to read as unduly informal, in calling Diana’s and O.V.’s father “Pa” as I have heard both of them refer to him over the course of nearly four decades, no disrespect is intended. If that seems wrong as you read this, please excuse me.
The first track on this CD was a brief recording of a spoken message Pa made, probably in the early 1950s when he visited a Mr. DeWitt in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Beyond that, and the fact that Mrs. DeWitt wrote the lyrics to a song titled “Rose in the Bud,” the questions of how they knew each other and who the DeWitts were (let alone their first names) seem unanswerable in that Diana never heard her parents discuss them and several search engines turned up nothing.
The next four tracks were a quartet of pieces by faculty composers at Eastman and were recorded on a pair of 78 RPM for the album titled American Works for Solo Winds. The photograph of the Rochester Philharmonic Wind Quintet was put on the back of this album so that all four soloists can be seen. While the first chair horn player, Fred Klein, is not a featured soloist in a separate work for horn with strings, he is heard prominently in Through the Looking Glass by Deems Taylor.
The background stories for remaining pieces are provided in the “composers” and “conductors” sections concluding these notes.
BERNARD ROGERS (1893 – 1968) was born in New York City and studied architecture aspiring to be a painter and continued to paint throughout his life. He studied music and composition with Arthur Farwell, Hans van der Berg, Ernest Bloch and Percy Goetschius. He was on the editorial staff of Musical America and taught at the Cleveland Institute and Hartt School of Music before taking a position at the Eastman School of Music from 1930 until he retired in 1967.
At Eastman, Rogers was professor of composition and chair of the composition department. After the successful première of his symphonic elegy, To the Fallen, by the New York Philharmonic in 1919, Mr. Rogers was awarded a Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship for study in Europe. In 1927, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris as well as with Frank Bridge in London. He began to teach composition and orchestration at Eastman when he returned to the United States in 1929.
In the ensuing 38 years at Eastman, he taught more than 700 composers, many of whom went on to achieve international prominence. Mr. Rogers’ work as a composer included four symphonies, three operas (he was awarded the Alice M. Ditson Prize for his opera, The Warrior which was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House in June 1947), several major choral works and numerous works of chamber music including Leaves from the Tale of Pinocchio recorded in 1956 by the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra under Howard Hanson [MG50114]. His book The Art of Orchestration was published in 1951.
Rogers received honorary doctorates from Valparaiso University and Wayne State University and was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1947.
WAYNE BARLOW (1912 – 1996), professor emeritus of composition, entered the Eastman School in 1930 and received his graduate and undergraduate degrees. In 1937, he was awarded a Ph.D. in music (composition), becoming the first person in the United States to receive such a degree. He also spent time at the University of Southern California, where he studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg. Before completing his doctorate, Howard Hanson asked him to join the faculty of Eastman.
A pioneer in the field of electronic music, Dr. Barlow founded the Eastman Electronic Music Studio in 1968. He was chair of the composition department from 1968 (succeeding Bernard Rogers) until 1973, and dean of graduate studies from 1973 until his retirement in 1978.
His compositions include sacred music, works for chorus and symphony orchestra, and pieces for chorus and pre-recorded tape. Throughout his career as a composer, Dr. Barlow received numerous awards and honors, including several ASCAP Awards. His works were commissioned by the Indianapolis Symphony, the Catholic Diocese of Rochester, the Penfield School District and the Brevard School of Music.
He was in demand as a guest lecturer and visiting artist and professor, specializing in topics such as electronic music, 20th-century composition, musical acoustics and the American composer Charles Ives. In 1955-56, Dr. Barlow was the Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music and Aarhus University in Denmark. In 1964-65, he received a post-doctoral grant to research work in the electronic music field in Belgium and Holland, at the Universities of Brussels, Ghent and Utrecht.
In Rochester, Dr. Barlow also served as music director at Christ Episcopal Church and choirmaster at St. Thomas Episcopal Church.
BURRILL PHILLIPS (1907 – 1988) was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Perhaps his best known work is Selections from McGuffey’s Reader, settings of three 19th century American poems. In 1942, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Burrill Phillips’ American Dance was originally titled Concert Piece for Bassoon and String Orchestra and published in 1940 by Carl Fischer in New York City. The change of title appears only to have been for purposes of the 1941 album American Works for Solo Winds. As recently as October 2012 copies of the sheet music are still sold on various websites under the original title.
Whether the piece was written a long time before its publication and merely reused for performance and publication is unclear. The copyright owner was the Eastman School of Music. Although Professors Phillips and Pezzi arrived at Eastman at roughly the same time and were colleagues, Diana says that they were not close friends in that she has no memory of Phillips ever having been invited for dinner or any other social function at their home in Rochester.
A quick check of youtube found a performance from 1952 of the work featuring one of Pa’s friends and colleagues, Sol Schoenbach with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the direction of Eugene Ormandy. A few other performances are posted, mostly by university students.
HOMER T. KELLER (1915 – 1996) graduated from Oxnard Union High School in 1933, after which he attended the Eastman School of Music where he studied with Howard Hanson, obtaining B.M. (1937) and M.M. (1938) degrees. In 1939 he was awarded $500 in the 1939 Henry Hadley Foundation competition for his First Symphony which was premièred in Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli in 1940. His Second Symphony was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC, in 1950.
For three years, he resided in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he first taught at the Palama Settlement and the Punahou Music School, later becoming a lecturer in music at the University of Hawaii. He was President of the Honolulu Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters.
Keller’s work in Hawaii exposed him to Pacific Island folk music styles, which he credited with widening his own musical thought with regard to melody and harmony. In December, 1956, the Honolulu Symphony gave the première performance of his Third Symphony to rave reviews.
He taught at the University of Michigan and, from 1958 to 1976, at the University of Oregon in Eugene where he worked to set up that university’s electronic music studio. Keller’s last residence was Montclair, California.
His music is published by the American Composers Alliance. The ACA collection is held at Special Collections in Performing Arts at University of Maryland. The Homer Keller Papers are held by the Eastman School of Music.
DEEMS TAYLOR (1885 – 1966) A biographical sketch from 2010 on a classical music website starts by saying “Deems Taylor was an American composer, music critic and promoter of classical music.” Here we seem to return to the durability question from the start of these notes.
By the year 2032, will the name Lewis Carroll prompt immediate recall of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass or do those references draw a blank?
Tucked inside the LP record jacket from which this CD was made was a copy of the printed program notes from an earlier recording (a set of 78 RPM records) of the work by the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony conducted by Howard Barlow (probably no relation to Wayne Barlow or author Harold Barlow). Recorded November 9, 1938, under the supervision of the composer, these notes were written by Taylor himself. In the section titled “Jabberwocky,” Taylor mentions the famous bassoon solo parenthetically noting, “this passage is referred to, with rather excessive bitterness by bassoon players as the ‘death of the bassoon’.” To this, in the margin in pencil, Pa wrote, “Depending on WHO plays that cadenza” and (on the earlier page) “Bassoon cadenza well-played in this recording.”
By the time I first heard this recording (roughly a decade before I first met Diana) the work was obscure and well on its way towards oblivion. One year after Diana and I married, in celebration of the Bicentennial of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, David Del Tredici was commissioned (jointly by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic) to compose Final Alice. His work ran about an hour and used a large orchestra with folk instruments as well as a soprano soloist who doubles as narrator. The subsequent work in the series, In Memory of a Summer Day, won a Pulitzer Prize.
These days, neither work is ever heard, probably because of the expense of hiring the forces needed to mount a performance although a controversial opera version of Alice by Korean composer, Unsuk Chin was mounted in Munich in 2007 to mixed reviews.
Perhaps the best answer to this question of what will endure or fade from the scene is the extent to which the work of art appeals to the individual (or enough people) on a visceral, emotional, level and whether or not, with repetition, its appeal grows or becomes tiresome.
EMMANUEL CHABRIER (1841 – 1894) is most famous for his España Rhapsody which was written, premièred and published in 1883 after he and his wife traveled throughout Spain. The work was dedicated to Charles Lamoureux, who conducted its first performance. Other of his compositions include Suite Pastorale, Fête Polonaise, Gwendoline Overture and Danse Slave.
HOWARD HANSON (1896 – 1981), although an established composer in his youth, he was equally famous for most of his life as a conductor and, for many decades, as the director of the Eastman School of Music where he championed new works by American composers. Diana has noted that as much as he admired Pa’s musicianship and artistry on bassoon, his appreciation of Ma’s cooking was every bit as profound.
One other personal anecdote is noteworthy. When Diana had her double scholarship cancelled (long story – the punch-line was her falling asleep at the piano when playing the slow movement of a Beethoven Sonata for her mid-term exam), Hanson was the lead examiner.
Decades later in Washington, DC, when Diana performed both as the soprano and alto soloist in a performance of the Bach Mass in B minor, she noted that the rave review was by a guest-critic, Howard Hanson who did not recognize her as she was performing under the name “Diana Beveridge” and she had blond hair. She hastens to point out that, even if he had recognized her, his review would have been the same as he was not prejudiced when assessing musical matters and never one to hold a grudge.
OSSIP GABRILOWITSCH (1878 – 1936), who used the German spelling of his name (in Russian: Осип Сoломонович Габрилович) was best known in his day as a concert pianist and conductor as well as a composer and, in the last decades of his life, the son-in-law of Mark Twain (having married Clara Clemens in 1910).
The essay “I Remember Detroit” makes mention of how Clara Clemens-Gabrilowitsch, would buy ice cream cones for Diana and O.V. when they were toddlers at the hot summer (outdoor) symphony concerts.
In 1938 Clara wrote a book, My Husband Gabrilowitsch, a copy of which was amongst the books and papers on bassoon and other subjects that eventually were given to Beth. In one of the last chapters (perhaps the final one … it has been well over a decade, perhaps two decades, since I read it) Clara wrote how Ossip, knowing that he had only a short time left to live, decided one day to play the piano for what he figured was the last time. Upon finishing a Schubert Impromptu, he turned to Clara as he closed the lid over the keyboard and opined as to how, “Years from now, when everyone will have forgotten Ravel’s Bolero, they will still be listening to and enjoying these pieces by Schubert.” Somehow, enumerating one last prediction that turned out to be wrong seems appropriate.