by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
June festival events continue on Saturday with Ohio Light Opera’s Sound of Music at 2 pm & Guys & Dolls at 7 (Freedlander Theater, College of Wooster), ENCORE Chamber Music Institute’s “Voice of the Whale” at 7:30 (Cleveland Natural History Museum), and ChamberFest Cleveland’s “Fantastic Tales” (7:30 in Mixon Hall at CIM).
Also on Saturday, conductors Dr. Henry Panion, III and Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz (pictured) lead the Canton Symphony in Gospel Joins Symphony (7:30 in Umstattd Hall).
On Sunday, ChamberFest Cleveland goes al fresco with performances along the trails, youth activities, and food & beverages from EDWIN’s (11am to 1 pm, Nature Center at Shaker Lakes), ENCORE Chamber Music Institute stays indoors for “Earth Makes Us Equal” (3 pm, Harkness Chapel at CWRU), and carillonneur Keiran Cantilina plays classical, traditional, film, and popular music (6 pm, from the tower of St. Paul’s Church, Cleveland Hts.)
INTERESTING READ:
Organist Paul Jacobs laments in BBC News the decision to install another digital organ in the New York Philharmonic’s Geffen Hall during its most recent renovation. Read ‘Why Doesn’t New York’s Geffen Hall Have a Real Organ?” here.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
June 15 — by Jarrett Hoffman:
Classical music personalities born on this date in history include German composer Franz Danzi (1763), Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843), American composer and arranger Robert Russell Bennett (1894), German-American composer Otto Luening (1900), and German violinist and pianist Julia Fischer (1983).
Those who passed on June 15 are French organist and composer Louis-Claude Daquin (1772) and American composer Clare Grundman (1996) — our focus today, given his several ties to the state of Ohio.
Grundman was born in Cleveland in 1913, graduating from East Cleveland’s Shaw High School in 1930 before attending Ohio State University. Continuing at OSU for his master’s, he also taught arranging and conducted the band both during and after earning his degree, and served in the U.S. Coast Guard as a military musician during WWII.
Among his important influences were Paul Hindemith — with whom Grundman studied composition at the Berkshire Music Center — and Manley R. Whitcomb (best known for serving as Director of Bands at Florida State University), who encouraged Grundman to write for band. And while his career spanned a wide variety of areas — including scores and arrangements for film, radio, TV, Broadway, and ballet, as well as chamber and orchestral music — his 100+ works for band have brought him particular recognition.
Grundman often displayed an interest in folk music, and among his most popular compositions are the American Folk Rhapsody No. 4, dedicated to Donald E. McGinnis and the Ohio State University Concert Band, and The Spirit of ‘76, subtitled “Based on Songs of the Time of George Washington and the American Revolution.” Listen to the latter here in a recording by — fittingly — the U.S. Coast Guard Band.
June 16—by Jarrett Hoffman:
Aside from French composer and organist Maurice Duruflé, who died on this date in 1986, the Midwest is well-represented in the annals of June 16th music history, particularly when it comes to electronic music.
An early pioneer in that field was Bebe Barron, born in Minneapolis in 1925. Having been gifted a tape recorder as a wedding gift, she and her husband Louis Barron delved into musique concréte, in which recorded sounds are often modified and assembled together. Their work brought them attention from the avant-garde community, including a collaboration with John Cage.
Turning to Hollywood, the couple went on to compose the first fully-electronic film score, for Forbidden Planet (1956). Audiences were reportedly stunned by what they heard, applauding wildly for one particular scene in which the music brings to life a spaceship landing on a foreign planet. As you’d expect, the visuals don’t exactly hold up today, but the music is still fascinating to hear — watch the minute-long landing scene here.
Bebe Barron’s last composition before her demise in 2008 was titled Mixed Emotions (2000). It came about after a residency at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and captures a similar feeling to her earlier work, but with the benefit of updated technology. Listen here.
And from Cleveland we have composer James K. Randall, born in 1929, who became increasingly interested in electronic music after he began teaching at Princeton University in the late 1950s. To my taste, his work is most interesting when it combines electronic and acoustic sounds, like in the second section of the haunting Mudgett: Monologues by a Mass Murderer. Listen here beginning at the 3:08 mark, where soprano Melinda Kessler enters the picture.
