John Tasker Howard’s 1934 book, Our American Music, was the first to attempt to measure the relative value of American composers. For Howard, the matter of who qualified as the first American composer came down to an unresolved competition between Declaration of Independence signer Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791) and psalmodist James Lyon (1735-1794). Had Howard known of the rich storehouse of Baroque music in what had once been “New Spain,” he would have had to revise his focus to composers who had been born 50 to 100 years before either Hopkinson or Lyon. Indeed, in 1934 the only persons familiar with the very existence of such repertoire were monks who looked after dusty manuscripts in the cathedral libraries of Mexico, Bolivia and Peru, music that even then hadn’t been touched in more than a century.

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Once legendary country music producer Owen Bradley recalled singer Patsy Cline as “my lost angel,” and in the world of classical piano music a similar description might well fit William Kapell, whose meteoric career ended in a tragic and similar fashion. A youthful, powerful, and uncompromisingly dynamic pianist with dashing good looks and a taste for wide-ranging literature, Kapell was a blazing ball of fire at the keyboard whose star was in the ascendant when the plane he was traveling in crashed into a mountain just south of San Francisco; he was 31. For someone who died so young, Kapell made an impressive number of recordings, issued in a more or less definitive package by RCA Red Seal, The William Kapell Edition, in 1998. Two additional hours of Kapell’s “missing time” have been recovered in the meantime, and released as Kapell Rediscovered: The Australian Broadcasts, introduced with some degree of fanfare a week ago.

The attention this release has been accorded thus far is well deserved, though owing to its irrevocably rough sound quality –- the source discs were made by a home radio receiver — Kapell Rediscovered seems more directed at those who know his work well already, rather than to the potential audience the hype is more likely to reach. For listeners who merely want to get a sense of what Kapell’s volcanic playing was like, we have selected a few choice bits in terms of samples and suggestions. The finiteness of Kapell’s recorded output invites the kind of comprehensive packaging that gives a listener “everything” and coalesces with the marketing trend of floating large packages of classical material for a discount; at the per-disc rate, the nine discs in the William Kapell Edition will only set one back by about half the cost of nine full-price discs. And yet, there is nothing wrong with enjoying Kapell in smaller measure; the intensity and depth of his pianism may well be better grasped listening a disc, or even a piece at a time. Kapell’s artistry is something that well transcends both the technology of his time and the typical conventions then commonly observed by Kapell’s colleagues in the few recordings he made with other musicians. No matter how one decides to take on William Kapell, he was undoubtedly an original, and his time -– missing or not –- is time well spent.

 
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (recorded 1951)
Khachaturian: Piano Concerto (recorded 1946)
Chopin: Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor - Scherzo (recorded 1951)
Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 7 (from “Kapell Rediscovered,” recorded in Australia, 1953)

Composer Henry Brant, who died in Santa Barbara on Saturday, April 26, at the age of 94, was American music’s first full-time proponent of Spatial Music -– the dividing up of separate instrumental bodies and redistribution of them over a wide area. This course of action, just as radical now as it was in the early 1950s when he started, was suggested to Brant upon hearing Charles Ives’ work The Unanswered Question, and in a sense, Brant spent the rest of his long life trying to answer it.

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A few very famous works tend to dominate the classical airwaves when spring arrives: Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, etc. But suppose the winds of fashion and popularity had blown in a different direction over the last 50 to 100 years and a completely different set of composers and works had become the cream of the classical crop? Here follows an alternative universe classical music playlist for springtime.

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Setting: The music library of San Jose State University, 1979. A student happens to run into his teacher, perpetually jolly and genial composer Lou Harrison, outside one of the tiny, closet-like listening booths with their already antiquated turntables. The student plays in the gamelan ensemble on campus that Harrison leads, and somehow the subject comes up of Indonesian gamelan in its relation to Western music. The student confides that he is familiar with the work of Colin McPhee and his Balinese transcriptions of the 1930s; he believes these to be the earliest examples of a Western musician dealing with the potent influence of the gamelan.

Harrison counters, “Oh, no! There are certainly gamelan inspired works that are earlier than that – don’t forget about Debussy and Pagodes. Here, let me show you something.…” Strolling leisurely down a narrow aisle of densely shelved music scores, Harrison stops at one spot and thinks out loud to himself, “Where is it? I should be able to find this, as it used to belong to me. Oh –- here it is,” and pulls down a red-backed quarto of fairly thick size. “This is Leopold Godowsky’s Java Suite which was published in the 1920s.”

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Many towns have a street named Eastwood Lane, but it is also the name of a composer. Little is known about his early years, and he seems to have had no formal music education; he did not publish his first music until he’d reached his early thirties. All of Lane’s music was composed for the piano, and he is alleged to have learned to compose by watching they keys of player pianos while they played rolls of his favored composers, particularly Edward MacDowell, and Claude Debussy. Lane composed roughly a dozen suites of short piano pieces modeled after MacDowell’s similar compilations, the first of which, In Sleepy Hollow, was composed in 1913. Lane’s last suite, Here Are Ladies!, appeared in 1944. He also produced a few standalone pieces, of which the tone poem Sea Burial (1925) remains the best known. His longest continuous work was Sold Down the River (1928), a nearly half-hour-long suite based on the program of the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

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By now many readers will have heard about a ghostly recording, made on April 7, 1860, of a woman’s voice singing a snippet from the traditional French song “Au clair de la Lune,” that was introduced on March 27, 2008, at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections conference in Palo Alto. The presentation was the work of First Sounds, a group of experts in the field of the earliest recorded sounds. Just ten seconds in length, the visual sound wave recording was made in Paris on a Phonoautogram by experimenter Léon Scott de Martinville (1817-1879); its sound was reconstructed from a paper tracing of the wave using a computer program developed at the Library of Congress.

Press reports about this rediscovered recording have been somewhat misleading. In the space of mere days, phrases like “Move Over Thomas Edison” have started popping up in headlines, suggesting that Léon Scott somehow scooped Thomas Edison. But this mis-characterizes the true significance of this discovery and what it means to the history of recorded sound, so some clarification is in order.

Thomas Edison never claimed to have invented sound recording. What he did invent was the phonograph — the first device of any kind capable of playing sound back. Edison did so because he was furious about Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876; Edison’s whole career up to that point was invested heavily in telegraphic technology, and that Bell had found a new wrinkle — transmitting a person’s voice in lieu of a telegraph key — was simply unacceptable to him. From that time Edison worked tirelessly to do Bell one better, and his “one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration” eventually led to the phonograph, built between August and December of 1877. But it wasn’t created overnight, nor in a vacuum.

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Classic film composer Leonard Rosenman died of a heart attack on Monday, March 3, at the age of 83, ending his long battle with Frontotemporal Dementia, a disability that attacks the brain. While Rosenman’s Oscar wins were for films in which he acted as a musical compiler, his signature work was elsewhere, scoring the James Dean features East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) in addition to films such as Fantastic Voyage (1966) and the TV adaptation of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book Sybil (1976) starring Sally Field. The vaunted Hollywood studio system of old was finished by the time Rosenman entered the picture business, and he –- along with his contemporaries Alex North, Earle Hagen and Elmer Bernstein -– represented the first composers in the “New” Hollywood, working on independently produced features supported by the studios, for international productions and in television. Rosenman’s music was uncompromisingly contemporary in style, and was among the first film composers to utilize advanced compositional techniques such as serialism and microtones in major motion pictures. It was an achievement that was rather low-key; however, as even many film score buffs weren’t even aware of Rosenman’s work until the release in 1996 of Nonesuch’s outstanding The Film Music of Leonard Rosenman, conducted by composer John Adams.

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