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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The DVD medium has had the unforeseen capability of clarifying the appeal of classical works that are germane to the theater. Adolphe Adam (1803-1856) was born the same year as Hector Berlioz and represents the other side of the Berliozian coin. If Berlioz represents a kind of early French Romantic avant-garde, Adam is like the derrière-garde, though still fighting the same battle. Whereas Berlioz produced three cantatas to win a Prix de Rome — the Paris Conservatoire’s seeming pre-requisite to practice as a French composer — only to discard the winning effort, Adam never succeeded in winning the Prix at all, and his family and professors alike persuaded him to find another line of work. Nevertheless, Adam prevailed simply by digging in and doing it. While Berlioz toured with his own symphony orchestra, singers and corps de ballet, Adam’s fate was at the mercy of the public, his fortunes rising and falling in line with how well his properties did in various Parisian theaters. Adam’s attempt to set up his own opera company was foiled by the outbreak of the Paris Revolution of 1848, and it took him six years to pay back the debt he incurred because of its failure. Ironically, one way he earned the money back was through teaching at the Conservatoire!

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It’s a bona fide senior moment when a package arrives and you have no memory of ordering what’s inside (Amazon Marketplace has a longer memory than some of us, apparently…), but such was the case this weekend with a copy of the surprisingly-hard-to-find Favorite Spirituals by the great tenor Roland Hayes. It was perfect timing though, because the weekend when America’s first front-running African-American candidate for president was winning primary contests and Jazz/R&B artist Herbie Hancock was pulling off an upset at the Grammy Awards was ideal for getting re-acquainted with one of the trailblazers of African-American concert music.

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[Edgard Varèse’s] music is completely unique. If you haven’t heard it yet, go hear it. If you’ve already heard it and think it might make groovy sound effects, listen again. – Frank Zappa, “Edgard Varèse: The Idol of My Youth,” Stereo Review, June 1971.

When Frank Zappa wrote his appreciation of Franco-American avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse in 1971, his motivation in doing so was that “if by some chance this article can influence more people to hear his works, it will have been worthwhile.” At the time, there was a wealth of expert recordings available of Varèse’s music, though not the one that had caused Zappa to idolize him: The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse Vol. 1 by Frederic Waldman and various Juilliard-based ensembles on EMS; that was long defunct in 1971. When it appeared again in 1979 on the Finnadar label, it came illustrated with Zappa’s essay and re-titled “The Varèse Album,” a moniker already used by CBS to designate their 2-LP reissue package of Robert Craft’s Varèse recordings in 1972. However, as LPs moved into CDs, both disappeared, and for a much longer interval than before.

Happily, with 2008 being the Quasquicentennial of Edgard Varèse’s birth in 1883 (as it is for fellow early modernists Alfredo Casella, Josef Matthias Hauer, Toivo Kuula and Anton Webern) both the EMS and CBS Varèse albums have become newly available, not through their corporate parents but through tiny reissue labels that usually specialize in rock and film music. Zappa’s beloved EMS recording returns courtesy of El!, an English re-issue label subsidiary to Cherry Red Records, and CBS’ The Varèse Album comes from Wounded Bird, a label based in upstate New York that handles a wide variety of past pop and jazz releases. In both cases, their respective Varèse albums are the only classical recordings in their catalogues.
Frederic Waldman, Juilliard Ensemble - Varèse: Integrales (recorded 1950)

Robert Craft, Columbia Chamber Ensemble - Varèse: Offrandes (recorded 1963)

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Among early 20th century French symphonists — a small group, considering how the practice was long regarded as the domain of German composers — few are as obscure and neglected today as Paul Le Flem (1881-1984), whose long career yielded four attractive symphonies of remarkably high musical quality, fantastic invention, and emotional depth. Thanks to the exceptional Timpani label, conductor Claude Schnitzler, and the Orchestre de Bretagne, the 1994 recording of the Symphony No. 1 in A major is now available again, along with performances of the effervescent Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, and two moody interludes from Le Flem’s opera, The Magician of the Sea.

Fans of the music of Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel may note strong similarities in these pieces (Le Flem was their student, after all), but all admirers of atmospheric post-Romantic music will find much to relish on this superb reissue.

La Magicienne de la mer: Lent; Animé

Fantaisie pour piano et orchestra

Symphonie No. 1

For every composer considered one of the “great masters” there are at least ten who reach a similar artistic plateau but never make it into the mainstream. Charles-Henri Valentin Alkan Morhange, understandably known by the single name “Alkan,” is one of the best examples of a composer who belongs at the top of his class — in his case, that of Romantic composer-pianists — but who hovers somewhere between the second and third tier in terms of recognition.

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Here in the Great Lakes region, the weather’s turning colder, the leaves are just about all down now, and, yes, snow has been sighted. But Down Under, it’s Spring. Bright green foliage, babbling brooks, and sunshine! Think warmer thoughts and try out some music by a few Australian composers.

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