When I first arrived at JPR in July 1998, I went into the music library feeling like a kid in a candy store. I trained as a musician and thought that I knew a lot of classical music but there were so many recordings, it was overwhelming. To begin with, I looked for what was familiar and programmed music by some of my favorites including Beethoven, Corelli, and Debussy among many others. After a few weeks, I started to expand a little with well-known names but sharing some of their less familiar pieces. You probably know Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” but did you know that he wrote cello sonatas? These sonatas are so warm and lyrical; I had not expected these lovely pieces from the composer of so many concertos.
I next started to look for composers that were unfamiliar to me like Baldassare Galuppi. A contemporary of Handel, Galuppi is mentioned in a poem by Robert Browning but had never heard his music. Both Handel and Galuppi made their living as opera composers and they share a gift for melody and expressing emotion. Galuppi’s Concerti à quattro soon became some of my favorite Baroque concertos.
Then, there was Josef Myslivecek, a contemporary of Mozart, whose life story sounds like an opera plot. Abandoning a mill that he had inherited in his native Bohemia, Myslivecek traveled to Italy and became a successful opera composer. The young Mozart met him when he went to Italy to obtain a position writing Italian opera, and Myslivecek was a mentor to the young man. Myslivecek’s music is full of the same wit and joie de vivre and provided part of the sound of what makes Mozart sound like Mozart.
Over the centuries, some music was overlooked because of racism or misogyny, and music written by Jewish composers was often dismissed or even suppressed as it was in the 1930s and 40s. This included not just music written in the early to mid-20th century, but also composers from previous centuries. One of those was Solomon Jadassohn, who was a contemporary of Brahms. When comparing these two, you can hear how they knew each other’s work, and witness a friendly conversation between the two, especially in each of their four symphonies.
As we entered the 21st century, I started to receive recordings by composers that had been overlooked for far too long, including women and composers of color. A good example is Caroline Shaw, whose name I first heard when she appeared on a TV show called “Mozart in the Jungle” and I was later given a recording of her music. At age 30, she became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and her compositions are a wonderful example of the conversation between the centuries. This was especially evident with her 2020 Grammy award-winning record “Orange”, which uses ideas and themes from Claudio Monteverdi and JS Bach.
Perhaps my favorite discovery was Florence Price, an African American woman who wrote a lot of music. Most of her music beyond a few titles was thought to be lost, but in 2009, a house in the suburbs of Chicago where she lived was scheduled for renovation. The couple who purchased the property discovered boxes and boxes of music written by Price that had never been published or performed. She is someone who took the advice of Antonin Dvorák: a generation earlier he noted that to write real American classical music, composers should look to music derived from African American and Indigenous sources. He used material that he heard while he was in the US to create his “New World Symphony” and she carried on that custom by expanding and using ideas from African sources.
It is this aspect of expanding the conversation between these other voices that has been a large part of why I have enjoyed my work at JPR as the host of First Concert. Including these artists alongside of the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms gives me hope that Classical Music will continue to be relevant well into the future.
So, as I conclude my tenure here at JPR, I thought about opening up the conversation with you about your discoveries as we have listened together over many years. During the month of May, feel free to email me at matthewd@sou.edu with your music discoveries and tell me a little about what they meant to you. They could be pieces by composers that you thought you knew or perhaps music by someone that you never heard before. In June, I will play as many of those pieces that I can and with your permission, share your stories. I can't imagine a more joyous celebration of the time we have shared to together exploring the world of great classical music.
