BLOCH: Piano Quintet No. 1

Walter Simmons on November 21, 2023

Program Notes Ernest Bloch lived a long life—79 years—and was creatively productive for six decades. His busy life took him from Switzerland to Brussels, Franfurt, then New York, to Cleveland, San Francisco, back to Switzerland, then back to California, finally …

THE WAR ON MUSIC: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century

Walter Simmons on November 18, 2022

By John Mauceri. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 232 pp. When a book appears that purports to deal with the mid-20th-century estrangement of classical music audiences from the fruits of their own time, which has largely continued since …

Rosner’s Requiem: On a Forgotten Genius of American Music

Walter Simmons on July 29, 2021

In the spring of 1970, I was about to enter the Manhattan School of Music to pursue the study of musicology. At the time, I was working at C. F. Peters Corporation, then the primary publisher of the music of Alan Hovhaness, a well-known American composer whose unusual style involved combining the modal polyphony of the Renaissance with Armenian, Indian, Japanese, and Korean elements, and who interested me greatly.

VINCENT PERSICHETTI: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold

Walter Simmons on March 3, 2019

VINCENT PERSICHETTI: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold. by Andrea Olmstead. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. 493 pp. Cloth. $110 The third quarter of the 20th century was an enormously fruitful period in American classical music, which saw the appearance of …