Horatio Parker is known today mostly as being Charles Ives' teacher at Yale. In most presentations he's presented as what Charles Ives had to overcome to become one of the earliest of the truly avant garde composers. But Ives was well on his way to being the composer he was long before he went to Yale.
I listened to this Pipedreams program of Parkers music after listening to some of Elgar's music last night. The result of that is that I think Parker was the better composer of the two. Unlike Elgar, Parker's music doesn't have a nationalist music establishment to promote it.
There was a time when, as a devotee of "modern music," I'd have passed Parker's music by but I got over that and listen to everything now. It's a stupid, narrow-minded attitude to have and I'm glad I'm over it.
You can find the scores of some of Parker's music here and some of his choral music here, though, unfortunately, not much mentioned in the program and not the really masterful anthem, Now Sinks The Sun, included in it.
I used to love listening to Pipedreams before my public radio station took it off, no doubt so they could have more NPR junk like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on. Now I listen to it online as I do so much else now that public radio as it should have been, is dead. To compare Parker's and Ives' music, you can listen to this program from their archive in the Real Audio format.
No comments:
Post a Comment