Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIV, no. 2 (Summer 1998)
Communications
Dear Editor,
I am eager to apprise members of "Reclaiming the Past: Musical Boston a Century Ago," a
festival I am organizing at the New England Conservatory. The dates are Sunday, 7 March
to Thursday, 11 March 1999. There will be eleven concerts and a symposium. The repertoire
includes opera, symphony, song, church music, chamber music, you name it. Featured composers
include Beach, Busoni, Chadwick, Dvorak, Farwell, Foote, Ives, Loeffler, and Paine, among
others. We will also be hearing and considering a fair amount of band music, including
Sousa's The Red Man. Needless to say, most of the music we'll present is otherwise
never heard. The participating scholars include Adrienne Fried Block, Paul DiMaggio, Pamela Fox,
Anne Hallmark, Robert Labaree, Steven Ledbetter, Ralph Locke, David McAllester Michael Pisani,
and Judith Tick. The participating performers include Frank Battisti, the Borromeo String Quartet,
Virginia Eskin, John Heiss, Richard Hoenich, Veronica Jochum, and Gunther Schuller. The topics
include the influence of Dvorak, the Indianist movement, and "Should American Music Sound
American?" The symposium (11 March) is titled "Boston Tastemakers--Who Paid the Piper? Who Called
the Tune?"
The premise of the entire exercise is that we've been sold a bill of goods by Bernstein, Thomson,
and others who claimed that nothing much happened in American concert music, save Ives, before World War
I -- that composers like Chadwick were not only enormously skilled, but identifiably "American." A full
day on the Indianist movement (9 March) will argue that it cannot be written off as a ton of kitsch;
the featured compositions include Busoni's fabulous Indian Notebooks and Indian Fantasy, Beach's String
Quartet, Griffes' Two Sketches on Indian Themes, and various Farwell compositions, including the
Hako String Quartet. The overlap with the Sonneck convention, alas, was unavoidable, but a number of us
will be travelling to Fort Worth from Boston on 12 March.
Further information is obtainable from Evelyne Tiersky at the New England Conservatory, telephone
617 262 1120 ext. 260 or email etiersky@thecia.net.
--Joseph Horowitz
New England Conservatory
Americana in Vierundzwanzigsteljahrsschrift der Internatinalen
Maultrommelvirtuosengenossenschaft
What you call the instrument depends on what category you belong to. If you are among the majority
of echt Americans, you say "juice harp." If you don't feel constrained by political correctness,
you call it "Jew's harp." If you are a fan of absurd etymologies, it's "jaw's harp." And if you are me, or
the three or four people I've been able to convince of the correctness of my positions, you favor the
old British word "trump."
VIM, whose admittedly Brobdingnagian holonym, appearing in the title of this communication, can be
translated as "Semimonthly Journal of the International Society of Trump Virtuosi," is, perversely, an
irregular serial, in the technical jargon to which we in the industry are partial, a spasmodical, and,
equally perversely, has contents that are mostly in English. When I began to publish VIM in 1982, it was the
first journal ever devoted to the trump, an instrument that perviously suffered in the esteem of the literate,
in favore of the more boring and less versatile ones, such as the piano, the flute, the lute. Today,
there are four more trump serials, as well as three major Web sites.
Each of the VIM's seven issues to date has at least one article (not to mention the trivia scattered
about) with an American or Canadian subject; these subjects range form the sublime to the ridiculous
to the sublimely ridiculous. In the list of them that follows, I have added a small abstract in those
cases where the title isn't self-explanatory.
Runs of VIM can be found in all the great libraries (my possibly tunnel-visioned definition of
great library excludes all that don't have it). Or one can order back issues or subscriptions from
VIM, 601 N. White St., Mt. Pleasant, IA 52641.
No. 1 (1982)
Daniel W. Patterson, "A Shaker Notice of the Jew's Harp," 42-43."
Brian L. Mihura, "The Great Jew's Harp Hunt of 1954," 44-48. The very public search for trumpists for the CBS
Radio Orchestra's performance of Ives's "Washington's Birthday" with Leopold Stokowski conducting.
Frederick Crane, "How Should the Jew's Harp Part of "Washington's Birthday" be Played?," 49-57.
Brian L. Mihura, "The Jew's Harp in Colonial America," 62-66.
No. 2 (1985)
"Obed Pickard's Jew's Harp Poem," 58-59. As recited on his classic Columbia record of 1927.
James W. Kimball, "Notes on Jew's Harp Advertising in the Mid-nineteenth Century, with an Appended
Glee," 63-75.
Frederick Crane, "The International Jew's Harp Congress 1984," 85-95, Iowa City, September 14-15.
No. 3 (1987)
"The Reverend Samuel Peters's Contributions to Jew's Harp Lore," 88-94. Including the text of "The Frogs
of Windham," the poetic account of the rout of a band of frogs by colonial Connecticuters whose militia's
band consisted of two trumpets, a drum, and numerous trumps.
"I'm a Demon on My Old Jew's Harp," 97-101. Introduction, and text of the 1923 recording by Al Bernard and Ernest Hare.
No. 4 (1994)
Robert W. Butts, "Obediah Pickard: Country Music's Master of the Trump," 18-26. With a discography, 1927-1947.
Lorne Greenwood, "The Jew's Harp in My Life," 27-37. Autobiographical notes of the Canadian traditional
musician, born 1919.
"Trump Makers of Today I," 60-62. P. 62 is on Robbie Clement, probably America's leading trump maker.
"Dvorak and the Trump?," 63-65. As imagined by the Czech-Canadian author Josef Skvorecky in his
novel Dvorak in Love.
"Jew's Harp Bill," 667-69. Text of the 1930 recording of the citybilly duo Arthur Fields and Fred Hall.
No. 5 (1996)
Frederick Crane, "Linda Robbins Coleman's Concertino for Trump and Small Orchestra," 144-147. On the work,
premiered in 1996, that remains the only composition for fully written out trump solo with orchestra.
No. 6 (1997)
Frederick Crane, "Tom Bilyeu 1915-1996," 85-88. Obituary of America's great maker-salesman-promoter of
the trump.
"An Interview with Tom Bilyeu," 89-105.
Frederick Crane, "The Trump in the Movies," 114-147. Mostly Hollywood.
No. 7 (1998)
Frederick Crane, "The Trump in American and Canadian LIterature," 8-14.
Web Sites
Jew's Harp Guild: www.cyberhighway.net/~mposs1/jhghp.html. A very rich site.
Japan Jew's Harp Association: avalon.phys.hokudai.ac.jp/throat-singing/kk/home/html.
Mostly in Japanese but with a lot in English.
Verein Mollner Maultrommelfreunde: www.stn.at/homes/Maultrommel. Mostly in German. The Verein is
hosting the Third International Trump Congress in Molln, Upper Austria in June. All the great American
trumpists will be there.
--Frederick Crane
Mt. Pleasant, Iowa
Dear fellow Sonneck members,
Until this week, the Sonneck Society has had no provision for subsidizing the publication of scores. Nonetheless,
we members have before us an opportunity to support an important publishing initiative, a new series of
reprints and editions of music scores of American music, filling the vacuum of hte now-defunct Earlier American
Music series, edited by Wiley Hitchcock, published by Da Capo Press on behalf of the Music
Library Association. Sonneck members All Benner, doing business as Conners Publications, issued the
first of the new series, Music in America, a little over a year ago. It's a reprint of the Bohemiam-American
composer Anthony Philip Heinrich's Sylviad, published in Boston, 1823-26, which has got to be
the most extraordinary opus 3 in the history of music, as well as a monument of early romanticism on both
sides of the Atlantic. Benner borrowed funds for the cost of publication, and the project will not break
even until 350 are sold. To date, however, fewer than 100 have been purchased, in a spite of a nice
review in the last issue of the Sonneck Society Bulletin. This situation is not encouraging for the
publication of further volumes in the series. No. 2 is projected to be an anthology of American music
prepared by Wallace McKenzie, and other numbers have been proposed. I hope that you will actively
support this kind of publication. Without such support, I'm afraid such projects will fail -- and this
is not in the interest of this Society or its goals. Would you check to see if your library has it?
If not, contact Conners Publications, 6780 State Rd. 57, Greenleaf WI 54126-9738. It sells for $70.95,
including shipping (email: almei@aol.com; URL: http://hostnet.pair.com/conners/index.html).
--Bunker Clark
University of Kansas
Updated 8/31/98