Religion and Ethics Forum
General Category => Literature, Music, Art & Entertainment => Topic started by: Nearly Sane on August 15, 2018, 12:44:30 PM
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But indeed someone I was unaware of till today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Coleridge-Taylor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkqaSqwHlsw
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Interesting, and a little sad.
My first job was with the PRS.
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Interesting, and a little sad.
My first job was with the PRS.
Yes, it is sad. Weirdly I found out about him because so read a tweet from Floella Benjamin (who I don't follow) about the fact that she has been trying to get someone to make a film about him for ages, and has just had another rejection.
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But indeed someone I was unaware of till today.
Between the Wars, his Hiawatha was very popular - not surprising given that it was championed by Malcolm Sargent.
And Elgar thought highly of him as well.
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Between the Wars, his Hiawatha was very popular - not surprising given that it was championed by Malcolm Sargent.
And Elgar thought highly of him as well.
And yet I had managed to get a chunky percentage through my three score and ten with no clue to his existence, and I doubt I'm alone
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And yet I had managed to get a chunky percentage through my three score and ten with no clue to his existence, and I doubt I'm alone
That feels like a fashion thing. His work fell out of fashion?
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That feels like a fashion thing. His work fell out of fashion?
Assume so. Listening to his stuff, I can't see anything that might explain that but then I suppose fashion is inexplicable.
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Between the Wars, his Hiawatha was very popular - not surprising given that it was championed by Malcolm Sargent.
And Elgar thought highly of him as well.
Indeed, and I think it was down to Elgar that his career gained a much needed boost. Can't think of that many black classical composers over the centuries, apart from the French creole violin virtuoso and composer Chevalier Saint-Georges.
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Assume so. Listening to his stuff, I can't see anything that might explain that but then I suppose fashion is inexplicable.
The tenor aria from Hiawatha "Onaway, awake beloved" has always been popular with those classically trained, high-voiced males. Rightly so - it's a lovely thing. The whole work is worth more than a bit of curiosity value. More so than the Longfellow poem on which it is based, I'd say.
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I believe that Sargent's interwar performances of Hiawatha were given in a semi-staged format (rather like John Wilson's Broadway musicals at the Proms). This would probably make them more generally accessible than would conventional concert performances.
Incidentally, Longfellow is commemorated, with a bust, in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. This seems rather strange since he was not British. (Yes, T S Eliot is also in Poet's Corner - but he did become a British citizen and, indeed, very English.)