[+] [Unsigned]. "Larry Adler to Unveil Gershwin String Quartet at Edinburgh Festival." Variety 231 (5 June 1963): 43.
Gershwin's Lullably, for string quartet, premiered at the 1963 festival, is an early work whose primary material was later re-used by Gershwin for part of the score for the Scandals of 1922.
Index Classifications: 1900s
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
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[+] [Unsigned]. "New Gershwin Tunes Featured in Movie." Down Beat 31 (23 April 1964): 14-15.
Billy Wilder's 1964 film Kiss Me Stupid re-used some Gershwin songs used previously (during the composer's lifetime) and introduced some new ones (posthumously). The new songs were released to the public for the first time from the composer's musical notebooks.
Works: Gershwin: 'S Wonderful,I'm a Poached Egg,All the Livelong Day,Sophia.
Index Classifications: 1900s, Jazz, Film
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
Individual record
[+] Barber, Nicola J. "Brigg Fair: A Melody, Its Use and Abuse." The Grainger Journal 6 (August 1984): 3-20.
Both Percy Grainger and Frederick Delius set folksinger Joseph Taylor's rendition of the English folksong Brigg Fair.Brigg Fair is related to two other English folksongs, Maria Marten and Dives and Lazarus.Dives and Lazarus sometimes bears the title Come all you Faithful Christian Men, or in the Irish tradition, The Star in the Country.The Jolly Miller is a variant of the same melody. Grainger originally collected the folksong from Taylor in 1905 and made his setting, Brigg Fair, for tenor and mixed chorus in 1906. Delius's setting, in his Brigg Fair: An English Rhapsody, was inspired by Grainger's earlier setting and dates from 1907. Delius's setting borrows ideas from Grainger's but does not copy it stylistically.
Index Classifications: 1900s
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
Individual record
[+] McKay, David. "The Fashionable Lady: The First Opera by an American." The Musical Quarterly 65 (July 1979): 360-67.
James Ralph's (1695-1762) The Fashionable Lady (1730) should be considered the first opera by an American, not Anthony Aston's The Fool's Opera (as cited by Sonneck in his Early Opera in America). Ralph, foremost a writer, travelled with Benjamin Franklin to England beginning in 1724, and moved in circles of notable friends such as John Gay, Alexander Pope and William Hogarth. The Fashionable Lady fits into the scheme of English ballad opera of the period. Specific numbers in this opera are lifted most often from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Polly, but also from Charles Johnson's The Village Opera and Thomas Walker's The Quaker's Opera. Only one number in Ralph's work, "The Queen's Old Courtier" (Air no. 56), could possibly have been composed by Ralph; in this rare instance, the music suits Ralph's text.
Works: James Ralph: The Fashionable Lady.
Index Classifications: 1700s
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
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[+] Ould, Barry Peter. "Oh I Can't Sit Down: Version for One Piano Six Hands (From Grainger's Transcription)." The Grainger Journal 5 (November 1983): 10-14.
Between 1944 and 1951, Percy Grainger made a number of arrangements of George Gershwin's works. In addition to his Fantasy on Themes from Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and the songs The Man I Love and Love Walked In, Grainger set two other songs from Porgy and Bess independently: "Oh, I Can't Sit Down" and "Oh, Lord I'm On My Way." Grainger's Oh, I Can't Sit Down is scored for three pianists at one piano and it appears that the third part is in fact a written-out improvisation which was added to the song as it appears in his Fantasy for Two Pianos. Based on this evidence, it does not appear that Grainger ever intended to publish this arrangement. As with his Bridge on the River Kwai Marches, this setting was probably intended as yet another of his "at-home" experiments.
Works: Grainger: Porgy and Bess Fantasy, The Man I Love, Love Walked In, Oh, Lord I'm On My Way, Oh, I Can't Sit Down, Bridge on the River Kwai Marches.
Index Classifications: 1900s
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
Individual record
[+] Tibbe, Monika. Über die Verwendung von Liedern und Liedelementen in instrumentalen Symphoniesätzen Gustav Mahlers. 2d. ed. Munich: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1977.
Mahler uses material from his own songs, especially those from his song-cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, in his symphonies in three general ways: (1) as the basis of an entire movement, as in the first movement of his Symphony No. 1 (based on "Ging heut' morgen übers Feld") and the Scherzo movement of his Symphonies No. 2 and No. 3; (2) as episodes with a symphonic movement, especially as "Lindenbaum" relates to the third movement of his Symphony No. 1, second movement of his Symphony No. 2, and the third movement of his Symphony No. 5; (3) as the source of melodic elements, taken over in the symphony through emulation, direct quotation, or motivic transformation. The last section of this monograph provides a contiguous chronology of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and the Symphony No. 1.
Works: Mahler: Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 5.
Index Classifications: 1800s, 1900s
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
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[+] Youens, Susan. "Schubert, Mahler and the Weight of the Past: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Winterreise." Music and Letters 67 (July 1986): 256-68.
Mahler's first song-cycle shows strong connections with Schubert's last, notably in the texts. Mahler composed three of the four texts himself, and apparently emulated Müller directly, more so than simply picking up on general tendencies in German romantic lyric poetry. In approaching the composition of his texts, and these early songs, Mahler exhibited a latent historicism, which he may have been reluctant to admit in order to avoid comparisons to the past.
Works: Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.
Index Classifications: 1800s
Contributed by: John Andrew Johnson
Individual record
