A forum for the appreciation of all things related to the classical music of Latin America.
Born in Indiana in 1906, David Van Vactor received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1928. He spent the following year in Vienna composing and studying the flute with Josef Niedermeyer, the principal flutist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. He returned to the US and became the first flutist of the Chicago Civic Orchestra. …
Francisco Curt Lange (1903-1997) was a German-born Uruguayan musicologist. He earned a degree in architecture, and also, pursued studies in music at universities in Leipzig, Berlin, and Munich. At the university in Bonn, in 1929 he received a Ph.D. after writing a dissertation on the polyphonic nature of Dutch motets. The following year, the Uruguayan …
For a five-year period, from 1936 to 1941, Leopold Stokowski shared the conductor’s podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy. However, Stokowski’s constant tinkering with the orchestra, such as his once telling the players to sit on stage wherever they wanted, led to increasing acrimony between the two conductors. In fact, by near the …
Today, here at the University of Kansas Latin American Art Music Festival, and as part of the “Milton Steinhardt Lectures in Music” series, I gave a talk entitled, “Musicological Disparities: The State of Affairs regarding Latin American Classical Music.” My presentation was centered around the musicological tools, in English, related to the classical music of …
Another excellent day at the University of Kansas Latin American Art Music Festival! Here in this photo, you can see (most of) us rehearsing Batuque, by Oscar Lorenzo Fernández. The KU students are doing a great job, which means that it’s shaping up to be a fantastic concert this coming Monday evening on the KU …
Born Johannes Hendrikus Philip Kindler, Hans Kindler (1892-1949) was a Dutch-American cellist and conductor. A student of Belgian cellist Jean Gérardy, in 1910 he appeared as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic. However, in spite of a growing reputation on that continent, four years later he left for the United States in order to seek …
Paul Herman Apel was born in 1882 in the central German city of Gottingen. Departing from Hamburg, Germany, on board the S. S. Pretoria, he arrived in New York City on May 7, 1899. The passenger manifest noted that Apel’s ticket had been purchased by his mother, Antoinette Apel, and that his final destination was …
Born into a wealthy family on November 7, 1875, Eleanor Hague studied privately in Italy and France. During the first decade of the 20th century, she was a member of the People’s Choral Union in New York (formed in 1897 by Dr. Frank Damrosch) in which she assisted in the work of instruction. Later, she …
In 1941, two U.S. musicians, Aaron Copland and Nicolas Slonimsky, headed off to Latin America on official missions. The latter, sent out by the Fleisher Music Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, was entrusted with three missions, of which the first was to collect orchestral scores that would subsequently be copied under a Works …