Four Centuries of Great Music November 23, 2025 Forgotten American Composers of the 20th Century

Four Centuries of Great Music
forgotten composers Nov 23-25

Today on Four Centuries of Great Music, I am continuing the series on forgotten American composers of the 20th century. This series is based upon the premise that we should be hearing more of the music of these composers in American concert halls as their work is fundamental to the American sound in music. 

I am opening this episode with the music of Morton Gould.  Morton Gould was born in Richmond Hill neighborhood, New York  City, on December 10, 1913, Gould was recognized early on as a child prodigy with the ability to improvise and compose. At the age of six he had his first composition published. Gould’s childhood experience of watching parades of military veterans marching through his city’s streets, he turned his talents to writing memorable music for concert and marching bands.

He studied at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School).  During the Depression, teenaged Gould found work playing piano in New York's vaudeville and movie theaters. In the 1930s he began a series of programs first for WOR Mutual Radio and the CBS network. His combination of classical and popular programming reached an audience of millions.

At a time before the term “crossover music” wasn’t even an idea, Gould’s music transcended and crossed the set lines that separated “serious” from “pop”.  He integrated jazz, blues, gospel, country-and-western, and folk elements into compositions which bear his mastery of orchestration.

Gould was always open to innovative forms of creating music, he was an early advocate of stereo recording. In the 1930s he became a member of American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), Gould served on the board from 1952 until his death and was president from 1986 until 1994. Gould was a firm believer in the intellectual rights of all artists and as the dawn of the internet took shape, he used his position at ASCAP to actively lobby on behalf of the rights of all creative people to be recognized and paid for their works.

Gould’s uncompromised sense of personal integrity was in full display when in the late 1940s he refused to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, even when offered recording contracts and Broadway musicals in exchange for his testimony. It wasn’t long before he went on the Committee’s “black list”. 

Gould died on February 21, 1996, in Orlando, Florida, where he was the first resident guest composer/conductor at the Disney Institute and was in the middle of a three-day tribute honoring his music.

Gould one said "Composing is my life blood.  That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer."    Gould  also said: “I've always felt that music should be a normal part of the experience that surrounds people.”



Fall River Legend
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Prologue
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Waltzes
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Elegy
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Interlude
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Dirge
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Lullaby
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Serenade
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Axe
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Invitation to Church Social
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Church Social
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Hymnal Variations
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Cotillion
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Cotillion Code
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Death Dance
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend - Mob Scene
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend- Epilogue

Kenneth Schermerhorn conducting the Nashville Symphony Orchestra 
Morton Gould:  Fall River Legend, Jekyll and Hyde Variations
Naxos

I am opening this second hour of this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music featuring forgotten American composers of the 20th century with the music of Peter Mennin.

Peter Mennin  was born Peter Mennini, the son of Italian immigrants, on May 17, 1923, in Erie, Pennsylvania. Both of Mennin’s parents were passionate about music and supported the music education and development of their children. In fact,  his older brother Louis Mennini also became a poser and music educator. 

Musically gifted from an early age, Peter started his first orchestral piece at eleven and completed his first symphony (out of nine he would eventually write) before his 19th birthday. He began his studies at the Oberlin Conservatory when he was 16, but left in 1941 to join the U. S. Army Air Force. He continued his studies with Howard Hanson at the Eastman School of Music, where he received his BA and master's degree in 1945.

His Third Symphony, was finished the day he turned 23 and was written for his PhD requirements at Eastman. The work was performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1947, and immediately catapulted him to music prominence. After receiving his Doctorate also in 1947, he accepted an invitation from William Schuman to join the composition faculty of The Juilliard School. 

In order to fit composition into his busy teaching schedule, he developed the habit of writing early in the morning or late at night. He worked away from the piano, writing directly onto the full score. He had completed 6 full symphonies before the age of thirty. Mennin wrote nine symphonies in total, several concertos, and numerous works for wind band, chorus, and other ensembles. His style became more chromatic and astringent with time, but was always essentially tonal, relying heavily on polyphony.  Many of his major works won awards, and were performed repeatedly by America’s leading conductors and orchestras, and quite a few were recorded as well. 

The Juilliard Review published an analytical study, “The Music ofPeter Mennin,” by Walter Hendl, who concluded by stating, “There is no doubt in my mind that [Mennin’s music] is, and will continue to be, one of the dominant expressions of the creative activity of our times.” In an essay, “The Symphony in America,” composer and musicologist Peter Jona Korn cited Mennin as “America’s outstanding younger symphonist.” Life Magazine featured a spread (with photographs by Gordon Parks) highlighting nine American composers who “stand out” as the most prominent at the time. The first page featured Mennin, the youngest of the group, “a fast-moving symphonist.” 

In 1958, he was named Director of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and in 1962 became President of the Juilliard School, a position he held until his death of pneumonia in 1983.


Peter Mennin:  Symphony No. 3 - I. Allegro robusto
Peter Mennin:  Symphony No. 3 - II.  Andante moderato
Peter Mennin:  Symphony No. 3 - III.  Allegro assai
Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz
Mennin: Moby Dick - Symphonies Nos. 3 and 7
Naxos

Next on this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music exploring  the music of forgotten American composers of the 20th century. Is the music of Vittorio Giannini.

Giannini was born in Philadelphia on October 19, 1903 to a very musical family. His mother was a violinist, his father was was an opera singer and founder of the Verdi Opera House in Philadelphia. Vittorio's two sisters were celebrated singers as well. One sister taught Voice at the Curtis Institute for 40 years and the other sang throughout Europe, until moving to the United States to sing with the Metropolitan Opera, and finally to spend her remaining years teaching. This sister was a pivotal figure in the success of some of her brother's operas and primeired the lead female role in his first two operas.

Giannini began as a violinist under the tutelage of his mother and studied violin and composition at the Milan Conservatory on scholarship, and then took  his graduate degree at the Juilliard School. 

His compositions span opera, art songs, and a wide range of instrumental music.  He then began to focus on instrumental works, many show a fondness for infusing Baroque forms with a romantic warmth. During his last few years he revealed a more serious side to his creative personality, broadening his tonal language with greater harmonic dissonance and melodic chromaticism, in the service of greater expressive depth, all within a romantic aesthetic framework. Among those considered his greatest works are the vocal monodrama The Medead, Psalm 130 for double-bass or cello and orchestra, and his Symphony No. 5. In addition to his seven symphonies (of which only the last five were numbered), he composed 15 operas and several concerti, as well as music for chorus, solo piano, and chamber ensembles. During the last eight years of his life he composed five works for wind band and, ironically, they are his most widely performed compositions today. One, his Symphony No. 3 (1958), has become a staple of the band repertoire. Despite the wide range of his output, little of his other music is in the active repertoire.

He returned to Juilliard to teach, moving on to the Manhattan School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music. His students included Herbie Hancock, Nicolas Flagello, John Corigliano, and  Adolphus Hailstork among others.   Giannini was the founder and first president of the North Carolina School of the Arts in 1965, which he envisioned as a type of Juilliard of the South, bringing artists such as cellist Irving Klein and violinist Ruggiero Ricci to teach there. However he died prematurely of natural causes on November 28, 1966, at the age of 63 the morning after arriving back in New York City from Winston-Salem, N.C. to meet with his publisher according to his obituary in the New York Times.

Today we will be listening to his Concerto Grosso which is in three movements
Vittorio Giannini:  Concerto Grosso- Allegro
Vittorio Giannini:  Concerto Grosso - Moderato
Vittorio Giannini:  Concerto Grosso - Allegro con brio
New Russia Orchestra  conducted by David Amos
GIANNINI: Concerto Grosso / Prelude and Fugue / FLAGELLO,: Serenata / GOULD: Harvest
Albany Records


We will close this episode of Four Centuries of Great Music exploring  the music of forgotten American composers of the 20th century. Is the music of Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison was born in Portland, Oregon on May 14, 1917.  The family supported Harrison’s interest in music paying for private piano lessons.  The family moved to San Francisco where Harrison was exposed to a wide range of oriental influences. After graduating high school in 1934, Harrison enrolled in San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). It was there where he took Henry Cowell's "Music of the Peoples of the World" course being offered by the UC Berkeley Extension. Harrison quickly became one of Cowell's most enthusiastic students, and Cowell subsequently appointed Harrison as class assistant.  Harrison asked Cowell for private composition lessons which started a lifelong friendship that lasted until Cowell died of cancer in 1965.

Harrison moved first to Los Angeles and then to New York City and his first published works were in his experimental and free-wheeling style which flourished during this period, with pieces like the Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra (1940) and Labyrinth (1941).

He moved back to California in the early 1950s and rejected the dissonant idiom he had previously cultivated, and turned toward a more sophisticated melodic lyricism in diatonic and pentatonic scales. This put him sharply at odds with the then-current academic styles, and set him apart from the ultramodernist composers he had studied and associated with.  It was also during this time that he began incorporating gamelan music timbres into his compositions.  In the 1960s he added compositions for Chinese instruments and the gamelan.  His compositions ranged from chamber music to orchestral music, vocal music, keyboard music and music for percussion ensembles.

He died of a heart attack on February 2, 2003 after stopping at a Denny's in Lafayette, Indiana for lunch. While inside, Harrison began experiencing unexpected chest pains and collapsed on the scene. He was pronounced dead by the paramedics.

Lou Harrison: Concerto in slendro -  I. Allegro vivo
Lou Harrison: Concerto in slendro - II. Molto adagio
Lou Harrison: Concerto in slendro -  III. Allegro, molto vigoroso

Maria Bachmann, Barry Jekowsky & California Symphony Orchestra. Lou Harrison - A Portrait    Decca Music Group