WOSU CLASSICAL RADIO INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT, "OBSCURE COMPOSERS"

Both WOSU Classical Columbus, Ohio, and WFMT Classical Chicago included our new book Obscure Composers in their spring pledge drives.  The author of our foreword, Henry Fogel, former CEO of the Chicago Symphony, discussed the book on WFMT in the 8 a.m. hour, March 31;  two weeks earlier, I was interviewed by WOSU's a.m. program host, Boyce Anderson (you can hear the 32:15 recording at sarkett.com/oc).  Meanwhile, here is a transcript:


BOYCE ANDERSON
I'm speaking with John Sarkett, who is the author of a book called "Obscure Composers". Welcome you first of all, to Classical 101, John...

JS
Well, thanks so much for having me, Boyce. I appreciate it.

BOYCE ANDERSON
I find it fascinating as I look at the various books you've written that music is just one aspect of what seems to be a pretty wide range of interests. Sports comebacks, Bible prophecy, but also you get into trading and the financial markets, which I assume is where your main work lies.

JS
Yes, that has been the case, so I have several volumes on that. One thing led to another. I worked with Sourcebooks, out of Naperville, Illinois, back in 2007 when I published my first book, Extraordinary Comebacks. Turns out I had been tearsheeting, and marking, and saving books with remarkable comeback stories for years and years and all of a sudden the thought was catalyzed in my mind to produce it as a book. And it was reasonably successful, and one thing led to another. And now I think there are 24 titles up on sarkett.com.

BOYCE ANDERSON (laughs)
So you find something catches your interest and you look and you say, 'oh boy, I think I have a book here waiting to be assembled.'

JS
I think that's a good way to put it Boyce. You know, with respect to Obscure Composers, the one we're talking about today, I've been a lifelong fan of classical music, but rather heavily tilted to the favorites. For example, when I turned on our classical station here in Chicago this morning came on Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, certainly one of my very favorite pieces, and everyone's favorite piece and I've probably heard it 8,000 times. A while back, I was listening to classical radio, and I heard a work and it was rather different, and it just occurred to me "what is this?" and I tried to catch the announcement at the end of the piece and I thought the announcer said "Symphonica Rusticana" but it was "Symphonica Romantica" by Kurt Atterberg. And I realized that in some 40 years of listening to classical, attending concerts, listening all the time to classical radio I'd never really heard the name "Kurt Atterberg." And he was fairly famous in the mid-20th century. His works were performed by the likes of Toscanini and others. He won a famous contest and so forth. And it got me to thinking, Boyce, how many other such composers are out there that I've never really heard of that have something incredible and worthwhile to say that really spoke to me. One thing led to another and I was off on this safari.

BOYCE ANDERSON
It is a fascinating thing to begin thinking about some of this, because you think, ok, because you have all of these composers who were writing in like, the Baroque period, like Bach and Vivaldi, and others, but you think, somewhere along the line, there had to be others, beyond just Bach, Vivaldi, Telemann, and on up into Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. And you think, well, and you begin to look at their students, and at their teachers, and the people who were working in other churches, there were, I mean, music was everywhere.

JS
Indeed, it was everywhere. And you mention, in my opinion, and the opinion of others, the greatest composer -- ever-- Bach. Interestingly, one of the things that was brought back to my attention, I think I knew this vaguely but I went back and researched it, but Bach, during his lifetime was regarded as well....no J.S. Bach. Incredible as it is even just to say this, he was regarded as something of an ..... average composer. He was passed over for an important musical post that he wanted for the likes of Telemann, who is a familiar musical name, but also another individual by the name of Graupner, who I'm pretty sure most classical listeners are not book, chapter and verse with. But then, after his passing, a lot of his manuscripts were lost, and it took almost 75 years for Mendelssohn to take up his cause by presenting his St. Matthew Passion in the 19th century. So, the ebb and flow of fame, is a rather fascinating theme here. People who were very, very famous in their day might be forgotten today. And similarly, people who were rather overlooked in their own time, have become immortals in the case of Bach, and just plain more famous in the case of others. It is a real sociology study here.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Something that is very fascinating in classical radio is that if you bring in someone in programming who wants to go with the favorites, and maybe you haven't been doing that, you get this huge bump in listenership for a short period of time and then you go through them again and again and again, and things begin to drop off. And I think that your book really points out to us that people like Purcell and Graupner and Buxtehude and composers like that are not only what makes music interesting and they put a lot of the names we do know into context and perspective.

JS
Oh yes. And I'm not suggesting that I've found 50 or 100 composers that excel Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartok. That's not the case, but when we, as you point out, Boyce, when we listen to their works, our minds are refreshed, reinvigorated, we hear things a little differently, and certainly we're going to go back and hear the great works. As we should. And we're going to be that much more informed and enlivened by them. That has been the case with me, and others have told me the same. It's a profitable business to expand our awareness.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Well, it is, and it's far more entertaining and interesting when you go to the concert hall if you do that if you have something you recognize and then you hear and say "wow I didn't know that Guillaume Dufay wrote anything like this. I was just looking at your list of questions about forgotten composers -- they used his tombstone to cover a well?

JS
Amazingly, yes, if you want to talk about obscurity...you can really be forgotten. Well, just think of in our own case, aside from music, if each of us were asked to write an essay about our great great great grandparents, where would we begin? We probably don't, we barely know their names, if that, and nothing about them. So, in the case here, of 500 or 1000 years, you can truly be forgotten. But it raises other and interesting questions: what is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of one's work....time here on planet earth? One can get rather philosophical rather quickly in this, so another sort of a dividend in studying these so-called obscure composers.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Well then, one name that you brought up that I found very interesting is one that we don't think of as "obscure" because we hear the New York Philharmonic so much -- is Leonard Bernstein. There's a lot of his music, while we know a lot of it, there's a lot we don't know.

JS
Yes, and interestingly, for someone who was so famous, so celebrated, as a stage composer, West Side Story and so forth, and as a conductor, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of recordings, one of his regrets, at the end of his life, one of the things he rued was that his classical writing wasn't taken all that seriously. It really stuck in his craw. So you never know what's inside someone's head -- what they aspire to be known for. All the fame, all this money, and he had this regret.

BOYCE ANDERSON
I think there are a lot of composers that have that thought, even the composers that we do know, of course, the things that they think people should pay attention to are oftentimes not the things that people want to hear. Holst, like that with The Planets. He grew to despise The Planets because that's what everyone wanted to hear, and he'd written so many other things. I was looking through your list here and there's one that is familiar to those of us who are in radio but no so generally familiar: Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Tell me a little bit as you can remember about him.

JS
Well, Gottschalk was a fantastic composer. He was educated and grew up in New Orleans. Went off to Europe, was turned away from the Paris Conservatoire because the director there thought all Americans were savages, and illiterate. Uneducated. Eventually he got private tutoring in Paris, and he was a tremendous talent and a tremendous composer, and then he toured the world. And died much too young. But left behind a large body of work that's just now in recent times getting more attention. And as people aspire to put forth, quote, "an American music" his certainly was. He was American and a lot of second and third hearings are taking place. He is a very good exemplar of the whole "Obscure Composers" concept.

BOYCE ANDERSON
And, in his day, for lack of a better way to put it, a bit of a rock star.

JS
Indeed, he really was, he got a lot of attention, traveled, really, the whole world, performing his works.

BOYCE ANDERSON
I'm looking at a couple of others, back in the earlier part of your book, in the baroque and in the classical. Is there a composer around the time of Haydn or Mozart that really caught your attention as to why isn't this person's music being heard more?

JS
Interestingly, we can touch on this if we have a bit more time, but I consider this work not be just my own vision but the collaboration of others. And I can cite a lot of other names that have contributed to this book, but one of the things that I did was that I put forth the idea on a very active website by the name of violinist.com, and I was floored, Boyce, some 50 people took the time and trouble to write back to me about their particular favorite obscure composer. This sort of touches a nerve with people because the very knowledgeable listeners and performers do have partisan views about their favorite obscure composers. One of these was Josef Boulogne, who also attained the title Le Chevalier de St. Georges. He was called, in his time, the "black Mozart." He was the son of a Frenchman, who was a plantation owner, and a black mother, who was raised here in the States, but went off to Europe for his education. He was as good a swordsman as he was a composer and musician. He was famous for both and he wrote some really entertaining violin concertos. And I had never heard his name in some 40 years of listening, attending and studying music. So that's just one, a fascinating study, there's a lot to that one.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Another name that, since we are speaking on St. Patrick's Day, that has come up is a name that I always enjoy hearing from, and a name that we don't hear very often, except around this time is John Field. He had a huge impact in the piano world....

JS
Oh my...and of course, when we think of the nocturne we only think of Chopin, but interestingly, it was Field who invented the form. And he was widely known in Europe and among Liszt and Chopin and others of their ilk at that time, but it's a name that sort of ... has dwindled ... as you point out, not as famous now, perhaps, as he was in his own time. But someone, again, that can be revisited, we can look at his output and be informed and reinvigorated by it. And, if nothing else, come back to Chopin and Liszt, and the other immortals with a more informed and enlightened view.

BOYCE ANDERSON
And another thing, sometimes I think it just takes us a while to grow into these composers. Or --- it's like, you know, the prophet in his own land sometimes is not listened to. There was one composer in your list you mentioned a little bit later on in your list -- that I'm looking at here -- that it took them some 11 years to discover what turned out to be one of his greatest compositions. Papers were just stacked up at his brother's house....

JS
Oh, you're speaking of Schubert, of course...

BOYCE ANDERSON
Yes.

JS
...who a....such a fantastic output for someone who died so young, at 30 or 31 (note: it was 31). Schubert famously said his purpose was, he was put on earth to write music. And as soon as he would finish one piece he would write another. This is how he wrote some 900+ Deutsche numbers, D. catalog, now. He really heard only a fraction of his symphonies. And his Symphony No. 8, the Unfinished, sat for 40 years without a performance. And No. 9, for 10 years. And yes, Schumann was with his brother, rifling around in his papers, and came across this, and was thunderstruck at what he'd stumbled over and sought to bring it to the wider world, and thank goodness that he did.

BOYCE ANDERSON
It is amazing to me some of the things that have been buried, and who knows what has yet to be discovered. They're still occasionally pulling up a little something by Beethoven or Haydn so there could be thousands of these things out there.

JS
A lot of the composers that I've come across, Boyce, their output has been lost. I mentioned Josef Boulogne. He wrote more than 200 works, but only 80 remained. Of Bach's cantatas, he wrote 300, we have only 200 left. So, yes, I'm like you, I see every once in a blue moon in the media, a new work by Beethoven, a new work by Mozart found, or claim to be found. And this is the work of musicologists, and they make entire careers of arguing over and researching just who wrote what. So we'll leave that to them, but I totally agree with you.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Well, and it's very interesting, things that happened then, and still are happening to us today. A couple of years ago, I was moving something in the closet and I found this ring that I had been missing for 15 years. How in the world did this get in here! Well, it fell out of something and there it was. And not only the closets but at least according to one composer's legacy, you need to check the freezer once in a while....

JS
Oh, you're thinking of Vincent Persichetti, who had a large output, he was a fantastic educator ...the accolades that accrue to him as being a teacher are just stupendous. People thought he was a fabulous teacher and a wonderful human being, and he wrote widely, creatively, many kinds of classical music, and for some reason, and I didn't find the exact reason, he wrapped one of his last pieces, a work for harpsichord, in tin foil and put it away in his freezer. It was found some time after his passing, so when you say there are works out there still to be found, apparently, that has indeed been the case. And by the way, I had exactly the same experience as you did, Boyce. I wrote something, a fiction work, when I was very young, lost it, always wondered what became of it, and several months ago I was going through a box and there it was stuck in a folder with a bunch of other papers ...so it's a remarkable feeling, almost like talking to a voice from the past. A fabulous feeling to find something that you've lost. And I think in a sense, we can say, you know....one of the people I cite in the book is James Conlon, music director of the Ravinia Festival here, the L.A. Opera, a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. He has done a lot in this area. He, in fact, has created a foundation to advance the cause of composers who have not gotten their due, particularly those of Jewish extraction in WWII who were persecuted and put to death by the Nazis. And he says in one of his essays, you know, that some people say that all the great works, we know them all. They persist, they've made their way to us. He says this is a ridiculous statement because humanity has lost entire civilizations, the complete cultural output of entire civilizations like, if you think of native American peoples, like the Anasazis, of the Southwest, of the Aztecs, of the Mayas, I mean much of what they put out --- gone. So to say every great work of classical music, 'we already know it' and 'we have it' and if it hadn't been great, we wouldn't have lost it is just not true. So there really is worth in prospecting, unearthing the works of the past that we have missed. And going back and giving a rehearing to others that are out there but that we haven't, you know, fully grasped and appreciated.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Well, when we listen to them now...maybe with different ears than we did even 10 years ago.

JS
That's really the case. I'm thinking not many years ago the serialists, composers, kind of ruled in the classical world. And I think -- I can't document this or measure it but my sense is that the tonalists and traditionalists and the neo-classicists have gained some ground back in the time since. So, that's one thing I've learned, and hopefully it comes through in this book. Things that we thought, for sure, that we knew....who was great, and who was lesser and who was unworthy, can get turned upside down given 50 or 100 or 200 or 300 years. And we do hear it differently.

BOYCE ANDERSON
We do. And we spoke a moment ago about Leonard Bernstein, not only as a composer but also as a conductor, and there was another conductor, whose name kind of disappeared for a long time, at least in his day, maybe better known as a conductor than as a composer. And that was Gustav Mahler.

JS
Indeed. In his own time, as you well know, Boyce, he was mostly known as a conductor. And he wrote his classical works on his summer vacations! Quite remarkably....and, he was not quite as obscure as some. But it took until the 60s really for Bernstein to take up his cause for him to become famous, and then the bravura recordings of Solti in Chicago, and others, in the 70s, 80s, and so forth. And Mahler is, I think we would agree, completely an immortal by this time. So, sometimes, it takes about 100 years. Interestingly, I came across an article in Musical Quarterly from about 100 years ago, and the author of that article was suggesting that people give another hearing to names like Stenhammar, Medtner, Szymanowski. Those are names that have not become musical immortals of the weight of like a Mahler or a Bruckner. They are known, especially among afficianadoes, they're still there, but 100 years ago someone was writing and saying, 'you really should listen to these guys, they're great.' Similarly, in the same article if you can believe this, Boyce, he predicts the demise, the complete end of listening to the music of Puccini.

BOYCE ANDERSON (laughs)

JS
And this individual went on to become the music historian of the Library of Congress. Not just a listener, this was a very educated, erudite, musical person. So, whatever we think we might think today, or think we know for sure today, come back in 100 years ... may not be the case at all. I think I can safely say today to you, and that we could agree, Puccini is a musical immortal.

BOYCE ANDERSON (laughs)
I think we could agree on that, yes. It is amazing sometimes how ... not only what they say is going to disappear, but what people say is going to be around long after we're gone -- and here we are maybe five or ten years later, and folks are saying "who?"

JS
Is is an astonishment, believe me. It never fails to amaze me.

BOYCE ANDERSON
One of the composers whose name really became prominent once again some decades ago because of "Amadeus" was Antonio Salieri. It's one of those names we know, but we really don't know that much about him.

JS
Yes, and I think the musical public first heard his name famous movie of some years ago -- "Amadeus". And he's one of the ones I went back and revisited because I knew the name, and I knew nothing else. In fact, when I'm reading about a lot of composers, I saw on the Internet, a person talking about David Diamond, the American composer. Person said: "well, I know the name, but I don't know any of his works." That's how it was with Salieri for me, but I went back, I listened to them, I write about him in the book, very interesting and worthwhile composer. There are so many like that, Boyce.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Muzio Clementi is one that comes to mind, he built a lot of pianos and things such as that ... a huge piano manufacturer, but he wrote over 100 piano sonatas --- a name that we really don't often pay that much attention to.

JS
That's right, we might know the phrase "Gradus ad Parnassum", his set of 100 exercises and etudes, but I actually listened to them all, and more than once, and I'll tell you what, they sound better than exercises, they're real music and very interesting. While we're on that subject, etudes, I came across a Russian composer, Sergei Lyapunov. Not a familiar name to many, but he wrote a set of Transcendental Etudes, and when we hear that name we immediately think of Liszt, and his fantastic set, but Lyapunov wrote his in the keys that Liszt didn't.

BOYCE ANDERSON (laughs)

JS
And you know they're not a level with Liszt but the last three are pretty fantastic. And then there was a composer in the 20th century by the name of Sorabji, not a familiary name to me. I researched him, listened to him, can you believe it, wait for this....... he wrote a set of 100 Transcendental Etudes. He was a complete eccentric. He was a recluse, he posted a sign outside his house, "No Visitors!" He got into rows and rails with music critics and so forth, an irascible, strange, and eccentric person....but a whole universe of music here. And he has his partisans, he has his fans, people who took on the Big Repertory like John Ogden, and others, who played Busoni, and Sorabji, this is a name worthy of that, like Alkan, Alkan, Busoni, Sorabji, these are huge, dense, thick piano works. There is a story behind each of these composers. But if you encounter nothing but the Busoni Bach transcriptions, which are known, but are perhaps not played as much as one might imagine, except in certain piano competitions -- fantastic stuff. Well worth one's time seeking out these, and I talk about each of these in the book. Alkan, Busoni, Sorabji, and many others. In fact, you say, how many do you have? I have 79 chapters, but then I have a lot of other recommendations from the people who have contributed. And then I have a wonderful chapter by Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International in the UK. He suggests yet another 40 composers, so taken all together, some 200 composers are cited in my book. I think to really do it justice all you would need to do is live 200 lifetimes and you could really master this music.

BOYCE ANDERSON
And so you're going to have to get on it, and start taking your vitamins, and doing your exercises. Correct?

JS
Well, I'm being facetious of course. Suffice to say, once you kind of get hooked down this road, you'll never lack for activity or a new composer or a new work to listen to and then listen again, and allow it to seep into your consciousness, and hopefully make a dent.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Well, that's the thing that I appreciate about this book. It is the stories such as these that bring these composers off the written page and off the manuscript and make them living people. They were all living people just like us, they had their foibles, they had their faults, but they had their incredible skills and it is this that I think will make the music come to life and will help it live on long beyond all of us.

JS
Yes, and not every composer, Boyce, it almost goes without saying, is going to speak to everyone. In my case, I can think of three composers in the book that are real, real finds for me. Holmboe, Mompou and Diamond. There are others, too, but if you can find one or two or three or four or five composers that you really like and that really speak to you, I mean, this will be well worth the endeavor. I made a friend of an opera singer, Todd Thomas, who sings in a small opera company in New York, I think it's called Teatro Grattacielo and their slogan is "maybe you've haven't heard your favorite opera yet." And I think, wonderful thought, and you can translate that to classical music. Maybe you haven't heard your favorite composer yet, or symphony, or sonata. If you only listen to the Brahms Second, which I'm going to put myself up first among the guilty over the years, you know, if you're only listening to the Brahms Second and the Beethoven Seventh and so on, you're not going to get these experiences. I just think it's more fun, more interesting, to encounter a new voice, a new composer rather than listen to the Brahms Second for the 800th time. Does that make sense?

BOYCE ANDERSON
It makes perfect sense. In fact, the interesting thing that came up just this last weekend, I played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the air, and of course we all focus on that opening movement. But I have fallen in love, after hearing it performed live a couple of times, with the final two movements. And they say things to me that the first movement doesn't. And I think it's just because of the familiarity. But getting further into that piece of music and really living with it for a while you say 'wow, there's more to this than I ever imagined possible.'

JS
Totally agree. I can still remember, and perhaps with a few goosebumps, first time encountering Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It is the immortal work from the immortal composer himself. The ne plus ultra, if you will. And we're always going to go back to that, Boyce, we're never going to give it up. And I'm just saying the company of composers is a little bigger than that, little more interesting....just in terms of humanity, and experience, it's like you wouldn't want to only read Shakespeare, you'd want to read some of the other authors, modern ones, too. Hilary Hahn, perhaps you've played it on WOSU, did an interesting project in recording recently. She laid down encores from 27 living composers. All their names would be considered obscure in that they are not famous like Bach and Beethoven. But I mean, in their own worlds, they're famous. But we talk about that a little bit, too. Part of the exercise, I think, is giving a bit of recognition to something we hear about all the time in classical music ... 'you've got to hear modern works, you've got to listen to modern composers' because if you don't, how are they going to write? I think that's valid. They don't have to be 1,000 or 500 years old, could be a person living in your own town or community. You might want to give his or her work a listen, too.

BOYCE ANDERSON
I'd like before we wrap up, you've mentioned a couple of composers here who we've not spoken about yet. Give me a little look into your take on Holmboe and Mompou.

JS
Ah, well. Holmboe...neither name was familiar to me at all. I stumbled across Holmboe, I forget how, but what a wonderful facility for writing symphonically and for winds. He has concertos for every woodwind and brass instrument it would seem. And these are neoclassical in style, bright, energetic, upbeat, propulsive, motivic, rhythmic pieces. And then Mompou was a fascinating individual, from the 20th century, Catalan, and he went to the Paris Conservatoire, but he had something of a shy and retiring nature. He was not really cut out for the life of a touring rock star, like Liszt was. He turned his imagination to composition, which we're glad he did, because he wrote a moderate sized output of really different sounding music. 20th century but it's not serial it's more tonal, but something like Satie who was an early influence but essentially Spanish, Catalan, wonderful reflective, introspective, almost like the philosophic thoughts of his mind being expressed on a sonic palette. Wonderful stuff. So those are two names that I could easily recommend for a hearing to anyone. There are others. But the thing is to not go listen to what I like per se but to seek out voices and sounds that make sense and resonate with their own mind, and heart, and spirit. If we do that, in this project, I'll be exceedingly amply rewarded.

BOYCE ANDERSON
Well John Sarkett, I appreciate the book "Obscure Composers". I think our audience is going to appreciate it and maybe go on their own bit of exploration as you did as they read and listen to some of these composers who hopefully will not then be as obscure as they are now, and I thank you for your time.

JS
Oh you're welcome, Boyce, anytime, thank you so much for having me.

5, 167 words, transcribed, Friday, April 11, 2014.