My wife, R. S. Perry, published a book in 1974 entitled Charles Ives and the American Mind. Her book is a very broad and knowledgeable study on American Transcendentalism and its impact on creative artists such as the composer Charles Ives. I have started re-editing that book for a second edition that will be published soon. Stay tuned for more as I make progress on that project. I will occasionally post some quotes from her book here on a new page that I will mount shortly called R.S. Perry’s Charles Ives.
More Tales of Old Town Bluffton is my newest book about the South Carolina Lowcountry. It is now available on amazon.com, along with all my other books. The first 31 pages can be viewed by clicking on Amazon’s Look Inside feature on their website.
My new book, Tales of Old Town Bluffton, The Complete Writings of Andrew Peeples, is now available in paperback from Amazon Books.Andrew Peeples’ stories are full of early twentieth century small town local color. He was born in 1905 in Bluffton, SC, and raised on Calhoun Street (the main street) in the house shown below. He was the seventh son in a family of fourteen children. He graduated from Bluffton High School and later from the University of South Carolina. For many years he worked as the Health Education Director for the South Carolina State Board of Health.
As some of you know I have long been interested in American Neo-Romantic orchestral music. So much so that I started a study over ten years ago and have been working on the book, off and on, ever since that time. (There was a lot of down time!) I finally decided to finish the project! If you ever wondered what Neo-Romantic music is, or just want to know more about it, my new book, Ethnic Influences on Musical Style, Three American Neo-Romantics,is now available on Amazon Books. The cover art is by my wife, R. S. Perry.
The three American Neo-Romantic composers that I discuss are Ernest Bloch, William Grant Still, and Samuel Barber. It is a small and affordable book. (122 pages, $7.95) I plan on making it available as an e-book soon. Stay tuned, or just check back on Amazon from time to time.
When I compose music, I sign it as J. S. Graves. When I write a book or an article I sign it as John Samuel Graves III. It’s kind of complicated. Perhaps I will explain it some day in this blog.
On April 4, 1951 at 3:30 P. M., my brothers and I experienced a trauma that marked us for life: our father took us by force on our way home from school in Philadelphia and brought us back 700 miles to his and our home: Bluffton, SC. My twin brother and I were nine and one-half years old, and my younger brother was only six. None of us, including our father and mother, ever fully recovered from that event and the subsequent custody battles that followed.
John Samuel Graves, Jr., my father, and Florence Rubert, my mother, married on June 25, 1939. After 11 years of marriage my mother decided she wanted to think things over. She and my father agreed to a trial 3 month separation, and on June 3, 1950, Mother took us north to stay with her sister, her mother, and her grandmother. After about 10 months had passed without our father being allowed to see us he became convinced that he had to take matters into his own hands: he would return us to our ancestral South Carolina home. The details of that story are presented in my new book, Testimony of the Infant Children, the Untold Story, a non-fictional account of those and previous times in the Lowcounty town of Bluffton, South Carolina. The second edition will soon be available. Stay tuned.
For more information about the people described in my book please visit The Real People in my New Booktab on graveshouse.org.
My book is now available in its Second Edition on Amazon Books. Amazon’s Look Inside feature allows a viewer to read substantial portions of the book’s text. Please take a look! The Second Edition in not primarily different from the first edition. It has been re-edited for spelling, grammatical and formatting issues. The Second Edition also contains photographs that were not in the earliest versions of the book. Some of these additions and corrections have been posted for quite some time on graveshouse.org . See page Testimony Back Story & Photos.
Nature often seems to ignore
whatever is going on in our lives.
It just keeps “pushing things up.”
Nature is “by nature” hopeful!
These photos are of things that have just “appeared” in our yard in the last month – without invitation or prodding. Somehow – like music – they just seem to “always be there for us, if we will just look and listen.”
If anyone knows what exactly these plants are please let me know. When using my contact form please include “plant names” in your first line. I get a lot of junk mail in my contact form and I may inadvertently delete your email. Thanks.
The Heart of a Woman,The Life and music of Florence B. Price
New book by Rae Linda Brown, recently published by University of Illinois Press, 2020, now at the Central Arkansas Library.
Florence B. Price (April 9, 1887-June 3, 1953) and William Grant Still (May 11, 1895-December 3, 1978) were raised in the same Little Rock neighborhood and were lifelong friends. Both can be viewed as Neo-Romantic composers.
According to Brown:
“Florence Price was the most widely known African American woman composer from the 1930s to her death in 1953. She achieved national recognition when her Symphony in E Minor was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1913…The concert marked the first performance of a large-scale work by a black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra.”
“I have told Florence Price’s story in the fullest context of her life as an African American woman in the vibrant cities in which she lived – in Little Rock, Boston, Atlanta and Chicago. Only through an understanding of the social, political and economic milieu can the reader more fully appreciate Price’s music and the context in which it was written. Particular attention is given to the black classical music tradition in these cities, which is often overshadowed by the proliferation of jazz, blues and gospel music.”
Remarkably, Price completed over 300 works in diverse genres: 4 symphonies, orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, including arrangements of spirituals, a piano sonata, a piano concerto, violin concertos, a piano quintet, multiple works for the organ and more. Brown gives a great deal of attention to the analysis of some of Price’s major works. Much of Price’s music can now be seen and heard on youtube.com.
Price’s story is a cautionary tale about what can happen to one’s artistic output if steps are not taken to preserve it while one is alive! If it hadn’t been for a chance find in 2009 by a new owner of an abandoned vacation cottage once used by Price much of her music would have been lost. They found many previously unknown pieces, including two violin concertos and her Fourth Symphony. Much of Price’s work is now archived at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
Our own Linda Holzer, Professor of Piano and Music at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has often championed American composers, especially women composers. She has featured works by Florence Price on many of her recitals. Her Doctoral Dissertation Treatise was entitled Selected Solo Piano Music of Florence B. Price. Watch for future recitals of Price’s music and please visit Professor Holzer’s website: http://www.lindaholzermusic.com/
In an attempt to clarify some of the confusion surrounding the word tonal, Walter Simmons describes two basic kinds of tonality:1
the strict constructionist position which dates from 18th century Germany and Austria, where “a primary tonal center serves as an overall organizing principle, unifying all other aspects of a composition,” and
the loose constructionist position which refers to “all music in which tension/resolution expectations rooted in tonal harmony play a role in the expressive impact of a composition.” This kind of tonality permits the use of atonality “as an expressive device within a tonal composition, in passages where the subjective experience of a tonal center is largely absent, even though a theoretical tonic may be adduced through elaborate objective analysis.”2
The loose constructionist position on tonality most accurately describes the music of the American neo-romantic, andhighlights, for me, the most ‘neo’ part of their appellation. They are Late Romantics who, rather than being satisfied with producing music like 19th century romantics, continued to develop and evolve their, and our, sense of how tonality, harmony, rhythm, and form could be used most creatively in the 20th and now, the 21st century.
Once again, I am exceedingly indebted to Walter Simmons and his book Voices in the Wilderness, Six American Neo-Romantic Composers. I quote him liberally and highly recommend his book to anyone desiring to fully comprehend American Neo-Romanticism and the works of these six wonderful composers. Also, please visit his website https://walter-simmons.com/ for more articles and information about his mission: The discovery and promotion of 20th- and 21st-century classical music that embodies traditional aesthetic values of emotional and spiritual expression, along with clarity of formal structure and coherence.
Despite the neo prefix “the early Neo-Romantics were not reviving a style from the past—they were evolving along a continuum still very much alive.”1 They embraced many stylistic features of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and indeed knew, or knew of, many of the ‘greats’ of that period: Richard Strauss, Mahler, Stravinsky, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Debussy and Ravel, among others. Bloch and Sibelius were life long friends, and he was also personally acquainted with Debussy and very much admired the French impressionists.
Simmons “posits a Neo-Romantic ideal, in which the expression of emotion, depiction of drama, and evocation of mood are joined with, rather than opposed to, formal coherence, developmental rigor, and structural economy.”2 The American neo-romantic “tended to emphasize intense, passionate emotional expression, lavishly colored instrumental sonorities, and a rich, chromatic harmonic language derived from expanded triadic harmony.”3 Simmons further offers the following four points as the ultimate distinguishing characteristics of American neo-romantics:
Most “displayed a greater use—and a more economical and disciplined application—of classical forms and more modest durational proportions in general than their European models.”
They “display certain characteristics often identified as ‘American,’ chiefly a heightened importance of rhythmic drive—frequently irregular, asymmetrical, and syncopated—and associated with this—a greater and more varied use of percussion instruments.”
Especially by mid-century, they “expanded the harmonic language of their predecessors by raising the dissonance quotient…(often adding harshness, richness, or both), thereby expanding the expressive potential of the harmonic language.”
Finally, “the American Neo-Romantics approached the matter of tonality somewhat differently from most of their European predecessors. In the earlier music of the neo-romantics, a tonal center is usually apparent at any given moment, although such centers may shift frequently within a work or section of a work, without a primary tonic exerting a unifying or hierarchical function relative to subordinate tonal regions. In other words, rather than an overall organizing principle as in much European music, tonality functions in neo-romantic music as a local expressive device, its relative strength or weakness contributing to a sense of emotional stability or lack thereof in the work at hand. Furthermore, in later neo-romantic compositions, a subjective perception of tonality may be absent altogether for greater or lesser periods of time, allowing for the expression of more extreme emotional contrasts. But even during passages when a tonal center is largely imperceptible, subjectively experienced tensions rooted in tonal expectations serve as important expressive elements.”4
