GDG- "Notes of a Pianist"

[Norman Levitt]

>From: "Gitt, Doug" <dgitt at state.pa.us>
>Reply-To: GDG <gettysburg at arthes.com>
>To: <gettysburg at arthes.com>
>Subject: GDG- "Notes of a Pianist"
>Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:25:52 -0500
>
>Esteemed GDG Member Contributes:
>
>
>I am adding this to my "must-read" list.  Louis Gottschalk was a pianist 
>and composer during the middle 1800's.  He was also a bit of a writer, 
>recording his experiences.  "Notes of a Pianist" is a collection of these 
>chronicles.  Read the review in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: 
>http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/16022610.htm
>
>GB link; among other ACW experiences, he was a passenger on a train that 
>was sitting on a bridge over the Susquehanna as the ANV neared Harrisburg!
>
>Doug
>

Louis Moreau Gottschalk is a remarkable character and a true American 
original.  He was the first American to achieve an international reputation 
as a composer and concert virtuoso (he was a student of Liszt) and he toured 
widely in Europe and S. America as well as the US.  He also had the 
reputation of being an irresistable ladies' man, which probably was one of 
the factors that kept him on the move.  Though New Orleans born and bred, 
Gottschalk was a fierce Unionist, and, in fact, one of his best known 
concert pieces is The Union, a melange of patriotic tunes arranged for piano 
and orchestra, which he performed as a morale-booster.  Most of the music he 
composed is ephemeral and deservedly forgotten--sentimental "program music" 
of the most cloying sort (e.g, "The Dying Poet".)  But he was also the first 
"serious" composer to integrate black music into his work, drawing on the 
idioms of the slave culture, the Caribbean, and South America.  Some of his 
best known pieces in this vein are "The Banjo," "Bamboula" and "A Night in 
the Tropics".  This black-influenced music is probably best-known today 
through its arrangement into a ballet score entitled "Cakewalk".

NL

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