John Powell and Daniel Gregory Mason, Plus Reups

Composer John Powell is one of the most interesting and at the same time notorious figures in American music. This early American Recording Society LP presents his most famous composition, the Rhapsodie Nègre, which anticipated the so-called “concert jazz” movement by several years.

John Powell in 1916

A few words of background from Powell scholar Stephanie Doktor: “In 1918, Virginia-born composer and concert pianist John Powell premiered his Rhapsodie Nègre - a symphonic composition designed to blend both the ‘primitive’ and ‘childlike’ qualities of the Negro. The rhapsody was but one of the many compositions Powell rooted in the melodic and harmonic structures of black American music.”

Doktor goes on to say that “Powell was on the cusp of America’s burgeoning modernist concert tradition, just before he developed a distinctly anti-modernist stance. More broadly, I argue that the concert jazz vogue, which Powell presciently advanced six years before George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, reflects musical modernism’s indebtedness to conceptions of black sound.”

Nevertheless, Powell was a virulent racist. “Four years later [i.e., after the premiere of Rhapsodie Nègre], Powell launched a white supremacist campaign to preserve the Anglo-Saxon race in law and in music. Powell and his political allies helped pass the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited miscegenation [in Virginia].”

Daniel Gregory Mason

By that time, Powell had come to believe that his music should be inspired by Anglo-Saxon folk music, a view he shared with his friend and associate, the New Englander Daniel Gregory Mason, who composed the other work on this 10-inch LP, the Chanticleer overture.

An article by David Z. Kushner, which also provides much more background on Powell, notes, “By 1920, Mason, too, was pontificating about the need to recognize the Anglo-Saxon virtues that he juxtaposes to the ‘Jewish infection in our music.’” Regardless of this rhetoric, none of this is apparent in Chanticleer, an attractive piece inspired by Thoreau’s Walden.

Dean Dixon leads the accomplished performances, with the Vienna Symphony (here in the guise of the ARS Orchestra) perhaps happier with the Powell than the Mason, in which the ensemble sounds thin (as it often did in these ARS sessions). Oddly, the soloist in the Powell work is uncredited. I don’t believe it was Dixon, who as far as I know was not a pianist.

The Mason recording is from March 1951 – at least the indispensable discographer Michael Gray lists a Mason session for that time with Dixon, although he says the work is Chronochromie rather than Chanticleer, evidentally confusing Mason for Messiaen (which probably would not have pleased the former). The Powell session is likely from about the same time. The download includes the Doktor and Kushner articles referenced above.

Reups

I had a request to reupload another ARS disc, the first recording of Ives’s Three Places in New England, coupled with Robert McBride’s amusing Violin Concerto, with the excellent soloist Maurice Wilk. Walter Hendl conducts. This has been remastered, and now has much better sound.

Another new remastered reupload is the result of a request on another site – Artur Rodzinski’s fine recording of Prokofiev’s Symphony No.5, with the superb Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York.

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