Liner Notes
Cat. No. 80258
Release Date: 1977-01-01
The symphony orchestra in the United States has enjoyed better than a century of health and growth, and this has bred a tradition of symphonic compositional activity that has been equally secure. In discussing the roots of all aspects of our serious-musical culture one inevitably returns to the Germanophilia Americans not only inherited but encouraged from the time of the first great waves of German immigration up to World War I (see the liner notes for New World Records’ Fugues, Fantasia, and Variations (80280); Charles Tomlinson Griffes (80273); and Aaron Copland: Piano Music (80277). This legacy had its greatest and most lasting effect on the symphony. The founding of the great orchestral institutions in the nineteenth century—the Philharmonic Society of New York (1842), the St. Louis Symphony (1880), the Boston Symphony (1881), the Chicago Symphony (1890), the Cincinnati Symphony (1894), the Philadelphia Orchestra (1900)—was accomplished along lines native to Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich and by figures whose orientation had been fixed by German training and tradition. The conservatories established during and shortly after this period — Peabody (1860), Oberlin (1865), New England (1867), Cincinnati (1867), Chicago (1868), Juilliard (1904), and Mannes (1916) — were also Germanic in allegiance. If a promising youngAmerican composer did not actually go to Germany to study, he was still subject to Germanic influences in the schools and concert halls