Ferde Grofe (1892-1972) - Grand Canyon Suite

Ferde Grofe (1892-1972)

Grand Canyon Suite (1931)


I. Sunrise




III. On the Trail




V. Cloudburst



Ferde Grofé, (March 27, 1892 – April 3, 1972) was an American pianist, arranger and composer.

Born Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé, in New York City, Grofe came by his myriad musical interests naturally. Of French Huguenot extraction, his family had four generations of classical musicians. His father, Emil von Grofé, was a baritone who sang mainly light opera and his mother, Elsa Johanna von Grofé, was a professional cellist. She was also a versatile music teacher who taught Ferde to play the violin and piano. Elsa's father, Bernardt Bierlich, was a cellist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York and Elsa's brother, Julius Bierlich, was first violinist and concertmaster of the Los Angeles Symphony.

Ferde's father died in 1899 and Elsa took Ferde abroad to study piano, viola and composition in Leipzig, Germany. Given such a musical background, it is perhaps understandable that Ferde became proficient over a remarkable range of instruments including piano (his favored instrument), violin, viola (he became a violist in the LA Symphony), baritone horn, alto horn and cornet.

This command of musical instruments and composition gave Ferde the foundation to later become first an arranger of other composers' music and then an orchestrator of his own compositions.

Grofé left home at the age of 14 and variously worked as a milkman, truck driver, usher, newsboy, elevator operator, helper in a book bindery, iron factory worker, and as a piano player in a bar for two dollars a night and as an accompanist. He continued studying piano and violin. When he was 15 he was performing with dance bands. He also played the alto horn in brass bands. He was 17 when he wrote his first commissioned work.

Beginning about 1920, he played the jazz piano with the Paul Whiteman orchestra. He served as Whiteman's chief arranger from 1920-1932. He made hundreds of arrangements of popular songs, Broadway show music, and tunes of all types for Whiteman.

Grofé's most memorable orchestration is that of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which established Grofé's reputation among jazz musicians. Grofé took what Gershwin had written for two pianos and orchestrated it for Whiteman's jazz orchestra. He transformed Gershwin's musical canvas with the colors and many of the creative touches for which it is so well known.

He went on to create two more arrangements of the piece in later years. Grofé's 1942 orchestration for full orchestra of Rhapsody in Blue is the one most frequently heard today.

Due to Grofé's ubiquity in arranging large-scale musical works and a perceived paucity of American achievements in serious music, the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler complained that "America has no composers, only arrangers."

During the 1930s, he was the orchestra leader on several radio programs, including Fred Allen's show and his own The Ferde Grofé Show. In 1944 he was a panelist on A Song Is Born, judging the works of unknown composers.

Grofé was later employed as a conductor and faculty member at the Juilliard School of Music where he taught orchestration.

In addition to being an arranger, Grofé was also a serious composer in his own right. While still with Whiteman, in 1925, he wrote Mississippi Suite, which Whiteman recorded in shortened format in 1927. He wrote a number of other pieces, including a theme for the New York World's Fair of 1939 and suites for Niagra Falls and the Hudson River.

Today, Grofé remains most famous for his Grand Canyon Suite (1931) a work regarded highly enough to be recorded for RCA Victor with mastery by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony (in Carnegie Hall in 1945, with the composer present). The earlier Mississippi Suite is also occasionally performed and recorded. Grofé conducted the Grand Canyon Suite and his piano concerto (with pianist Jesús Maria Sanromá) for Everest Records in 1960.



Ferde Grofé died in Santa Monica, California at the age of 80. He was buried in the Mausoleum of the Golden West at the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) - Le Roi

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955)

Le Roi David (King David) (1921): Prelude



Arthur Honegger (March 10, 1892 – November 27, 1955) was a Swiss composer, who was born in France and lived a large part of his life in Paris. He was a member of Les Six. His most frequently performed work is probably the orchestral work Pacific 231, which is interpreted as imitating the sound of a steam locomotive.

Born Oscar-Arthur Honegger (the first name was never used) in Le Havre, France, he initially studied harmony and violin in Paris, and after a brief period in Zurich, returned there to study with Charles Widor and Vincent d'Indy. He continued to study through the 1910's, before writing the ballet Le dit des jeux du monde in 1918, generally considered to be his first characteristic work. In 1926 he married Andrée Vaurabourg, a pianist and fellow student at the Paris Conservatoire. They had one daughter, Pascale, born in 1932. Honegger also had a son, Jean-Claude (1926-2003), with the singer Claire Croiza.

In the early 1920's Honegger shot to fame with his "dramatic psalm" Le Roi David (King David), which is still in the choral repertoire. Between World War I and World War II, Honegger was very prolific.

He was widely known as a train enthusiast, and once notably said: "I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses." His "mouvement symphonique" Pacific 231 (a depiction of a steam locomotive) gained him early notoriety in 1923.

He composed the music for Abel Gance's epic 1927 film (Napoléon), nine ballets, and three vocal stage works, amongst other works. One of those stage works, Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (1935), a "dramatic oratorio," is thought of as one of his finest works.

Honegger had always remained in touch with Switzerland, his parents' country of origin, but with the outbreak of the war and the invasion of the Nazis, he found himself trapped in Paris.

He joined the French Resistance and was generally unaffected by the Nazis themselves, who allowed him to continue his work without too much interference. However, he was greatly depressed by the war. Between its outbreak and his death, he wrote his last four symphonies (numbers two to five) which are among the most powerful symphonic works of the 20th century. Of these, the third, subtitled Symphonie Liturgique with its three movements evoking the Latin Mass (Dies Irae, De profundis clamavi, and Dona nobis pacem), is probably the best known.

In 1953 he wrote his last composition, A Christmas Cantata. Arthur Honegger died at home of a heart attack on November 27, 1955 and was interred in the Cimetière Saint-Vincent in the Montmartre Quarter of Paris.

The principal elements of Honegger's style are: Bachian counterpoint, driving rhythms, melodic amplitude, highly coloristic harmonies, an impressionistic use of orchestral sonorities, and a concern for formal architecture. His style is weightier and more solemn than that of his colleagues in Les Six. Far from reacting against German romanticism as the other members of Les Six did, Honegger's mature works show evidence of a distinct influence by it. Despite the differences in their styles, he and fellow Les Six member Darius Milhaud were close friends, having studied together at the Paris Conservatoire. Milhaud dedicated his fourth string quintet to Honegger's memory, while Francis Poulenc similarly dedicated his Clarinet Sonata.

Honegger is currently featured on the Swiss twenty franc banknote.