01-16a: Toscanini Wax Windfall !! : Beethoven Bizet Brahms Dukas Dvorak Gershwin Mozart Prokofiev Schubert Schumann Tchaikovsky & Wagner !!

1957 – Arturo Toscanini (Italian conductor)

That wasn't too clever of me, was it? Twelve albums by the greatest Italian conductor of the 20th century, and I somehow managed to not include a single Italian composer.

12-18: Harmonia : Deluxe 1975 - Dvorak Cello Concerto : Tortelier / Horenstein 1971 - Gottschalk Piano Music Vol 1 & 2 / Martin 1991-94

Not shown: Brian Brockless

1737 – Antonio Stradivari (Italian luthier)
1839 – Charles-Henri Plantade (French pianist, harpist, cellist & composer)
1841 – Felice Blangini (Italian-born French singer, composer, organist & teacher)
1865 – Francisco Manuel da Silva (Brazilian composer, teacher, singer & cellist, Brazilian National Anthem)
1869 – Louis Moreau Gottschalk (American composer & pianist)
1911 – Alberto Randegger (Italian composer, conductor & singing teacher, active in England)
1918 – Henryk Jarecki (Polish composer & conductor)
1919 – Horatio Parker (American composer, organist & teacher whose pupils included Charles Ives)
1928 – Lucien Capet (French violinist, composer & teacher whose pupils included Jascha Brodsky & Ivan Galamian)
1963 – Winfried Zillig (German composer, music theorist & conductor, pupil of Schoenberg)
1982 – Tibor de Machula (Hungarian cellist, active in Germany & Holland)
1987 – Conny Plank (German Krautrock, electronic & experimental record producer & musician)
1990 – Paul Tortelier (French cellist, composer & conductor)
1995 – Brian Brockless (English organist, choirmaster, composer & conductor)
1996 – Irving Caesar (American lyricist & musical theater composer, "Tea for Two")
2000 – Kirsty MacColl (English singer & songwriter, spouse of producer Steve Lillywhite)
2001 – Gilbert Bécaud (French pop & jazz singer, composer & actor, "Monsieur 100,000 Volts")
2001 – Dimitris Dragatakis [Δημήτρης Δραγατάκης] (Greek composer & violist)
2007 – Alan Wagner (American television executive, radio personality, writer & opera historian & critic)

Woo hoo, 10,000 page views. Excitement city. And a few of those pages will even take you to some good links.

Let's see, we appropriately enough have some very notable string players pooping on the same day in history as the greatest violin maker in history. I had plans for an offering from Lucien Capet's Capet Quartet, but my go-to blog for that one had all their files at Megafuckup.

Still, you've got Paul Tortelier playing one of the great cello concertos... a spacey 70s Krautrock classic produced by Conny Plank... and a generous helping from New Orleans piano composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whose syncopated rhythms and exotic flavors greatly influenced the ragtime style that appeared two decades after his death, making him an important early figure in the history of jazz.

Of course, Gottschalk sounds only a little like Scott Joplin, not much at all like Jelly Roll Morton, and progressively less like Erroll Garner, Bud Powell, or McCoy Tyner. But in his music you can catch an enticing whiff every here and there of where its influence would lead. That's almost as exciting as getting 10,000 page views on your crappy blog.

BACH / STOKOWSKI BONUS ! Orchestral Transcriptions (plus more space for The Dead and Dying)

The fine transfer work of F. Reeder at the Internet Archive. Half of these 10 tracks are Stokowski transcriptions, performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The remainder are the work of Frederick Stock & Fritz Reiner with Chicago, Dimitri Mitropoulos with Minneapolis, and Pierre Monteux with San Francisco:

J. S. Bach: Transcriptions for Orchestra

If you've reached this post looking for Felix Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns, Alexander Glazunov, Antonín Dvořák, or Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, I have some bad news for you: they're dead! But you can find some of their music here:

Stokowski Sampler

09-01: R.L. Burnside Mississippi Hill Country Blues 1985 - Chet Atkins & Jerry Reed : Me and Jerry 1970 - Ethel Waters Complete Decca - Coleridge-Taylor | Dvořák Violin Concerto - Mozart : Clifford Curzon | Dennis Brain

1648 – Marin Mersenne (French Jesuit priest, theologian, philosopher, mathematician, & music theorist)
1777 – Johann Ernst Bach II (German composer & organist, 2nd cousin once removed of J. S. Bach)
1814 – Erik Tulindberg (Finnish composer, violinist & civil servant)
1867 – Edward Hodges (English church organist & composer, active at Trinity Church in NYC)
1896 – Johann Evangelist Habert (Austrian church musician & composer)
1912 – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (British composer & pianist)
1935 – Felice Lyne (American operatic soprano)
1957 – Dennis Brain (English hornist, son of Aubrey)
1957 – Sabine Kalter (Polish mezzo-soprano)
1959 – Wilhelm Rode (German bass-baritone)
1964 – George Georgescu (Romanian conductor)
1964 – Otto Olsson (Swedish composer & organist)
1968 – Granville English (American composer)
1969 – William Flanagan (American composer, lover of Edward Albee)
1972 – May Aufderheide (American ragtime composer)
1973 – Graziella Pareto (Spanish operatic soprano leggiero)
1977 – Ethel Waters (American blues, jazz & gospel singer & actress)
1982 – Clifford Curzon (English pianist)
1996 – Vagn Holmboe (Danish composer & teacher)
1996 – Ljuba Welitsch (Bulgarian-born Austrian operatic soprano)
1999 – José Soler (Spanish operatic tenor)
2005 – R. L. Burnside (American blues & blues-rock singer, songwriter & guitarist)
2008 – Jerry Reed (American country music singer, guitarist & songwriter & actor)

First Jimmy Reed, now Jerry Reed. Somehow I knew it would be the case, since their similar names have always confused me - much as test audiences were confused when Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 was originally shot as Smokey IS the Bandit, with Jackie Gleason playing a dual role as both Sheriff Buford T. Justice and The Bandit (whose usual portrayor, Burt Reynolds, was demanding a bigger salary than the producers were willing to pay - although they did manage to include him in a cameo at the end of the film). As a result, many scenes were re-shot so that Reed's character Cledus Snow now assumed the role of The Bandit, a promotion from his usual position as sidekick of Reynolds' Bo Darville. But if you only know Jerry Reed as the grinning Snowman from that trio of cinematic masterpieces, you are in for a big surprise. Reed was not only a great rockabilly player from the 50s, and a fine singer and songwriter (e.g., "When You're Hot You're Hot"), but also an innovative fingerstyle guitarist who could hold his own with the likes of the formidably gifted Chet Atkins... (Reed more below)

Marin Mersenne is sometimes called the "Father of Acoustics." Aside from having some rather important mathematical principles named after him (Mersenne numbers, Mersenne primes, the Mersenne conjecture, etc.), he was, at the dawn of the Scientific Age, one of the first to apply a truly scientific methodology to the study of musical tone. In L'harmonie universelle (1636–37), he was the first to publish the law that the frequency of a vibrating string is proportional to the square root of the tension, and inversely proportional to the length, to the diameter, and to the square root of the specific weight of the string, provided all other conditions remain the same when one of these quantities is altered. He also provided the first truly correct calculation of the equal-tempered semitone as the 12th root of 2, which could be constructed using nothing more than a straightedge and compass. L'harmonie universelle isn't all the fun and games of math and physics, though. The work is replete with detailed illustrations and descriptions of all the instruments that were in use in Mersenne's day - a real treasury for early-music specialists. A serpent:

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an African-British composer who enjoyed much success both in Britain and America between 1895 and his death in 1912 (of pneumonia, at the age of 37), to the extent that he was sometimes called the "African Mahler." Coleridge-Taylor composed orchestral works, chamber music, songs, and choral music, most notably his trilogy of cantatas for chorus, soloists, and orchestra The Song of Hiawatha, Op.30, written between 1898 and 1900. One of his last completed works was his Violin Concerto in G minor, Op.80, which he wrote for Maud Powell (music written by a great black composer for a great female violinist - nicely pluralistic for 1912), whose parts had to be quickly recopied by hand in time for the premiere after they got lost en route to America - although not on the Titanic, as legend has it... (Read more below). See you on the other side of the high-water mark in steerage...