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To: mylife
We cant all be Hayden...no need - there's really a wealth of gorgeous, exciting, inspiring music out there "off the beaten path" of Hayden, Beethoven, Mozart and the like - Grofe is one not many people know much about, beyond maybe "On the Trail" from the "Grand Canyon Suite", but he's written some lovely, evocative stuff like the opening section of the "Mississippi Suite" (not "Mississippi River Suite" as I called it wrongly). There's whimsy in some of his music - back in the 1950's when outdoor summer concerts were still being given at the Robin Hood Dell in Philadelphia, I attended one that included one of the first performances of Grofe's "Hudson River Suite". It contains one section called "Rip Van Winkle" which is supposed to portray in part a group of dwarfs playing nine-pins. On stage they had an actual bowling lane and during that section of the performance rolled a couple of bowling balls along it to hit pins at the end for the proper "musical" effect - funny.

Maybe Grofe's best work is in a piece of music that doesn't ordinarily have his name attached to it. He rescued Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" from the original big-band kind-of-bizarre orchestration, heavy with saxophones and a banjo, with the current concert arrangement that so many people know and love.....

214 posted on 09/10/2016 9:41:07 PM PDT by Intolerant in NJ
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To: Intolerant in NJ

I was unaware of the Grofe/Gershwin connection


227 posted on 09/11/2016 9:26:55 AM PDT by mylife (The roar of the masses could be farts)
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