Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night’s concert at the Organ Pavilion was fantastic, a quite beautiful mixed-bag program whose sheer range made me think of George Bernard Shaw’s snippy remark about Adelina Patti: “Of all miscellaneous concerts, a Patti concert is the most miscellaneous.” The organist was Alcée Chriss (actually Alcée Chriss III, according to the program bio – which I didn’t bother to look at before the concert, and therefore I was expecting “Alcée” to be a Black woman and was startled when he turned out to be a Black man instead), and my husband Charles noted that three of the 10 pieces listed on his program were by African-Americans – though there’s a caveat to that. Only one of the three was actually written by a Black composer – “In Quiet Mood” by Florence Price (incidentally I had just dug out the BBC Music CD of her Symphony No. 3, and like the first and fourth Price symphonies Naxos recorded it was a tec...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last Saturday, September 25, I spent the entire day at home, watching more than nine hours of the 2021 Global Citizen telecast, an annual event designed to build awareness, funding and the political will to deal with human-caused climate change and global poverty. The event was actually scheduled for 24 hours and encompassed concerts in various cities, including Paris (where the opening ceremony was held), New York, Los Angeles, London, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Sydney and Lagos (the capital of Nigeria), with special one-artist presentations from places like Tuscany (Andrea Bocelli), Johannesburg (a South Afrkcan dance troupe) and Seoul, South Korea (so they could accommodate the inexplicably super-popular Koirean boy group BTS, who are still cute but getting older and noticeably heavier, while their music remains a confusing bowl of various ear candies; as I’ve joked about BTS in previous TV appearan...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I’ve been listening to an oddball CD I got in the mail yesterday, volume 5 of an 11-volume series of two-CD sets called The Britannic Organ, which I’d read about in Fanfare magazine and assumed it was just an oddball title for a series of British organ performers around the turn of the last century. The history of this music – both the way it got recorded in the first place and the way it’s presented here – is a lot more complicated. In the 1850’s a German named Michael Welte had invented an elaborate variation on the hand-cranked barrel organ, the Orchestrion, which basically consisted of a small organ, a few ancillary instruments (mostly drums, cymbals and other percussion) and a metal drum with tabs on it to make the instruments sound, sort of like a giant music box. In the 1880’s, with the development of player pianos that reproduced music from perforated paper rolls, Welte decided to rework...