Indian Scenes: Five Pieces for the Pianoforte : From the Incidental Music to the Story of a Vanishing Race by Edward S. Curtis : Music Based Upon Indian Motifs - Primary Source Edition
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Musical Examples; Illustrating the Progress of the Art From the Earliest Times to the Present Volume 14
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Gilbert Henry Franklin Belknap was a composer. He collected the folk songs and was interested in the music of African-Americans around the turn of the 20th century.
Background
Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert was born on September 26, 1868, in Somerville, Massachusets. He was the son of Benjamin Franklin and Therese Angeline (Gilson) Gilbert.
Among his ancestors were Humphrey Gilbert of Ipswich (1640), and Lieut. Ezekiel Belknap of Revolutionary fame. His uncle, James L. Gilbert, wrote the well-known ballad “Bonnie Sweet Bessie. ” John Gibbs Gilbert, the Boston actor, was a cousin.
His father, a bank clerk, was also a church organist, singer, and composer of anthems; his mother was a professional singer.
Education
At the age of ten, under the inspiration of Ole Bull’s playing, Gilbert determined to study violin, and after some preliminary instruction he studied at the New England Conservatory and under Emil Mollenhauer.
Career
Gilbert organized a musical club which during the late eighties held weekly orchestral performances under his direction. While playing at a hotel in the White Mountains he met Mrs. Emma Stowe, a musical enthusiast.
Through her influence his parents were persuaded to allow him to begin lessons with Edward MacDowell, with whom he had studied composition (1888 - 92). He had already become more interested in composition than in the violin.
MacDowell proved a sympathetic guide and was himself influenced by Gilbert’s enthusiasm for folk-music. Outside of the musical field Gilbert had other intense intellectual interests, especially in the natural sciences.
In 1893, he visited the World’s Fair in Chicago, where he made an intensive study of Oriental music; in 1895, he took his first trip abroad; and in 1901 he made a second trip to Paris, traveling across on a cattle-boat in order to hear Charpentier’s Louise.
After this time, he devoted his whole effort to composition. Gilbert experienced great financial difficulties, and to make both ends meet he held various positions, chiefly in music-printing firms.
He did some of his first composing in a barn in Quincy, Massachusets, where he lived for some time. His greatest productive period dates from his marriage, and his enjoyment of a congenial home life.
His compositions, written for piano, voice, and orchestra, fall naturally into three groups. The first reveals Gilbert’s free experimentation under European influences. It includes “Celtic Studies, ” a group of songs (1895); and a symphonic prologue for Synge’s Riders to the Sea; and culminates in the “Salammbo’s Invocation to Tanith” (about 1901), which made his reputation in, Russia, where he became a favorite American composer.
Under the influence of Dvorak’s symphony, From the New World, Gilbert became interested in utilizing native American material. The “Negro Episode, ” his first orchestral work based on negro rhythms, was praised by Massenet and heralded in France as the first appearance of autochthonous American orchestral writing.
This was followed by the “Comedy Overture” (1905), Dance in Place Congo (1906), “Americanesque” (1909), “Negro Rhapsody” (1912), and “American Dances in Rag-Time Rhythm” (about 1915). The compositions of Gilbert’s last period were written in a mature original style which showed an artistic assimilation of racy national characteristics, not based on either negro or Indian rhythms.
These he attempted to make expressive of American optimism, youthfulness, and buoyancy. They include an opera, The Fantasy in Delft (1915), and several compositions for full orchestra, the chief of which are “Symphonic Piece” (1925), “Jazz Study” (1924), “Strife” (1910 - 25), and the “Nocturne, from Whitman” (1925).
His last composition was a suite for chamber orchestra, composed on a commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge foundation. His most popular songs were the “Pirate Song” and the “Fish Wharf Rhapsody, ” sung by David Bis- pham.
Gilbert’s career was largely self-made. Over three-quarters of his time he spent in gaining a livelihood. He worked also under the severe handicap of a pronounced congenital heart disease, and was able to prolong his life only by force of will and by a careful husbanding of his strength.
Achievements
Gilbert made a unique contribution to the evolution of music as the first articulate American composer whose work was wholly indigenous.
The chief events which brought his work to the attention of the public during his lifetime were the performance of his “Comedy Overture” by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, April 1911; the commissioned composition of the “Negro Rhapsody” for the Norfolk Festival, 1913; the production of his native American ballet, Dance in Place Congo, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, April 1918; the production of the major portion of the music for the Plymouth Tercentenary Pageant, 1920; the performance of the “Symphonic Piece” by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1926; the invitation from the International Music Exposition at Frankfurt to appear there in the summer of 1927 as one of America’s foremost composers; and finally the ovation accorded him at the premier of his “Nocturne, from Whitman, ” introduced by Pierre Monteux with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, March 1928.
He wrote many articles on his favorite theme, most of which appeared in the New Music Review and the Musical Quarterly.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Views
Quotations:
“It has been my aim from the first to write some American, and unEuropean music: music which shall smack of our home-soil, even though it may be crude. ”
Interests
Gilbert was an omnivorous reader and an enthusiastic collector of various kinds of natural-history specimens. His chief interest, however, was always music.
Connections
On June 4, 1906, Gilbert was married to Helen Kalischer.
