Minnesota Musicians Archival Studies Concerts ofMinnesota Composers, 1889-1935, and other related events A Chronology Robert Tallant Laudon Prof. Emeritus ofMusicology University ofMinnesota 924 - 18th Ave. SE Minneapolis, MN 55414 (612) 331-2710
[email protected] 2001 This chronology springs from my research as author of Minnesota Music Teachers Association, the Profession and the Community, 1901-2000 (Eden Prairie, MN, by the association, 2000), which the quarterly Minnesota History has called more than an organizational history but a book that shows how talented and dedicated musicians, music teachers, and music lovers worked to build 'the musical Gibraltar of the Great Northwest'... and helps to explain Minnesota's prominent place on the nation's musical map." The composers are those that I am calling the First School of Minnesota Composition extending primarily from the 1890s to 1930, a group strongly influenced by German style and tradition, frequently writers of music for church and occasionally for light entertainment, most in the style of the Boston Group such as John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, and George W. Chadwick and others strongly influenced by the German Conservatories founded in the decades of the 1840s to the 1860s, hosts to numerous Americans in the 1880s and beyond. The music of this East Coast Group has not found an active place in the concert repertory of our symphonies who still prefer to repeat over and over the works of the greatest European masters, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. The Minnesota group has met the same fate. Yet the sincere efforts of a devoted group representing the taste of several generations of society deserve a place perhaps only in history but perhaps also to serve as contrasts to the Second School ofMinnesota Composition that began with the Modern Music movement ofthe 1920s and the Third School of Minnesota Composition that began with the establishment of the Minnesota Composer's Forum (now the American Composer's Forum) in 1973.