4 14duL 13 REc'D REGISTER NOW FOR INTERNA.TIONAL CONVENTION J U I YJ 1970 Vo 1. 7, No. 7 Honorary Ganz -----­ 9 - So. Cal. Aug. Meet Left V5. Right ------- 2 9 ---------- Back Issues President Brooks ------- 3 10 ---- No. Cal. June Meet No July Meet in No~ ------ 3 11 -----~-- Slick Trackerbar International Meet·.--------- 1+ 11 ---------- PepDe~corn & Kid ?~ F. Fire ---------------~-~- 6 12 ---------- 5hould Know (p ink) (. 1lo-Phone ----------------~-- 7 . 15 --~------------ The Masterp ieee AMnCA A~t Case --~---~------~----- 7 16 --------------- Duo-Art Recording 50. Cal. June Meet 21 ~---------------- Dating Catalogues Sp. Cal. July Meet ------------------- 9 21 ----------------------------- Addenda 1 RUVOLPH GANZ HONORARY McM5ER OF AMI CA I have been trying for some time to get in touch with Rudolph Ganz, one of Duo-Artis and Welte1s most prominently featured and prodigiously recorded artists. Finally, both Ralph Obenchain of Wilmette., 111 inois and Vernon Brown of Japan were able to obtain his address and send it to me. Having heard that Dr. Ganz' correspondence was handled by his wife since his heart attack 5 years ago, I wrote her to offer Dr. Ganz the Honorary Membership. In add i t i on to the fo II "'" ing though tfu I 1etter, Mrs. Ganz also sent considerable biographical material in response to my request, and several photographs. To my extreme del ight, she even asked her husband a long list of historical and technical questions l id sent, and wrote down the answers he rememberedl We are indebted to both Dr. and Mrs. Ganz for this invaluable material, which I will attempt to campi le and present in a subsequent bulletin. Such generous cooperation with my intrusive research accompanie~ Rudolph Ganz is especially touching in view of the gratitude we mezzo-soprano Esther already owe the Ganzes for their contributions to the LaBerge during their 1958 concert tour. Miss Arts - the most pertinent to this bulletin being the Welte-Mignon and Duo-Art recordings of Rudolph Ganz, LaBerge is now Mrs. Gan z. and his Hupfeld recordings that were converted to the Ampico sometime between 1925 and 127. (The statement "n my "From Cari l lon to Ampichron" article that Ganz recorded for "all t hree!' is _,J roven false by Dr. Ganz ' own testimony that he never recorded for Ampico, and the 127catalogue supplement's admission that the Ganz rolls it listed were conversions.) I believe I have also seen a Ganz performance for the wide-roll So i o Art Apol.lo , but I wouldn't know if this was a conversion or not. June 7, 197J Dear Mr. Elfers: Belated but sincere thanks for your letter and the enclosures. I had previously heard from Mr . Obenchain in Chicago and suggested he call for an appointment on one of my non-teaching days so that I could handle t he conversation, but I promised very little i n the way of information due to Dr. r,an z ' i llness . Then a letter from Vernal Brown in Tokyo, which I answered today. ( My SUIUmer free of a teacllin.g schedu~e has just oegun - hence the letters! ) First, thank you very much for wishing to name my husban d an Honora~f Member ­ which he acceFts gratefully. Now, as to your questions - they are so interesting and begging answers. How I wish I could supply them. But i t seems impossible for my husband to recall most of what you wished to know. 1 do recall his telling of correcting the Paderewski rolls ­ that he tried to get the two hands to play more simultaneously but this was a failing - or perhaps an intentional individualistic attitude - of Paderewski. Dr.Ganz always sa.id Busoni was the first to play with two hands together. And I recall another Ganz story of his working on editing in the N.Y. studio. He was in soiled shirt sleeves and an official of Duo-Art opened the door and sadd , "Ganz, 'urrj" and clean up. the Queen is coming." But Ganz thought this was a practical ( - Joke - until a :£ew minutes later in walked the Queen of Belgium with her ~tourage1 "- But she was Vf!rygracious and said she had enj eyed hearing some Ganz recordings on -the boat trip over - a Duo-Art had been placed at her disposal on the bcat, 4 "1- ,. dAt)t· RUVOLPH GANZ, HONORARY MEMBER (oonti t d) 2 As to biographical material - I enclose a. number of clippings. The jacket article of Robert Ma.rsh on the Veritas recording put out by International Piano Library is extremely good. But Veritas is no longer and IPL suffered a dreadful fire a few weeks ago at which time much of their valuable collection was destroyed. A great many "Who's Who" and similar reference books carry articles about Dr. Ganz. I believe I am also listed in "Who's Who among Women" but I hasten to add that my accomplishments are very modest compared with those of my husband. My principle activity is to be a good wife - and since 1965, a good nurse! For mere sta~istics ­ I am ~~ Associate Professor of Voice at Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt {miversity (Dr. Ganz is President Emeritus of CMC). Prior to his stroke we shared many concerts in the United States, Israel and a few in Europe. We performed the Webern 14 songs from ma~uscript found shortly before in Europe. These we performed for the first Webern Festival in Seattle, washin~on and later gave a firs~ performance of t ne s e in Te L Avi.v , We have also given all-Swiss c on cer t.s ~ a=..l­ .~erican concerts, conte~ora~f concerts, all-Ganz concerts, etc. 2. wi s r. =- could be mcre he Lp rul , but hope f'uLrv t.h'i s will fill in a rev oLanks . Cordially, I II II II II II II II II Ii II II I II. II II II ; SOMETlf.tES THE LEFT HANV VIDN'T KN()(lJ WHAT THE RIGHT WAS VOl.'JG Dr. Ganz' revelation that he was required to artificially coordinate the Paaerewski paws in the Duo-Art recordings came as a surprise to me, although I had hea:d that Ganz had been chosen by Paderewski to do his editing. However, the famous Pole also contributed some of his QVJn suggestions. In a letter that a member of tne International Piano Library wr ot e to the Editor of The Gramophone Magazine in January, 1967. he cited a notation which Paddy himself had written on one of the Duo-Art ma s te rs presently in the IPL collection (unless it was destroyed by their recent fire): "' cannet play thes~ passages even 1v; can you even them out for me?" The statement that Ferruc2~o Susoni was the first major artist to Dr. Ganz' ~nowledge who had natural coordination of his two hands was also a revelation. It wou l dn l t have occurred to me that this was a prevailing problem among virtuosi. Per1aps it no ~onger is, and the World has reproducers to thank for that. The ev,dence of sloppy t e chn i que p roduced J~y the i r revea 1in9 record i ng dev ices may have exposed to the artisrs faults which their concert audiences hadn't noticed. In the series of articles appearing in ~pcorded sound Magazine in 1967, John Farmer {an Ampico collector) uses Welte's faithful recording of this coordination problem to condemn the Welte playback mechanism: liThe explanation [for lithe persistent lack ll of unison between the hands ] 1 ies in the fact that since the bass and treble units never deliver exactly the right vacuum level to their respective note pneumatics, the hammers for the bass and treble notes will arrive at the strings slightly later or- earlier than intended because they are moved at the wrong speed. 1I [1] It apparently never occurred to Mr. Farmer that the artists might have played that way, or to check the rolls to see that the perforations are not aligned, and that this lack of coordination persists even when both hands were recreated on the sa~e side of the stack, so it was not a matter of inconsistent response in the system." A mechanism would have to be pretty drastically out of adjustment to deliver timing variations so pronounced as to be detected by the human ear, which 1- think might be more inclined to first perceive that one side of the" stack is playing fortissimo while the other is pianissimo! . Max Pauer, a Welte recording artist, was not quite so reluctant to recognize his ONn faults. In Great Pianiete on Piano Playing by J. F. Cooke (loaned to me by B;:! Coverdale), he says: liThe remarkable apparatus for recording the playing of virtuosos, and then reproducing it through a mechanical contrivance, is somewhat SOMETIMES THE LEFt HANV (oont t d) of a revelation to the pianist who tries it for the first time. In the records of the play i n9 of art i s ts whose in terpreta t ions are pe rfect 1y fami 1 i a r to me, there sti 11 remain unquestioned marks of individuality. Sometimes these marks are small shortcomings, but which, nevertheless, are so slight that they do no more than give cha racter ;" "When I listened to the first record of my ONn playing, I heard things which seemed unbelievable to me. Was I, after years of public playing, actually making mistakes that I would be the first to condemn in anyone of my own pupils? I could hardly bel ieve my ears, and yet the unrelenting machine showed that in some places I had failed to play both hands exactly together, and had been guilty of other errors no less heinous, because they were trifling.