WILLIAM PARKER New World Records 80475 The Listeners An American Song Recital

The following is an adaptation of the original liner notes by Philip L. Miller to NW 305. A change was taking place in American music in the 1920s — a swing away from the influence of Germany to that of France. Even before the ban on German music imposed by World War I, interest in the French school had been growing. One of the first important composers trained in this country, John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951) included settings of Verlaine in his earliest published works. His basic studies were with John Knowles Paine at Harvard, where he received his B.A. in 1897. He worked briefly with Edward Elgar in 1906, when they both happened to be in Rome, but by his own account he learned most from Bernard Ziehn in Chicago. Carpenter was also among the first serious composers to cultivate the jazz idiom, notably in his ballet Krazy Kat, first presented in 1920, and in his Four Negro Songs (to poems of Langston Hughes), published in 1927. In his day, Carpenter was hailed as the most typically American of our composers. When Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) decided to leave his native Elmira, New York, for serious music study, he set out for Germany, as had many of his predecessors. It was hardly possible in those days to complete a musical education in the United States, and by common consent the greatest music was German. One deviation from this rule was Edward MacDowell, whose mothe