4candles wrote:... but I've come across the name of an American composer - Edward Jerome Hopkins - who seems to have written some quite original works, including a piano concerto.
Does anyone have any music by him or have any detailed background info?
This piece appears to be the same composer, but is C. Jerome Hopkins, not Edward.
hopkins - op. 11 the wind demon.pdf
From Grove:
Hopkins, (Charles) Jerome
(b Burlington, VT, 4 April 1836; d Athenia [now Clifton], NJ, 4 Nov 1898). American composer, pianist and music educator. He moved to New York in about 1853, where he performed and lectured, and in 1861 he founded the Orpheon Free Schools to teach sight-singing and basic musicianship to working-class children, shortly afterwards issuing his Method for Teaching Orpheon Singing Classes; he claimed to have educated over 30,000 pupils. In 1864 he began an annual series of concerts to help fund the schools, and founded the Orpheonist and Philharmonic Journal, partly to promote his schools and concerts, and partly to provide a forum for his trenchant musical and social criticism. In 1871 he introduced ‘Piano-lecture Concerts’, which mixed criticism and aesthetic theory with performance. His niece, and his closest companion after the death of his wife in 1876, was the pianist Amy Fay.
Hopkins was a curious amalgam of the traditional singing-school master and the progressive composer and virtuoso performer. His articles, letters and pamphlets (including Music and Snobs, 1888), display a scathing wit; at the same time his pedagogical works and collections of church music were conventional, even staid. He was a champion of American composers as early as 1856, and remained a polemical partisan of native music to the end of his life. As a performer, Hopkins was essentially self-taught, but he was evidently an excellent pianist and organist. His compositions include choral works and operas (many of which were performed repeatedly in his lifetime), concert music, and short piano pieces and songs. He sometimes wrote for unusual ensembles – as in the Dramatic Caprice for five pianos, and the Vespers Service (1875) for three choirs, soloists, two organs, harp, and orchestra. His more conventional pieces, such as the Piano Trio (1857–8), the Serenade in E (1870) and the Symphony (performed under Theodore Thomas), are often idiomatic and engaging. Hopkins’s music manuscripts are at Harvard University, and the New York Public Library has a collection of his letters.
Regards
Fred