Author Archives: David Guion

Just before and after the battle: two songs by George F. Root

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The American Civil War inspired more great songs than any other conflict. George Frederick Root composed a large share of them. Some of them are rousing patriotic tunes, such as Battle Cry of Freedom. But he also composed songs about the devastating impact of the war on American families.

“Just Before the Battle, Mother” is one of the earliest of these. It became such a great hit that it inspired many other songs. Root himself composed more than one of them, including the companion piece “Just After the Battle.”

It also inspired parodies that take a very different viewpoint. Continue reading →

Háry János, opera and suite by Zoltán Kodály

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hary janos statue

Háry János statue in Szent István Square, Szekszárd, Tolna County, Hungary / Pal Farkas (1992) via Wikimedia Commons 

Zoltán Kodály is a towering figure in 20th-century music: folk music collector, music educator, and composer. Along with his good friend Béla Bartók, he showed the world of art music the riches of Hungarian folk music. His opera Háry János, and more famously, the suite he derived from it, put it on full display.

Hungary has had a long tradition of foreign domination: the Turks for more than a century, then Habsburg Austria. Franz Liszt, the first internationally significant Hungarian composer, asserted Hungarian cultural independence and wanted to explore Hungarian folk music systematically, but he never did.

Kodály, on the other hand, helped establish the field of ethnomusicology and helped put Hungarian culture on the international stage.  Continue reading →

Swan Lake Suite(s) by Tchaikovsky

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Tchaikovsky. suite from swan lake

Tchaikovsky as a young man (1870s)

I came across some old notes I wrote about my community orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s Suite from Swan Lake. It was kind of a shambles, because, it appears, there is more than one suite. We found that out when the guest conductor had a completely different score than what we had prepared.

Investigating on the internet, I don’t find any explicit description of more than one suite, but I do find that Tchaikovsky himself did not extract a suite from his ballet. And that the ballet was not especially successful in his lifetime. Continue reading →

Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Civil War concert tour

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gottschalk tour poster

Gottschalk tour poster, 1860s

Louis Moreau Gottschalk became the first internationally famous American piano virtuoso and composer. Given his importance and popularity, it may come as a surprise that he spent so little time in the United States. His most important American concert tour coincided with the Civil War.

All his life, Gottschalk kept a journal, in French. In 1881, his sister Clara Peterson and her husband translated it to English and had it published as Notes of a Pianist. It has proved to be one of the great musical diaries of the nineteenth century. Gottschalk recorded detailed observations with sardonic wit. Continue reading →

Presenting classical music to children: they love it

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Encircling the City classical music for childrenChildren love music. They don’t know or care what music adults think they ought to love. So when they get a chance to hear classical music, children love classical music.

After a Covid-related hiatus, the Eastern Music Festival is presenting its 61st season in Greensboro, North Carolina. Since 2010, it has presented children’s programming in various branches of the Greensboro Public Library called Encircling the City. I first wrote about this project when it was fairly new.

This year, seven different library branches hosted programs. I attended three of them and heard three different string quartets perform.  The format was largely the same as before, although it had a different conclusion than I recalled before.

Quartet members were all fellows at the Eastern Music Festival. One of them explained that a fellowship is like an internship. They don’t get lessons, but they have started professional careers and perform with the faculty orchestra. Continue reading →

Le Boeuf sur le toit, by Darius Milhaud

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le boxeur sur le toit, darius milhaud, raoul dufy

In the restaurant, Le Boeuf sur le toit / Raoul Dufy 1919 [?]

Here’s a little quiz: Le Boeuf sur le toit is

  1. A Brazilian folksong
  2. The name of a nightclub in Paris
  3. An avant-garde theater piece by Jean Cocteau
  4. A piece for small orchestra by Darius Milhaud
  5. All of the above.


Anyone good at taking multiple choice tests can figure out the answer to that one easily. If “all of the above” is one of the choices, it is nearly always the expected answer. But how do all these bits of fact fit together?  Continue reading →