Hi Electra,
that’s very interesting. These sorts of things occasionally come in and then go out of vogue. For example, I remember the Australian Broadcasting Corporation commissioning a dozen or so fanfares from Australian composers to be premièred by the various state orchestras during its 60th anniversary year in 1992; fifty or so years earlier, Eugene Goossens commissioned and performed eighteen fanfares with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, having composed one of the contributions to the 1921 magazine Fanfare:
During the 1942/43 season, CSO Music Director Eugène Goossens invited various composers to submit fanfares to be performed at subscription concerts. The composers seem mostly to be Americans; several later became well known. The only fanfare currently in the repertoire is Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. The titles salute various aspects of the war effort. Also during the season, national anthems from Allied countries opened the concerts.
1. A Fanfare for Airmen, Bernard Wagenaar, Oct. 9, 1942
2. A Fanfare for Russia, Deems Taylor, Oct. 16, 1942.
3. A Fanfare for the Fighting French, Walter Piston, Oct. 23, 1942.
4. A Fanfare to the Forces of our Latin-American Allies, Henry Cowell, Oct. 30, 1942.
5. A Fanfare for Friends, Daniel Gregory Mason, Nov. 6, 1942.
6. A Fanfare for Paratroopers, Paul Creston, Nov. 27, 1942.
7. Fanfare de la Liberte, Darius Milhaud, Dec. 11, 1942.
8. A Fanfare for American Heroes, William Grant Still, Dec. 18, 1942.
9. Fanfare for France, Virgil Thomson, Jan. 15, 1943.
10. Fanfare for Freedom, Morton Gould, Jan. 22, 1943.
11. Fanfare for Airmen, Leo Sowerby, Jan. 29, 1943.
12. Fanfare for Poland, Harl McDonald, Feb. 5, 1943.
13. Fanfare for the Medical Corps, Anis Fuleihan, Feb. 26, 1943.
14. Fanfare for the American Soldier, Felix Borowski, March 5, 1943.
15. Fanfare for the Common Man, Aaron Copland, March 12, 1943.
16. Fanfare for the Signal Corps, Howard Hanson, April 2, 1943.
17. Fanfare for the Merchant Marine, Eugene Goossens, April 16, 1943.
Performed at a “popular” concert:
18. Fanfare for Commandos, Bernard Rogers, Feb. 20, 1943.
All of these appear (probably including Milhaud and Goossens) to be new compositions.
My trawling of the web came up with little that was helpful for your enquiry, but let’s see how we go. The
Hollywood Bowl has a paragraph stating:
Musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky claimed he was fired after conducting two weeks of concerts in 1933 because the music was too dissonant and unusual. His programs, which mixed Mozart and Strauss with such daunting contemporary works as Varèse’s Ionisation, undoubtedly caused some audience disapproval, but they had a profound impact on composer John Cage, who attended all of them.
I note
Ionisation was premièred by your father earlier in 1933.
I presume you know the Library of Congress’ Slonimsky Collection backwards and forwards. One would suppose the programmes for the concerts escaped being put in Box 125 (which isn’t itemised like the other boxes).
Box 119 contains holographs for the parts of fanfares by:
Manuel de Falla — perhaps the Fanfare pour un fête in Fanfare Issue 1, 1 October 1921?
Darius Milhaud — listed by the LoC as “Fanfare pour un fête”, but that’s
clearly the title of the Falla work; the Milhaud work in Fanfare was simply entitled “Fanfare”
Serge Prokofiev — Fanfare pour une spectacle [including a printed version]
Amadeo Roldán — Fanfare/Llamada
Igor Stravinsky — Fanfare for a liturgy
Also there in “miniature printed versions” (presumably direct copies from Fanfare?):
Arthur Bliss — Fanfare for a Political Address
Francis Poulenc — Esquisse d’une fanfare
Of those, only the works by Roldán and Stravinsky apparently weren’t in the one of the six issues of Fanfare in 1921. As mentioned upthread, the Loeb Music Library at Harvard have a complete set, and IMSLP contributor Jason Huffman scanned all 24 fanfares for his own website (and most of them have subsequently become available on IMSLP·US).
Slonimsky’s own Fanfare is listed separately and more completely: “Fanfarria habanera para despertar a los trasnochadores” (and elsewhere I found it attributed to one Nicolas Slonimsky whose dates were erroneously given as 1913–1990!)
Holograph score (4 p.) and parts (5), in ink with pencil annotations.
Score signed "Habana, 22.-IV-1933"
Note: piccolo, clarinet, horn, bell, maracas, and bongos
With that orchestration, I wonder whether it has anything in common with the Piccolo divertimentos mentioned elsewhere amongst his works. I realise that those eight are well short of the fourteen you mention in your post, but there were in all 24 fanfares included in the 6 issues of the 1921 magazine, so it would not be too brazen to presume some or all of the other six originated there. (The 24 composers represented were: Auric, Bantock, Bax, Bliss, Havergal Brian, Ernest Bryson, Coppola, Falla, Fogg, Goosens, Julius Harrison, Harty, Holbrooke, Malipiero, Milhaud, Poulenc, Pratella, Prokofiev, Roussel, Satie, Vaughan Williams, Wellesz, Felix White, and Gerard Williams.)
Finally, I’ll append a more complete quote of the British music critic Malcolm MacDonald, writing in the Havergal Brian Newsletter No. 10 (March 1977, © 1977 Malcolm MacD):
The most minute of all Brian's compositions — if we can even call it that — is nevertheless an item of some interest. It owes its existence to Leigh Henry’s little magazine Fanfare, which ran for half-a-dozen issues in the years 1921–22. Described as a ‘musical causerie’, Fanfare was a stylish production, with some of the irreverence of the Twenties but with its critical head firmly screwed on: it took note of all the most progressive developments in music at the time, and it contains, among other things, the first really sensible evaluations of Schoenberg and Stravinsky published in this country. The editor, Leigh Henry, was well versed in all aspects of contemporary music, and had a high opinion of Havergal Brian (on whom he wrote two important articles in the May & July 1922 issues of Musical Opinion). That Fanfare closed down for lack of support in January 1922 was, however, a sign of the times — of how much the Great War had broken the spirit of the English Musical Renaissance.
The magazine (a collector’s item nowadays) owed its name to its stimulating practice of commissioning tiny musical supplements from leading British and European composers: four per issue, on average, were asked to contribute a little fanfare. Thus were written such gems as Falla’s Fanfare pour une Fête and Satie’s Sonnerie pour reveiller le bon gros Roi des Singes; British composers who contributed included Bax, Bliss, Bantock, Holbrooke, Ernest Bryson — and Havergal Brian. While most of them wrote complete pieces in full score, Brian simply produced a four-bar extract, in short score, from a major work which at that time remained in sketch — the opera we now know as The Tigers. It appeared in Fanfare vol. 1, no. 5 (December 1921).
The fragment (which is all it is, though I have made a realization for brass and percussion, should anybody want to perform it) is thus chiefly worth our attention for what it can tell us about the early stages of a work whose genesis is still somewhat mysterious. The original pencil sketch-score of The Tigers is lost. The present Fanfare corresponds to the last bar of p. 119 and the first three bars of p. 120 of the printed vocal score. But in bars 1–3 the dynamics and accentuation are different, and the right-hand part in bars 1–2 is at a different octave; while bar 4 (in 3/4 and suggesting a percussion pattern) is completely different from the purely melodic 4/4 allegro molto we find in the vocal score. Moreover the parent work is here designated a ‘Burlesque Opera’ (Brian was later to say that it was not burlesque at all, and the vocal score in fact just calls it ‘Opera’) with the title The Grotesques — which the piece in fact bore at least well into the 1920s. We don’t know exactly when the change was made; but it is fascinating to note, in the stage-direction above bar 3, that at least one character’s name got changed too. Colonel Sir John Stout, operatic history’s softest chocolate soldier, is here called ‘Colonel Toby’ (like a Toby Jug, perhaps?).
Mere hints, musical and dramatic — but we could, if we wished, postulate a major revision of Brian’s first opera between 1921 and its publication in 1932 on the strength of them. Even about a major work like The Tigers there is so much that we still don’t know. It remains to mention that on the small slip of manuscript paper on which Brian wrote his little Fanfare — which recently came to light in a bookseller’s catalogue — are the lowest three systems (viola, cellos, basses) of a page of full score. The bars are empty, but they contain clefs and a key-signature of B flat or G minor. We possess no orchestral work by Brian of around this date that uses such a key-signature. So what is this, then? A scrap from the lost Tales of Olden Times? Part of a full score that Brian the copyist was making for some more fortunate composer? As always with Brian, each new piece of evidence for his creative life only raises further questions.
It is worth noting that IMSLP·US now hosts a copy of the opera’s
vocal score mentioned (
here), and the manuscript
full score of the work, missing since the 1940s or 50s, was recovered late in 1977, several months after MacDonald wrote the above.
Best regards, Philip