Louis Moreau Gottschalk: Fiesta criolla from "La Nuit des Tropiques", ("Symphony romantique")

[John27346]

This fugue ain't going nowhere so the cameraman pans back to the rhythm section.

[mianom]

What orchestra is this? Why aren't the auidience members dancing...or at least smiling?

[atchicago1]

@mianom They are not dancing or smiling because they're Swiss, probably banking and insurance executives and their wives on a wild night in town. LOL

[Astraea52]

@atchicago1 The only way to really enjoy rythmic latin-based music music, is if you've got "natives" in the audience! I don't know how people can sit quietly in their seats with their hands folded like that! I have to stop typing now, because I've got shake my shoulders & my "air maracas"! (LOL)

[cubanito323]

On the positive side, however, is the fact that composers of the size of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, passing by Gershwin, wrote works based on the designs rhythmic danzón and of the rumba.

[cubanito323]

AND THATS FUCKIGN WRONG

[cubanito323]

For example, forgetting that the proto-forms of ragtime were brought to North America from the Caribbean by the composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), who introduced by New Orleans, many do not recognize and merely ignore the extensive influence of the Cuban music in the development of jazz, and often the formulas rhythmic afro-cuban are wrong and maliciously classified as drawings purely jazzy.

[cubanito323]

Historically, many injustices, inaccuracies and omissions have been committed in regard to the recognition of the great influence that has exercised the Cuban music in the development of the music of the United States

[cubanito323]

A GREAT GREAT COMPOSER .BUT NOWONE WANTS TO ADMIT THAT THERES A LOT OF CUBANS INFLUENCES IN SO MANY OF HIS COMPOSITIONS .

[jrtrmish]

He was hailed by Chopin and Liszt, among others, when he took Europe by storm.

[883plum]

Latin music 3 generations before Copland, Gould, et. al.

[tammanyman]

If your kids aren't into traditional European classics, introduce them to this good old USA type

[ciociosan22]

i love this piece! we're playing now in our youth orchestra and my conductor says that "it sounds like the 1950s, just written a century ago." it's so fun to play! and listen to!

[d60944]

Haha - I've loved this piece for decades! A shame Gottschalk was so inept at orchestration....

[nbarry45]

Gottschalk was America's first great classical composer. He was actually older than Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but his use of Caribbean rhythms gives his music a more "modern" sound.

[Marlene55M]

He was born in New Orleans....

[MrVivahorn]

@Marlene55M I wonder if his birth in New Orleans has something to do with the lack of our exposure to his music?

[Marlene55M]

@MrVivahorn: Probably so. Maybe he was more acknowleded at his own time, but considering that he died at the early age of 40, this can't have been too long. And probably, all the "educated" folks both over here in Europe as well as on the American continent, were more into his contemporaries, such as Liszt, to name only one of those days' popstars :-). I like Gottschalks music a lot and have a nice collection of his work.

[MrVivahorn]

@Marlene55M I really like Gottschalk's music as well. Maybe the fact that he spent most of his concert life in Central adn South America also explains to some degree the lack of acknowledgement of him as an "American" composer and performer of the first magnitude.

[a026and]

Great - Gotschalk was the first Euroupean composer to use New World folk motifs in a symphony.

[petert93]

Gottschalk was American. His father was an English-Jew and his mother was a French Haitian and Louis Moreau Gottschalk was born in in New Orleans.  He was not European though of European dissent