Charles Loeffler- The Lone Prairie
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Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) was one of the most respected composers
in the United States at the time of his death. He was born in a suburb of
Berlin, but a deep antipathy for the Prussian government led to his claiming
Alsatian birth after the age of eighteen. Loeffler was originally trained as
a violinist and had a distinguished career as an orchestral musician, serving
as assistant concertmaster with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for twenty-one
seasons. He began composing seriously in the mid-1880s, and after his
retirement from the BSO in 1903 divided his time between composition, teaching
violin, and overseeing the farm in Medfield, MA which was his retirement home.
The Lone Prairee (scored for tenor saxophone, viola d'amore* and piano) has
always been listed in the various catalogues of Loeffler's compositions as
being incomplete. Paul Cohen and I found the undated holograph sketches and
scores for the piece over fifteen years ago in the Loeffler Collection in the
Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. In 1991 the
Loeffler scholar Ellen Knight directed me to a little-known five-page
holograph of The Lone Prairee which is in effect virtually complete. This
second score, although contained in the Loeffler Collection in Washington, is
not catalogued.
Although the work is listed by Ellen Knight as "A Paraphrase on Two Western
Cowboy Songs," all the holograph material is simply headed "The Lone Prairee."
I have traced the two tunes used by Loeffler to an issue of the Wa-Wan Press
Magazine (Vol. IV, Spring 1905) where they appeared with harmonizations by
Arthur Farwell. Farwell credits Henry Gilbert with collecting the melody of
the cowboy song The Lone Prairee and Alice Haskell with collecting the words
and tune to the Negro spiritual Moanin' Dove from inhabitants of the South
Carolina coastal islands.
Bruce Gbur
Athens, Georgia; September 1993
* Loeffler was an accomplished performer on the viola d'amore and viola. The
part in The Lone Prairee is written so that it may also be played on viola.
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