Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

The SLSO is generally considered one of the best orchestras in the country. It was the first of numerous American symphony orchestras to confess to financial troubles, back in the summer of 2000. And it was the first to start climbing out of its financial hole - progress made with the cooperation of its musicians.

But efforts to resolve players' salaries have now reached an impasse that has silenced the sound of cellos and clarinets at Powell Symphony Hall. The situation is hardly unique: Several other professional orchestras across the US have either shut down or dropped a season in recent years because of financial problems.

For many years guitarist/composer/author Anthony Glise has split his time between a small village in France where he writes and performs, and St. Joseph where he is adjunct professor of music at Missouri Western State College. He’s finally found a way to introduce the communities of both his homes.

Chorale Divertimento, a concert choir based in Lille, France near Mr. Glise’s home in Sainghin-en-Melantois in Northern France, is coming to St. Joseph to perform compositions, written by Mr. Glise, with the St. Joseph Chamber Choir. The two entities will be joined by the Lawrence Chamber Orchestra, guitarist Jason Riley, and Mr. Glise himself, who will narrate and play guitar.

“It’s like two old friends that haven’t met and I want them to meet,” Mr. Glise, a St. Joseph native, said. “It’s a wild exchange.”

All the major symphony orchestras in America could collapse tomorrow, and life would go on, musical life would go on. The symphony orchestra in its modern form has existed for about a century and a half. We had hundreds of years of musical history before that, an endless catalogue of masterpieces and legendary musicians. We functioned without the orchestra then, and we’d be able to function without it in the future. I’m not in any way wishing for the collapse of the orchestra. I’d be deeply disheartened by such a turn of events. It might mean among other things that I’d be out of a job, as would many music critics around the country. But I’d be very interested to see what happened next. The point is, I wish that for every story in the media about troubled orchestras there was a matching story about a new composer-led ensemble, a new chamber series, a new program of professional musicians working in schools, and so on. There are more professional musicians than ever before. More people are going to live concerts of classical music than ever before. There are far more composers writing music —ten, maybe twenty times as many as a hundred years ago. But musical life lacks a center. It exists off the radar screen of the major media. It’s actually kind of exciting when you think about it. If I were in the business of marketing classical music to younger audiences, I’d make a virtue of this. Classical music is the new underground.

John William Boone wore out sixteen pianos by age fifty-one playing songs that ranged from "Dat Only Chicken Pie" to Chopin's "Military Polonaise." Billed as "the marvelous musical prodigy," Boone composed complex pieces on the spot and could play back any tune after hearing it once.

Born in 1864 and blind from infancy, Boone was an African American musician who lived during the height of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan. He was billed a "freak of nature" early on and was barred from performing in many concert halls because of his race. Yet he refused to give up. "No matter how a person is afflicted," he wrote, "there is something that he can do worthwhile." His ambition eventually earned him a place among the top ragtime performers of his time.

Today Boone is celebrated at an annual ragtime festival in Columbia, Missouri, supported by the Missouri Humanities Council. The John William Boone Heritage Foundation and the City of Columbia are helping to restore his house and turn it into a cultural museum.

The St. Louis Symphony is back in the headlines and not with glowing ones like last season's, announcing its cool new music director, David Robertson.

This time it's on strike, or “locked out,” as the players are calling it. At issue is their new contract, and the conflict comes at a time when the organization, which almost went out of business four years ago, was again beginning to raise big sums of money. . . .

The Kansas City Symphony, which settled its negotiations last year by agreeing to a salary freeze for the first year of its contract, is still playing.

In fact, this week it will step forth with music director-designate Michael Stern for a program at the Lyric Theatre and at Johnson County's Yardley Hall.

Joanne Johnson Baker, 81, made her transition peacefully at home on Monday, December 27, 2004. Funeral services will be at 11 a.m. on Monday, January 3, at Second Presbyterian Church, 55th and Oak, followed by a reception. Arrangements are being handled by D.W. Newcomer's Sons Stine & McClure Chapel (816-931-7777).

Contributions may be made to The Joanne Baker Piano Scholarship (c/o Linda Robbins, Director of Development, Conservatory of Music, UMKC, 4949 Cherry, KCMO 64110), or The Joanne Baker Prize (Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation, 138 West Broadway, Suite 220, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101).

One of the most beloved and sought-after piano teachers in America, Joanne knew from the start that she would become a musician. At age four, she gave her first solo piano recital in a career that would take her to Carnegie Hall and around the world.

Joanne was born on October 18, 1923, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Luella May Johnson and Franklin August Johnson. From infancy through high school, she studied piano with her mother, a well-known pianist and former head of the Quincy Conservatory of Music in Illinois.

Music led to unpredictable adventures. At ten, Joanne held her first church job as a substitute organist at Paseo Methodist Church, playing the first-ever-sold Hammond Number One (now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington). In the marching band at Paseo High School, since she couldn't push a piano around the field, Joanne held a reedless clarinet, miming the fingering while marching in formation. She had the peculiar job of accompanying Paseo's whistling chorus and recalled the sudden danger when one whistler would get the giggles and, section by section, the whole chorus would fall apart.

Joanne attended the University of Kansas, where she met her husband of sixty years, Russell Walter Baker, Sr., who died in 2002. They married on September 15, 1942, and moved to Virginia and Maine where Russell was stationed during the war.

One stormy night in 1944, lightning and thunder tore through Phoebus, Virginia, where Joanne was giving a recital. Somewhere in the middle of Chopin's C# Minor Scherzo, the lights blew out. In total darkness, unable to see her hands or the keyboard, she forged ahead to the piece's conclusion. She couldn't see the standing ovation the audience gave her, just as they couldn't see her bow. Joanne always finished what she started.

After the war, she continued her education at the University of Michigan, where she earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees, was elected to Pi Kappa Lambda, and graduated number one in her class. Among her teachers were Quincy Porter, Joseph Brinkman, and Carl Friedberg, a student of Clara Schumann and Brahms.

As a young composer, Joanne wrote music for church, band, and choir, then went on to string quartets and solo piano pieces. After her piano sonata won a national competition, Joanne was invited in 1954 to play the piece at Carnegie Hall, where it was broadcast on national radio. But it was her love of teaching that would emerge as the primary focus of her career, and her students became a second family to her.

In 1948, Dr. Wiktor Labunski invited Joanne to join the faculty of what is now the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri - Kansas City (UMKC). She became its longest-serving faculty member, teaching at the school for 49 years and chairing the Keyboard Division for the last 25 of those years. She was designated a Curators' Professor, the University's highest honor.

Joanne chaired the prestigious Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition for two decades in Salt Lake City and was the first American artist invited to teach in China after the Cultural Revolution. In these and other capacities, she was an ambassador for the UMKC Conservatory, attracting the finest talent from around the world to build a first-class Keyboard Division.

Her many awards include the Burlington-Northern Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching, the Conservatory Trustees' Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Standard Oil Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the Award of Merit from Mu Phi Epsilon. She was on the board of directors of the annual World Piano Pedagogy Conference, and a longtime member of Mu Phi Epsilon, the Music Teachers National Association, the Missouri Music Teachers Association, and the Kansas City Musical Club.

Her legacy continues in the form of The Joanne Baker Prize, to be given in perpetuity at the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, recognizing that she is "known throughout the United States and the world as one of the most charismatic and exceptional musicians and teachers by her students and colleagues."

In 2003, The Joanne Baker Piano Scholarship was endowed by the Women's Committee for the Conservatory of Music, UMKC. Joanne's presence is audible to all in the musicians she trained and in the music they are making throughout the world.

She is lovingly survived by a son, Russell W. Baker, Jr., and his wife, Susan; a daughter, Wyatt Townley, and her husband, Roderick; and five grandchildren, Dr. Joshua Baker, Elizabeth Baker, Katherine Baker, Edward Baker, and Grace Townley, in whose lives she lives on.

Published in the Kansas City Star from 12/30/2004 - 1/2/2005.

Krutz's quest began five years ago when he was entertaining some musicians at his shop.

A couple visitors picked up some of Krutz's instruments and began to play. The notes were no different from any other performance, but Krutz said there was a sublime deepness to the music, a resonance between the instruments that he felt in his chest.

"The sound weighs more; it sounds bigger - almost like a woofer," he said.

Enthralled, Krutz wondered what it would sound like if an entire orchestra was playing with his instruments.

In the 1600s and 1700s, it was common for chamber orchestras and other groups to perform on instruments from a single maker as most groups were outfitted by royalty or the church and used local artisans.