“I call it 'New Old Music,' and it was written in 1897 by Charles Martin Loeffler, who was the most-performed American composer in this country and Europe at the time,” clarinetist Graham Steele Johnson, 25, told WTOP.
It's a piece by one of America's great composers, Charles Martin Loeffler, that seemed lost to history, but one musician has spent the past four years resurrecting it in the same spot in Washington, DC where it once found its way.
Clarinetist Graham Steele Johnson has managed to recover the sheet music using materials from the Library of Congress, and will perform the music at the library in Washington on Wednesday night.
Clarinetist Graham Steele Johnson performs music by famous American composers at the Library of Congress on May 22, 2024. (Courtesy of Dylan Hancock)
“I call it 'New Old Music,' and it was written in 1897 by Charles Martin Loeffler, who was the most-performed American composer in this country and Europe at the time,” Johnson told WTOP.
Johnson was forced to cancel performances during the 2020 pandemic, and instead wrote program notes for other shows and conducted research.
By chance he came across a description of an octet that caught his interest because it featured two clarinetists and the instrumentation was almost identical to that of Claude Debussy's “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” which he had previously arranged.
“I started looking for recordings and couldn't find anything, then I looked for sheet music and couldn't find anything, so I started thinking maybe I'd found something good,” Johnson said of the 30-minute song.
Johnson said this was not an unusual pattern for the German-American composer, who often described himself as French, because he was “very sensitive to critical reactions.”
“Even though he was a very prominent figure during his lifetime, he ended up not publishing much of his music,” Johnson continued.
The only manuscript of the octet was housed at the Library of Congress, but copies had to wait until the facility reopened in 2021.
“It turned out to be a 75-page epic,” Johnson said of the manuscript, which he spent the next year sorting through.
“The score is a mosaic of scratches, deletions and all sorts of revisions made by Loeffler, making the restoration process complicated,” Johnson said.
In the end, he and seven others performed individually for the first time since 1897.
“It was actually a totally new experience going into this rehearsal and not really knowing how the song was going to go,” Johnson recalls.
He'll perform the song Wednesday night at the Library of Congress, returning it to the same place where it's been kept secret for more than a century.
“It's been really fun to hear people's reactions to this music,” Johnson said. “It's music that's been left out of musical history and left out of our sense of musical canon.”
Johnson believes this is just the first step in reviving long-forgotten music.
“There's a big, uncritical misconception in the classical music world that time is some kind of filter that determines quality,” he said.
The octet's first recording will be released on Johnson's album, “Forgotten Sounds,” on June 7.
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