Raising the false hopes of workers everywhere, Monday is “Fry Day” this week – as today happens to coincide with the birthday of William Henry Fry. Maybe.*
Fry was born in Philadelphia in 1813. A pioneering figure in American music, he was the first native-born composer to write on a large scale. He composed orchestral works and the first opera by an American to be performed publicly in his lifetime (“Leonora,” in 1845). He was an outspoken advocate of American music – that is, music composed by Americans – at a time when German imports ruled the roost. It would be decades before American music would gain a toehold in the concert halls, which makes Fry an even more remarkable figure.
Fry studied music with a former bandleader in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, who went on to become the head of Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Society. Fry himself would become the society’s secretary.
He was also a journalist, a writer on music, and the first music critic to write for a major American newspaper. He was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and acted as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune.
He composed seven symphonies, all of them of a descriptive nature. His “Santa Claus Symphony,” after Clement Moore, is more of a Straussian tone poem. My personal favorite, though, is the “Niagara Symphony.” Written for P.T. Barnum, the work is conceived for enormous forces augmented by a mind-blowing eleven timpani.
Hear this sublime work this afternoon on The Classical Network in a recording on the Naxos label. The album features liner notes by my friend and colleague Kile Smith. For 18 years, Kile was curator of the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music at the Free Library of Philadelphia, the world’s largest lending library of orchestral performance materials, where Fry’s scores are housed.
Kile, of course, is also an entertaining writer, a personable radio presence, and a terrific composer. His latest album, “The Arc in the Sky,” was released last month on Navona Records, a subsidiary of Parma Recordings. The hour-long work was commissioned by the Grammy Award winning choir, The Crossing. It is one of five CDs of Kile’s music to be issued over the past year.
I’ll further exploit the Fry connection to share some of Kile’s music this afternoon, following on the heels of the “Niagara Symphony.” Out of the Fry and into the Kile, so to speak.
It will be more fun than going over the falls in a barrel, from 4 to 7 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
- There is some discrepancy regarding the date of Fry’s birth, with some sources giving August 10, and others August 19. So maybe it is just Monday, after all.
More about Kile Smith here: kilesmith.com
