Composers: F.C. Menges, Salvatore Giannini, Harry Lincoln (1878-1937)

 

Harry Lincoln was from Williamsport, PA and owned the Vandersloot music publishing company.  Per Wikipeida, the surnames of several of the pseudonyms Lincoln often published under were Vandersloot.

 

I can't find anything at all about F.C. Menges and probably nothing about Salvatore Giannini.  I found some really brief references to a piano teacher and composer named Salvatore Giannini who lived from 1830-1900 but I don't know if it's the same person.  I suspect it isn't because the issue of The Crescendo the Giannini song is from is from 1915, but I suppose it is possible it was published posthumously.

 

Menges and Giannini don't even have IMSLP entries; I found their songs while looking through The Crescendo Volume 8.

 

Date: 1915 (Chant du Gondolier, The Gallery Gods March), 1916 (December Morn Foxtrot)

 

Original Instrumentation: 

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 Mandolin, Guitar (The Gallery Gods March)

 Mandolin or Violin, Guitar (Chant du Gondolier, December Morn Foxtrot)

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Movements:    

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The Gallery Gods March

Chant du Gondolier

December Morn Foxtrot

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Why this one:

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​Another one for my late 19th Century series.  I was looking through The Crescendo magazine issues that are uploaded to IMSLP after encountering them for the first time while working on the Odell stuff.  I picked Volume 8 essentially at random and picked a few that looked interesting.  The obscurity of the composers also made these appealing, given the nature of the Lazarus Music Project.​

 

Description:  

 

The Galler Gods March

Key:  D

Time: 2/2  BPM=100

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This song is found in The Crescendo Vol 8, No.1. 

 

After a brief intro, the piece as recorded is structured ABCDC.  A and B are 16 bars long while the C section, marked as a Trio section and in G major, is 32 bars.   

 

As is par for the course in this American song series, the melody is almost entirely in the mandolin.  The guitar plays what I referred to in my Odell write-up as "a stride piano-esque bass note - chord - bass note - chord four beat pattern" though there are some single note walk downs, though they feel like transitional elements rather than melodic ones.

 

There are a lot of double stops in the mandolin during the intro and A and B sections, which almost makes it feel like a chord melody.  The first really "singable" melody is  in the Trio C section, which doesn't use the double stops.  

 

The D section is the weirdest (relatively at least), with lots of accidents and rhythmic starts and stops, which definitely gives the sense that it is a mini development section where the composer is tinkering and screwing around with ideas before returning to the Trio section.  The accidentals make it seem like it's trying to modulate to a different key, but then it just returns to the Trio with its fairly unambitious G major.

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Performance:​

 

As notated in the score, the A and B sections repeat, but I opted not to do this. I recorded all three of these songs tighter and, given that "Chant du Gondolier" and "December Morn" combined were already 8 minutes long, I decided to try to trim the overall length where I could.   

 

This song was the hardest to play of the three Crescendo pieces.  Both the guitar and mandolin had some extremely tricky sections.  

 

I also noticed after I recorded it that it was written for mandolin and the performance notes in the magazine say to "tremolo all half and dotted quarter notes" which I did not do.  I had it in my head that this was written for the violin, in which case I don't usually tremolo long holds.  Also the other pieces I've done that were written specifically for mandolin, like Frey's Gondolier's Serenade or Mattie Mazurka, had the tremolos explicitly notated in the score.  I didn't even  realize there were performance notes in The Crescendo magazine until i stumbled onto them  while looking for something else.  So my apologies to F.C. Menges.

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Chant du  Gondolier

Key:  D

Time:  4/4    BPM=95 (Intro)

 3/4    BPM=112 (Waltz)

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This song is from The Crescendo Volume 8, No.2.   The magazine describes this as "a charmingly effective easy concert waltz," which is an accurate depiction of this pretty, if not all that ambitious, song.

 

It kicks off with a 16 bar intro in 4/4, where the guitar repeats an 8 bar sequence.  Then it moves to the waltz referenced above.

 

The waltz is sctructured ABCCAD.  Except for the 8 bar D section, which is the coda, the sections are all 32 measures long. 

 

The melody is in the mandolin, with the guitar playing the typical guitar waltz bass note - chord - chord pattern throughout.   Section A has a pretty flowing and light melody.  Section B has two main ideas and alternates between on octave leap motif played twice followed by a short-short-long figure, also played twice.

 

The C section, in G major, is played an octave higher the second time.

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Performance:

 

This song wasn't very difficult, though at north of 4'30" it is longish compared to most of the other tunes I found from this era and genre.    

 

Like in "The Gallery Gods" I didn't see the performance notes, but this one doesn't mention tremolos, though they were prominent in E.H. Frey's "The Gondolier's Serenade" so maybe I should have done it here, too?

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Errata:

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The score has some things in it that confused me a bit.  Per the performance notes, this song was also published for a full mandolin orchestra so some of the cues in the score were clearly pulled from there.   The first C section starts out with cue notes for a mandola and a note "mandolin solo for 8 measures."  I didn't quite know what to make of that but opted to just play the mandola part as the melody.  The performance notes refer to the second C section as "merely a repetition an octave higher" which is what i independently landed on, so I think I didn't commit an egregious offense playing what i did there.  

 

I could have interpreted the mandolin solo note as "write an 8 bar solo for this piece" but wasn't sure I'd able to come up with something in the spirit of this style I'm not very familiar with.  I also justified not doing this by telling myself the purpose of this project is to preserve the composer's writing as faithfully as I was able; adding my own solo on top seemed to go against this idea.

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December Morn Foxtrot

Key:  G

Time: 4/4  BPM=130

 

This song appeared in The Crescendo Vol 8, No.9.

 

After a four bar intro where the mandolin and guitar play in unison, the song is structured AABBACCAB.  

 

The 16 bar A section contains the main theme, a motif  containing 4 swung beats  followed by a short - long - long tag.  The first swing beats have some accidentals, which provides some tension as the melody contains non-diatonic notes a minor second (i.e. half-step) below the starting notes.

 

The B section, only 8 bars long, has a different repeating pattern of  short - long - short - long - short - long.   The C section, marked as a Trio,* modulates to C major and the melody is built around the swung rhythm in lines of descent.

 

* Like in "The Gallery Gods," Trio here means the structural kind, not the instrumentation kind.

 

Except for the unison intro, the  melody is in the mandolin and the guitar plays walking bass lines into the stride piano-esque pattern.  Like most of the rest of this American series the accompaniment harmony isn't all that complicated.

 

Performance:​

 

This was really fun to play.

 

I wasn't sure what tempo to play this at so I looked up foxtrots and found a few places that said they generally were between 120 and 136 BPM.  This one sounded better to me at the faster end of that range (i.e. BPM 130).  The performance notes which, again, I didn't see until after I recorded it, said "tempo about like a schottische" though I probably wouldn't  have found that too helpful as apparently schottische tempo varies pretty widely depending on what country you're in.  (American ones are supposedly slower).  

 

The notes also said to tremolo the half notes, which I did not do.  but at least there aren't very many in this song.

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Album Art:

 

Inside the Boston public library.  (Recall, The Crescendo was published in Boston.)   I took this photo in 2011.