Ferde Grofé

Ferde Grofé with score

Ferde Grofé also Ferde Grofé Sr. (born March 27, 1892 in New York , † April 3, 1972 in Santa Monica , California) was an American composer , arranger and conductor of Franco- Huguenot descent.

Life

He was born into a musical family as Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé and grew up in Los Angeles . After his father died in 1899, he followed his mother to Germany, where she studied for three years at the Leipzig Conservatory .

Back in Los Angeles he learned to play the piano and violin, initially earned money as a lift boy , newspaper boy, bookbinder and similar jobs, but at 15 he also became a musician, and played to dance, parades and picnics. He also played alto horn in brass bands and viola with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1909 he wrote his first composition, The Grand Reunion March, for a meeting of the Elks Clubs. He also played in Los Angeles nightclubs, where he became popular for his arrangements and improvisations. There he met Paul Whiteman in 1917 , for whose band he then became pianist, arranger, co-conductor and sheet music librarian.

In 1924 he orchestrated the Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin for Whiteman . From then on he began with larger compositions for orchestra, some of them with a pinch of humor. This is particularly evident in his works, Theme and Variations on Noises from a Garage (1926) and Free Air (1929) , which are dedicated to the bicycle pump .

Grofé's most important compositions are:

• Mississippi: A Journey in Tones (1925) a suite with the sentences Father of Waters , Huckleberry Finn , Old Creole Days and Mardi Gras
• Metropolis: A Fantasy in Blue (1928)
• Grand Canyon Suite (1929–1931) with the sentences Sunrise , The Painted Desert , On the Trail , Sunset and Cloudburst
• Hollywood Suite (1935–1938) with the sentences On the Set-Sweepers , The Stand-in , Carpenters and Electricians , Preview , Production Number and Director - Star - Ensemble
• Death Valley Suite (1949) with the sentences Funeral Mountains , '49er Emigrant Train , Desert Water Hole and Sand Storm
• Hudson River Suite (1955) with the sentences The River , Henry Hudson , Rip Van Winkle , Albany Night Boat and New York!
• Niagara Falls Suite (1961) with the sentences Thunder of the Waves , Devil's Hole Massacre , The Honeymooners and Power of Niagara

The suites represent musical travel images from the USA. The Mississippi Suite and the Grand Canyon Suite in particular are still performed by renowned conductors and orchestras to this day. At the Schwetzingen Festival in 2002, the SWR Big Band , the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra and the clarinetist Pierre Paquette under the direction of the pianist Dennis Russell Davies performed Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in the original instrumentation by Ferde Grofé.

With a studio orchestra in which the jazz musician Tommy Dorsey also played, he had his only hit hit in December 1933 with the hit song Temptation , which reached # 19 on the Billboard Top 30 . Bing Crosby sang it in the movie Going Hollywood that same year , making it a swing classic.

Grofé was a member of the Freemason Lodge Silver Trowel No. 414 in Los Angeles and St. Cecile No. 568 in New York City.

Only a few of his works are available on CD (the Hollywood Suite and the Grand Canyon Suite in several recordings ). Grofé became known to a wider audience through the CD Gershwin by Grofé , in which Grofé's arrangements for the Gershwin recordings are explicitly used. James Algar used Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite as a score for his short documentary Grand Canyon , which won an Oscar in 1958 .

In 1945 Grofé and Leo Erdody were nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Film Music" in the musical film drama Minstrel Man .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ As of June 2010  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• CV, works
• Ferde Grofé in the Internet Movie Database (English)