Piano Music - Samuel Barber

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Barber Samuel

📖 "Samuel Barber was one of the most honored and most frequently performed American composers in Europe and the Americas during the mid-century decades. Through most of his career he made his living alsmot entirely by composing, perhaps one of the few composers who could make this choice. His works - comprising forty-eight opus numbers and more than one hundred unpublished pieces - are representative of nearly every muscal genre, and many entered the repertoire soon after he wrote them."
Barbara B. Heyman Samuel Barber. The Composer and His Music

📖 "Barber entered his professional career in the mid-1930s upon the wave of Depression-era conservatism that charecterized the music of many American composers who were at least a decade older than he. But unlike many of his contemporaries whose careers came to maturity between the two world wars, he rarely responded to experimental trends that infused music in the 1920s and again after World War II, instead pursuing a path marked by a vocally inspired lyricism and a commitment to the tonal language and many of the forms of late nineteenth-century music. Although he shared the concern of his generation for writing music accessible to a broadly based audience, unlike Copland, Harris, Blitzstein, and Thomsonm, who searched for a music with national identity and who from the thirties on began incorporating popular, jazz, and folk idioms in their compositions, Barber attempted to communicate to established concert audiences whose taste was based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European models. … When he did incorporate Americana into his music, it was transitory, yielding Excursions - stylized pieces based on American idioms - and the Piano Sonata and the Piano Concerto, both of which lightly display motoric jazz rhythms…. In this regard, he bears a closer resemblance to nineteenth-century Romantics than to his peers, whose choice of subjects was often motivated by social consciousness or a sense of nationalism. His international literary orientation is reflected in the 1945 commencement address he delivered to young musicins at the Curtis Institute of Music: 'One might think there were no poets except Sara Teasdale and Walt Whitman… Do you know the poems of Spencer, T. S. Eliot … W. H. Auden?' Barber not only read their works but became a friend to many poets and writers.
Barbara B. Heyman Samuel Barber. The Composer and His Music

📖 "Of the many influences on Barber's music. three seem most prominent in preserving his consistent connection to the nineteenth century. The first is the character of his formal musical education, which was traditional Europe-oriented, and institutionalized - nine rigorous years of training … at the Curtis Institute… The second is the impact on his intellectual development of travels to Europe… A third force that molded Barber's artistic principles was the personal guidance he received from his uncle, the composer Sidney Homer, whose advice and mentoring can scarcely be overestimated."
Barbara B. Heyman Samuel Barber. The Composer and His Music

📖 "As much as Barber's nonrevolutionary posture was a product of his experience, however, it derived also from his personal motivation for writing music - to express feelings."
Barbara B. Heyman Samuel Barber. The Composer and His Music

Samuel Barber

1910 - 1981
Samuel Barber was an American composer, pianist, conductor, baritone, and music educator.

📖 "I suppose if I'm writing music for words, then I immerse myself in those words, and I let the music flow out of them. When iIwrite an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer."
Barber quoted in john Gruen's And Where Has Samuel Barber Been…", in New York Times 3 October 1971

📖 "NOTICE to Mother and nobody else:
Dear Mother: I have written this to tell you my worrying secret. Now don't cry when you read it because it is neither yours not my fault. I suppose I will have to tell it now without any nonsense. To begin with I was not meant to be an athlet. I was meant to be a composer, and will be I'm sure. I'll ask you one more thing. - Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football. - Please - Sometimes I've been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad (not very). Love, Sam Barber II"

📖 "I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't."

📖 "There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand."

📖 "I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that."

📖 "As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer."

📖 "I can only say that I myself wrote always as I wished, without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible."

📖 "I was 7 years old when I began composing. I began composing, improvising at the piano, the usual story."

📖 "I've had little success in intellectual circles. I'm not talked about in the 'New York Review of Books,' and I was never part of the Stravinsky 'inner circle.'"

📖 "As to what happens when I compose, I really haven't the faintest idea."

Quotes by Samuel Barber

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Explore Recordings of Barber's Music

Barber - Adagio for Strings, Op.11
Vienna Philharmonic
Gustavo Dudamel, conductor
(Summer Night Concert 2019)

Samuel Barber-Violin Concerto Op. 14
Isaac Stern, violin
Leonard Bernstein: conductor
New York Philharmonic

John Browning, piano

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