Music of the Barbary Coast and Beyond: San Francisco’s Musical Origins

In celebration of the San Francisco Symphony's Centennial, the Library and Symphony have been presenting special exhibits and a series of related programs. On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 6:00 PM we will co-present the program Music of the Barbary Coast and Beyond: San Francisco’s Musical Origins in the Main Library's Koret Auditorium.

San Francisco has always been a music-loving town, from the music halls of the Gold Rush to the emergence of a full-time professional orchestra in the early 20th century. James Keller, organizer of the forthcoming exhibition at the Society of California Pioneers', Singing the Golden State, and Leta Miller, musicologist from UC Santa Cruz and author of the forthcoming Music and Politics in San Francisco 1906-1945 (UC Press), paint a vivid portraits of the diverse musical forces that laid the groundwork for the founding of the San Francisco Symphony in 1911. San Francisco musicologist Susan Key moderates.


A selective bibliography of books by our presenters:

American Mavericks, edited by Susan Key and Larry Rothe (San Francisco Symphony; in cooperation with the University of California Press, 2001).

Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide by James M. Keller (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Lou Harrison by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War by Leta E. Miller (University of California Press, 2012).


Other blog entries relating the Symphony Centennial:

Music For a City, Music For the World: 100 Years with the San Francisco Symphony (September 12, 2011).

Alfred Hertz and the San Francisco Symphony (September 21, 2011).

San Francisco Symphony at 100 (October 3, 2011).

An Audio History of the San Francisco Symphony (October 17, 2011).

Recollections of Alfred Hertz (November 3, 2011).

Our Books - Read On Public Transportation!

One of the life's cheap thrills for librarians is to see books we have selected in the hands of readers on the bus, MUNI or BART. That's why it was a delight to come across these images from the blog People Reading Books In Public Places.

image source: People Reading Books in Public Places

This book, photographed on the K Ingleside train, is clearly a San Francisco Public Library book - the barcode placed in the upper left hand corner and date label at the top of the spine are the clues.

The photographed reader is enjoying Simon Reynold's Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews, a companion to his earlier Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.

For all you Simon Reynold's fans we have his two newest books at the Library. Bring The Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop covers Reynold's more recent music journalism. His Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past is a work of cultural criticism where he argues that the instant availability of nearly all of audio musical history that we have with the advent of internet has contributed to a contemporary culture that revels too much in stylistic imitation at the expense of originality.

image source: People Reading Books in Public Places

The blogger identifies this second book as Found: A Daughter's Journey Home by actress Tatum O'Neal. She notes that it is a library book being read on BART - but we don't know which library it was borrowed from. It could be one of ours - as of today's writing, San Francisco Public Library has 16 copies of this title. If a copy is not available at your branch, place a hold.

Here is a summary of Found from our Library catalog: "The actress reveals her efforts to pull her life together, make peace with her children, and forge a fragile relationship with her estranged father, Ryan O'Neal, after twenty-five years of public and private feuding."

If you have already read Found and enjoyed it, we also have several copies of Tatum O'Neal's 2004 book, A Paper Life.

Reading List:

Bring The Noise: 20 Years of Writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop by Simon Reynolds (Soft Skull Press, 2011).

Found: A Daughter's Journey Home by Tatum O'Neal; with Hilary Liftin (William Morrow, 2011).

A Paper Life by Tatum O'Neal (Harper Entertainment, 2004).

Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past by Simon Reynolds (Faber & Faber, 2011).

Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds (Penguin Books, 2006).

Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews by Simon Reynolds (Faber and Faber, 2009).

Recollections of Alfred Hertz

Cover image from 1925-1926 San Francisco Symphony season programs

Alfred Hertz, the San Francisco Symphony’s second conductor, though a beloved a figure, was a formidable musical force and personality.

Winthrop Sargeant was the music critic for the New Yorker from 1947 to 1972. A native San Franciscan he was a member of the second violin section of the San Francisco Symphony as a youth in the early 1920s. In Geniuses, Goddesses, and People, he describes Hertz as the first true genius he had ever met and recounts his impressions of the conductor.

In San Francisco, where he had taken over the conductorship of the local Symphony and whipped it into a standard of performance that was then new to the Pacific coast, Hertz was a great man. Few people honestly liked him, and I have rarely met a man who so consistently went out of his way to be disliked. With Hertz, being disliked was a point of pride and a proof of power. His appearance, to begin with, was somewhat frightening, and he made the most of it. His shiny, totally bald head, from which even the suggestion of a fringe had been studiously clipped, surmounted a neck that bulged with overlapping layers of fat. His thick, sensual lips and sawlike teeth peeked obscenely from behind a luxuriant and carefully tended black beard. His powerful shoulders and stocky body swayed uncertainly on legs pitifully withered by infantile paralysis, and his walk, painstakingly aided by a heavy cane, was like the halting progress of some wounded but defiant animal.

Hertz was a conductor of experience, knowledge and enormous sincerity. He could perform Brahms with a leisurely grandeur that has become practically extinct in the modern concert hall, and Wagner with a certain very Teutonic nobility. He never spared himself in his devotion to his work.

Fear the beard, indeed!

Leon Fleisher, another San Francisco native, encountered Alfred Hertz as a child prodigy in the 1930s. He reminisces about Hertz in his 2010 memoir My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music.

Hertz was as bald as a billiard ball, with a formidable dark, bushy beard that was salt-and-pepper gray by the time I knew him and round wire-framed glasses: a bona fide representative of the great European tradition, straight out of the concert halls of Gustav Mahler. Crippled as a child by what they used to call infantile paralysis--that is, polio--he walked with a cane for all of his adult life, but this did not diminish his notable vigor.

He was also a formidable and renowned musician. Hertz’s stature was such that he was able to attract a whole new caliber of player to San Francisco, both as soloists and as orchestra players. The violinist Louis Persinger, for instance, was the concert-master of the Berlin Philharmonic before Hertz lured him to take that position at the San Francisco Symphony. With this kind of musician on its roster, the San Francisco Symphony quickly developed into a serious professional orchestra.

Hertz was also forward-looking. He was committed to education and outreach--words that didn’t have as much currency in the classical music world in those days as they do now--and was happy to explore new ways of reaching audience. He was also eager to explore recording and radio. The San Francisco Symphony became one of the first American orchestras to make commercial recordings, starting in the 1920s.


The display The San Francisco Symphony in the Library's Collections features some of Alfred Hertz's correspondence and other ephemera. This display may be viewed in the Steve Silver Music Center on the 4th floor of the Main Library.


Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

Winthrop Sargeant, Geniuses, Goddesses, and People (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949).

Bob Grimes (1922-2011) - An Appreciation

Bob Grimes, photographed by Basya Petnick in "Bob Grimes - The Music Man," Nob Hill Gazette (January 1999), p. 20.

Musicians all over the world lost a dear friend when Bob Grimes passed away recently at the age of 89. We miss him at the Library as well. A recent obituary by Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle of October 14, 2011 provides a nice appreciation of Bob Grimes and his life.

Bob Grimes was a legendary collector of sheet music - his collection consisted of more than 34,000 pieces until he sold it to the Michael Feinstein Foundation near the end of his life. While Bob was happy to be known as a collector, his true passion was for the songs themselves. He wanted to play whatever part he could in bringing back what he saw as a Golden Age of American music. To that end he shared his collection and knowledge of this rich repertoire with countless singers and other musicians.

The Sheet Music Mogul of Post Street, source: Youtube - Channel 3 Evening News (2007).

In addition to possessing such a marvelous collection, he was a living encyclopedia, an endless font of knowledge about the songs of American film and stage. We librarians often called upon him to help library patrons. When you told him a song title he’d say, “That’s from [movie title], I pretty sure I’ve got it here, hold on a minute.” Or he’d answer “Oh, that one was never published.” Then you knew you were sunk.

Bob Grimes - Almost a Celebrity (source: Youtube)

He could recall significant details about every song often about their setting and creation. Today the internet, databases and recent reference books have made it much easier to track down an elusive piece of sheet music. But a mere twenty years ago the amazing memory of collectors like Bob Grimes and dealers like Dorothy Starr were absolutely essential.

Bob was always delighted to hold court and share his enthusiasm and knowledge with anyone who was interested. I’m sure many others can recount instances of Bob introducing them to some obscure, wonderful number captured on celluloid. I remain grateful for Bob playing me a movie scene where Lyda Roberti as Mata Machree sings the over-the-top number “It’s Terrific (When I Get Hot)” from the delightful W. C. Field’s vehicle Million Dollar Legs (1932). According to Frederick Nolan, famed lyricist Lorenz Hart anonymously contributed these lyrics to Ralph Rainger’s melody. But I’m sure Bob must have first told me that.


Matta Machree, The Woman No Man Can Resist (source bunæn’s Flickr photostream).

Bob was very generous with the Library and its patrons. Often after learning that Bob indeed did have a copy of a very elusive song, I would walk up to his apartment on Post Street where he would a have a copy awaiting me that I could provide for an astonished and grateful library patron.

We continue to aspire to provide what Bob Grimes did -- access to the vast ocean of American popular song. Our collection of sheet music is vast, if less focused than Bob’s. In 1990 we were fortunate have community members raise money to acquire the stock of Dorothy Starr’s music store. We have a database consisting of nothing but vocal sheet music that presently has more than 35,000 unique items. This supplements our already extensive collection of songbooks and piano / vocal scores to Broadway shows and film musicals. While we cannot provide this service with the same charm and aplomb that Bob did, we hope we aspire to continue his legacy of helping to unite singers with songs.

For those interested in learning more about Bob Grimes the Art, Music and Recreation Center has newspaper clippings about Bob Grimes spanning more than 30 years in our Musicians and Performing Artists File.

Bibliography:

Bob Grimes biography at the Internet Movie Database.

Lorenz Hart: A Poet on Broadway by Frederick Nolan (Oxford University Press, 1994).

An Audio History of the San Francisco Symphony

Victor Records advertisement from the San Francisco Symphony programs, 1929-1930.

Scott Foglesong, musicologist and chair of the San Francisco Conservatory department of musicianship and music theory, has spent the last two years unearthing rare recordings and broadcasts by the San Francisco Symphony. On Tuesday night, October 18, 2011, from 6:00 - 7:30 in the Koret Auditorium, Foglesong will lead a fascinating curated musical journey through time, from 1925 to the present.

** Rumor has it that there will be an audio demonstration of the "Hertz lunge."

Foglesong has also compiled a complete discography of the San Francisco Symphony that is available on the Symphony's website. For related reading, check out Larry Rothe's new centennial history of the Symphony entitled Music for a City, Music for the World: 100 Years with the San Francisco Symphony (Chronicle Books, 2011).

When you visit the Library don't forget to visit our two Symphony-related exhibits, Music for a City, Music for the World in the Jewett Gallery on the Lower Level and The San Francisco Symphony in the Library’s Collections in the Steve Silver Beach Blanket Babylon Music Center here on the 4th floor.

High Volume: Rock Art From The Chuck Sperry Archive and Firehouse Goldenvoice Poster Series

High Volume: Rock Art From The Chuck Sperry Archive and Firehouse Goldenvoice Poster Series will be on display on the 4th floor in the Art, Music and Recreation Center from October 7 through January 6, 2012.

An auburn-haired songstress holds a fawn. Shocking magenta hair falls to the shoulders of a blue nude strapped with artillery. A 1950s-model cop car rests peacefully at the bottom of the sea, washed in blues and purples revealing a silent white angel. Each outstanding print on display represents a prominent rock band. Each was created by Chuck Sperry.

In early 2011, Chuck Sperry, San Francisco artist and co-owner of Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company, made an unprecedented donation to the Library's Art, Music and Recreation Department of over one-hundred limited edition, hand-printed rock art posters. Officially entitled The Chuck Sperry Archive, this collection comprehensively documents the Goldenvoice Music Series (at the Regency and Warfield Theaters) from 2008 to present, as well as selected Firehouse productivity related to the cultural-life of San Francisco.

This collection is exciting in both use of color and variety of content. Each silkscreen print is comprised of up to sixteen colors, applied as individual layers. The pieces reference styles ranging from Japanese nishiki-e, Austrian Expressionism, 1960s psychedelia, to the provocative punk poster tradition of Sperry’s youth. Musicians such as Neko Case, Danzig, Bad Religion, Nick Cave, Sound Garden and The Black Keys are represented, as are a talented group of Bay Area graphic artists (Ron Donovan, Alex Fischer, Gregg Gordon, Dave Hunter, Alan Hynes, Scott Johnson, Dennis Loren, Chris Shaw, Frank Zio, and Zoltron) who contributed to the Firehouse Goldenvoice Poster series under the art direction of Chuck Sperry.



An opening reception will be held on Thursday, October 20th from 6-7 p.m. in the Latino/Hispanic Room A & B.

Related reading:

Eyesore: Recent Litter from the Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company by Chuck Sperry & Ron Donovan (Coniglio Editore, 2002).

San Francisco Symphony at 100

San Francisco Symphony Orchestra playing at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium [1935] (image source: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection)

On Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 6 PM, the San Francisco Public Library will screen the film San Francisco Symphony at 100 in the Koret Auditorium of the Main Library.

This one hour documentary film screening paints a portrait of the role of an orchestra in its community and the power of music to inspire--from the Symphony's founding in the wake of the 1906 earthquake through the Symphony's multimedia initiatives in today's fast-paced world. The film is narrated by author Amy Tan, a longtime friend and fan of the Symphony.

An audience Q & A with producer Janette Gitler will follow the screening.

Be sure to visit to on-going exhibits at the Library -- Music for a City, Music for the World in the Jewett Gallery in the Library's Lower Level and The San Francisco Symphony in the Library’s Collections in the Steve Silver Beach Blanket Babylon Room on the Fourth Floor.