Sonneck Society for American Music
Bulletin, Volume XXIII, no. 1 (Spring 1997)
Ramon Salvatore and American Piano Music
by J. Bunker Clark
Aaron Copland, Phillip Ramey, Arthur Farwell, John Knowles Paine, Paul Bowles, Stephen
Foster, Yehudi Wyner, Robert Palmer, Anthony Philip Heinrich, Ross Lee Finney, George
Whitefield Chadwick, John Alden Carpenter, Virgil Thomson, John LaMontaine, Wallingford
Riegger, David Burge, Amy Beach, Elie Siegmeister, John Corigliano, Arthur Foote, Hunter
Johnson. These are American composers, nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
faithfully promoted and performed in recent years by Ramon Salvatore.
I first knew Ramon when he held a visiting appointment on the piano faculty of the
University of Kansas, 1969-1970. I next saw him when he played works by some of these
composers, including a very impressive sonata by Hunter Johnson, on a recital during the
Sonneck Society meeting at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, April 16, 1988. He
returned to KU two years later, during American Music Week, for a November 19, 1990,
recital of works by some of the composers, including Anthony Philip Heinrich's "God
Save the Emperor" variatiosn from The Dawning of Music in Kentucky (1820) and
played excerpts for a paper on that work I read the previous day. He also had written a
kind review of my book The Dawning of American Keyboard Music in our journal
American Music (Spring 1990) earlier that year.
This recital was from a series of three, entitled "American Piano Music in the Grand
Tradition" he performed at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, and at Weill
Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall, New York, spring 1991 -- reported in this Bulletin,
summer and fall 1991. It was supported by a 1990 Solo Recitalists Fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Arts. (Program notes were written by Steven Ledbetter.)
Ramon wrote: "This series of three programs is the culmination of five years' preparation.
The choice of repertoire is personal and reflects what I believe are unjustly neglected
works by important living composers whose reputations were established before 1950,
but whose music receives infrequent performances, as well as by younger, currently active
composers. In addition, I have included composers who were active in the
nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, whose music, for the most part,
have remained forgotten. It is my hope that the listener will find this
endeavor to be worthwhile."
Ramon died of cancer last summer, August 5, 1996, a few weeks before his 52nd
birthday (August 27). Fortunately he left us four CDs of American music: American
Piano, vol. 2: Blue Voyage: Music in the Grand Tradition (Premier
PRCD 10197, 1992); Music in the American Grain (Cedille 90000 010, 1992);
Copland Piano Music: Romantic & Modern (Cedille 90000 021, 1995); and
Chicago Concertos -- Rudolf Ganz, Concerto in E-flat, with the Chicago
Sinfonietta, and John LaMontaine, Fourth Piano Concerto, with the Slovak Radio
Symphony Orchestra, both conducted by Paul Freeman (Cedille 90000 028, 1996).
(In spring 1995, at the National Gallery, Washington, he had premiered Copland's
early Sonata in G, included in the third recording.) His parents, Joseph and Charlotte
Salvatore, live in Morton Grove, Illinois. Ramon, a wonderful pianist, was truly a champion of
American music.
Updated 4/20/98