March 2010 Archives

The Etude Cover Gallery now shows 365 items, starting with the earliest cover from my collection -- January, 1901 -- and ending with the December, 1955 issue.

I did not expect to make such a concerted project of the covers, but the more I looked at them the more appealing they became to me. It reminded me of LP records and how generously endowed some were with large poster-size prints and artwork. Compact Discs, by comparison, generally offer impossible-to-read booklets if they provide any supplementary material at all.

These Etude Magazine covers seem lavish compared to modern products, though the quality of the Etude covers as art took a hit starting with the April, 1951 cover, featuring a new logo and a garish banner across the top.

An interesting cover I wanted to share appeared on the August, 1945 edition. Signed by an artist named Morgan this strange cover features an audience of insects enjoying the performance of a violin/cello cricket duo. Or are these performers another type of insect? My entymology is not so sharp as my other skills, but whatever these little creatures are they found their stage on a mushroom and are seen here making music in a thicket.

There is no information about this cover within the pages of The Etude, so the only extra detail I can glean is that artist's name is "Morgan" -- at least I think that's what the signature in the lower-right corner says.

The November, 1930, issue of The Etude opens up an interesting "mystery", that is if mysteries truly exist in our time. The cover image is titled "Rubinstein Playing in Stassov's Home" and it was, according to the credit underneath the image, "Painted expressly for The Etude by Ossip de Perelma de Bisserie."

Ossip de Perelma (also known as "Ossip di Perelma", "Ossip Perelman", and other variations) was an established Russian painter known for his portraits of that country's czars. He left Russia in 1917. In this painting the artist returns to Russian subject matter, depicting the great pianist Anton Rubinstein playing at the home of Vladimir Stassov (also spelled Stasov). Stassov, seen lounging at the far right of the painting, was a highly influential music critic in Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The painting adorns the November, 1930, cover of The Etude, and depicts a soireé which would likely have taken place in the 1880s or 1890s. No additional information about this painting is included in the magazine.

Of less interest than the painting, however, is the painter's ultimate fate as recounted in an interesting story at SimplySarasota.com. Under the "Mysteries of Sarasota" heading is a story called Where did the Russian Count's Relatives Go?, which contains a brief summary of the artist's life followed by the strange absence of any relatives or friends to claim his body after his death. Six years after Perelma's death the funeral home finally located the artist's wife, and arrangements were made for a proper funeral service.

A minor historical footnote, perhaps, but a staid reminder that a measure of fame in one's public life is no guarantee of lasting public renown or memory.

It reminded me of an interesting project I read about at DesignObserver.com. In a story called Death's Bloom I read of an Oregon hospital which stored in its basement a number of metal canisters containing cremains of its patients. Documented by photographer David Maisel in Library of Dust, the canisters evolved over the years into mordantly colorful works of erosive art. The Etude cover artist for November, 1930, ultimately suffered no such ignominy, but had he been left in the lurch long enough he might have been buried as an unknown.

Similarly (and more relevant to piano music) one is reminded of the burial site of Scott Joplin, who died a pauper and was buried in a mass grave at St. Michael's Cemetery in Astoria. In the 1970s, when Joplin's reputation rose up from obscurity and he was given the credit he was due, the burial site was located and a formal plaque honoring Joplin's burial site was placed. Today it is common to see tokens of respect placed at the site, which draws a number of admirers and famous-grave-seekers to St. Michael's Cemetery.

Paul Harvey used to have a segment of his radio show called "Shop Talk" in which he talked about the radio and broadcasting business in which he spent most of his life. I am no Paul Harvey but I shall try the Shop Talk thing, since it seems to be on my mind so much while building this new web site.

I use Movable Type for text content, with Gallery2 for photo galleries like the Etude Cover Magazines and Old Advertisements. I've used Gallery2 for years now and will likely skip the impending update to Gallery3, this out of no distaste for the new product (I have not even seen it) but out of a reliance on some features that will be stripped away from Gallery2 in the new release. Specifically, item-level permissions, a feature which has evidently contributed mightily to the complexity of the underlying database structure but which I find very useful. I also have done pretty extensive hack work and code jujitsu with the Gallery2 templating that I would not care to re-create in a new, presumably more simplified environment. I have other reasons too boring to recount for sticking with G2 for now.

For general CMS (Content Management Systems) stuff on Scriabin.com I stick with an old favorite in Movable Type. I know that some regard Wordpress as superior, and I do not deny WP's advantages for straight-up personal writing sites. But the extended templating options in MT remain useful to me for plugging content into other CMSes and softwares. On Sorabji.com I have a section which updates automatically across 3 sites without crons and plugins, I just have a template which generates a Perl library that plugs into my DICT server, and another template which fills in a .mobi version of things. Some of this can be accomplished in WP with .htaccess and httpd configs -- I am well aware of this because I do these tricks myself in other contexts where I use WP -- but for my sensibilities of site management I prefer static files and MT's templating extensibility, as well as MT's relatively infrequent upgrades. I also like MT because my initials are MT. Hah...

An early challenge with this site, then, was to combine content from MT and Gallery2. There is no specific bridge to connect the two (and without comments and logins on the CMS side it seems unnecessary to inject whatever complexities would arise from combining the two). Specifically, when I make certain content from an issue of The Etude available it seemed to make sense to link to that content from the corresponding cover image of that issue (assuming it's available) and vice-versa. With consistent file-naming and such it was easy enough to tell MT to fill in a txt file with a list of stories from the month, name the file in a format that matches the Gallery2 file-naming system, then tell Gallery2 to look for a file that matches the base filename of the cover image. Maybe that sounds simpler to me than to others but it took just a few minutes of re-purposing an MT monthly archive template, generating a set of txt includes, then telling Gallery2 to look for these files in the individual cover pages. So while this page might look natural enough in substance I had some fun making it possible by juggling the templating languages with which I am so familiar to form a pretty stable link between Gallery2 and Movable Type:

January, 1905 Edition of The Etude (Chopin Number)

Going forward my intent is to make the site look less like a turn-key Movable Type design and more like something I would do. I am not a graphic designer by any estimate nor do I have the funds to hire one, but I think I can craft a look that expresses the character of these old magazines and their content. At present the site looks brittle, and while others are prone to complain about the relative dearth of freely available Movable Type templates compared to other free CMS platforms I find that the starter templates are perfectly adequate for letting me focus on content first, and style later.

Spring must be on its way, for I am listening to the Chopin/Godowsky Study #45 when I find that at about 3:30 into the piece the sounds of the piano music become inextricably intertwined with the sounds of a Mr. Softee ice cream truck sprinkling its summertime noise along the street. Having not heard Mr. Softee's noise for some months it takes me several seconds to realize that I am not hearing some new and confusing counterpoint in this piece of music (which is busy with counterpoint and what Arrau called "ants"). It takes me some time to distinguish the two, to separate the music from the noise pollution, and to conclude that nothing about this recording (to which I have listened countless times) has changed nor am I hearing some new layer heretofore obscure. All I can do is turn off my music and wait for the Mr. Softee truck to pass into the silent distance so I can resume listening to music.

When I started the Etude Music Magazine section of this web site I dove in to my collection expecting to have little interest in the magazine covers. I thought they would be hackneyed or maudlin, and while some of them approach kitsch I nevertheless have come to feel that the quality of the artwork is consistent and genuine.

These oversized and impressive covers remind me of the influence magazine covers used to hold over me. As a child the Time Magazine "Man of the Year" (later re-named "Person of the Year") was an annual declaration of influence that I looked forward to with interest and speculation. Who would it be? Whose face would join the party filled by luminaries and bad guys? It was not just the "Person of the Year" issue, it could be any edition of Time that influenced my perception of how history moved in my life.

In a similar spirit I find that these old Etude covers command some authority. A retrospective look at a few hundred of them shows the influence of Liszt, Paderewski, and Beethoven over the minds of musical culture from the early 20th century. The large format of these covers was common enough in their day but I find that in modern contexts the generosity of the printing and sheer size of these magazines provokes some nostalgia for a journal and a publishing industry that commanded influence over its audience. Among pianists Liszt was (and still should be) revered as a god, as the single most influential force in modern pianistic technique, and it should be no surprise to see the old Abbe grace so many covers of the magazine. Beethoven needs no introduction or explanation for appearing so often on The Etude's cover, while posterity seems to have treated Paderewski with less kindness as his reputation has shifted from being among the great pianists to something more of a charismatic personality.

A more general but often-recurring subject for the covers is music in the home, in the back yard, or at soireés and social gatherings. The Etude branded itself as a magazine for the musical home, a home in which "music study exalts life!" Those many images of Americans young and old sitting at the piano or playing another musical instrument seem crafted to the belief that music is an essential component of a healthy and happy home, with the piano itself depicted as the center of domestic life -- a role that would later be filled by television.

I have more covers to add, and I will do so as my scanning time permits. I need to clear my desk to make way for the oversize scanner, an investment without which this project would be impossible.

Etude Magazine Cover Images Gallery