was born in Schio, Italy. His family emigrated to the United States in
1910 and settled in New Jersey, which Scarmolin was to call home for the rest of
his life. Scarmolin’s father Angelo, a textile worker, was a keen musical
amateur and gave the young Anthony his first instruction on violin, piano and
various other instruments.
At the age of 14, the young musician entered the German Conservatory of Music in New
York City, where he studied piano with Bertha Cahn. His earliest compositions,
extracurricular efforts, date from this time. These works, given that they were
written in the early 1900’s, and in an extremely conservative musical
atmosphere, are shockingly prescient in their expressionism and extreme
chromaticism. A typical example is Una Discussione (1907), the earliest work on
this album. This work comes with an Ivesian program which deals with an argument
between "Signor A" and "Signor B." The tension between the
two Signori is represented by imitative counterpoint, and their various ideas
and talking points are represented by discreet musical ideas of two to seven
beats. There are sudden changes of tempo to represent the emotional ebb and
flow.
When Scarmolin
showed his early efforts to the conservatory faculty he was met with
incomprehension, and when a hand injury forced postponement (and eventually
abandonment) of concert career, he found himself forced to build a career in the
reactionary musical climate of early 20th-century America.
Accordingly he set aside his modernism and concentrated on commercially
marketable forms of music. Over the next two decades he produced a great
quantity of salon music, all of it crafted with great charm and facility. He
would eventually return to art music, but continued to produce salon pieces well
into his last decade. Several of these genre works are included on this disc,
including the lilting Valse Caprice, the tarantella-like Strephon (subtitled
"Pastoral Dance") and the sentimental Melodie D’Amour. The Petite
Mazurka de Concert, Romance and Remembrance are later, unpublished salon works.
In 1919,
Scarmolin was hired to conduct the orchestra and band at Emerson High School in
Union City, New Jersey. By the mid 1930’s he felt secure enough to take time
away from the composition of genre music and pursue more artistically ambitious
ventures. In 1938 he produced In Retrospect, written for a competition sponsored
by and early music performance ensemble looking to inspire new works for old
instruments. Originally scored for harpsichord and a consort of viols and later
reconfigured for piano quintet, this is a lyrical, and occasionally atmospheric
work in a style intended to sound "antique." In 1940, Scarmolin
produced Quartet for Strings, his first in this genre. The modernism of his
early works is nowhere to be found in the concert works of the 30’s and early
40’s; instead one encounters a lush Romantic sound, not unlike that found in
the scores of contemporaneous films. Still, there is a distinctive voice
audible, particularly in the brooding slow movement of this work.
In the late 1940’s
Scarmolin began, gradually, to adopt a comparatively modernist
element in his work. Never as expressionistic or chromatic as his early works,
the works of his last decades instead tend toward a degree of austerity and
astringency and the use of polytonality and whole-tone harmonies. The Second
String Quartet of 1955 is typical of this late sound, as is the Evocation of the
early 1960’s. This last work, originally written for clarinet, was adapted for
violin by Vladimir Tsypin, who performs it here.
