President's Welcome
It's a pleasure to welcome you to The OREL Foundation web site and to cordially invite you to have a look around. This site reflects many months of planning, formulating, researching and writing and is the product of the work of many people. Special thanks go to Michael Beckerman who, from the beginning, has overseen the major section of the website devoted to composer biographies.
You will note that we feature twenty representative composers as we launch the site. These composers were selected for a variety of reasons, and inclusion of some and exclusion of others reflects no particular bias or judgment. Other composer profiles will be added as we go along, and we welcome your input in helping us grow the site.
We have taken pains to make our site user-friendly, with a special emphasis on providing lots of information that may be useful to musicians and teachers who may be encountering much of this material for the first time. At the same time, we hope that certain of our offerings—the “Articles and Essays” section, the “Discussion Board,” for instance—will be of interest to visitors more familiar with the issues we explore.
One of the things most important to us is to allow visitors to the site to quickly match the information in the articles with sound samples. Let's take an example. Click on “Composers” and you will see a series of portraits and on the right an alphabetical list of composers. Click on “Zemlinsky.” In the center of that page you will see a short encyclopedia-style article and on the right, over the photo, further choices. Click on “Works” and a list of compositions will appear chronologically. Scroll down to 1922-23 “Lyrische Symphonie” near the bottom of the page. Click on that and you will see information about the composition, and at the bottom something called “Audio Sample Link.” This will take you to a place where you can hear short sound sample, or buy an MP3 download of the piece. (Please keep in mind that available information and links vary with each work.)
We also invite you to explore—and to contribute to!—our online calendar of upcoming performances. You will note that, for now, the performance listings are generally limited to those twenty composers featured on the site. Also, you may use the search function to locate upcoming performances of interest or in a city near you, or to locate performances of particular works or composers.
We also invite you to actively participate in our Discussion Board. In this way this site can play a small role in the worldwide conversation among those musicians and scholars who share a passion for these composers, their music and the re-evaluation of their historical significance.
A special note: As you explore the site, you will find select links to audio excerpts and the occasional video. One can find many more such excerpts on sites such as YouTube, iTunes, Amazon.com or other similar outlets, and we encourage you to seek out such opportunities. We intend to add many audio and video files in the months ahead, while thoughtfully navigating the legal issues involved.
I am grateful to all who have already made important contributions to the site and to The Foundation, starting with James Conlon, whose unparalleled work on behalf of these suppressed composers inspires us daily. Special thanks also go to Bruce Kovner, Chairman of our Board, for his remarkable support of the organization and its mission. It has been a particular pleasure to work closely with Michael Beckerman in the creation of this site, and I gratefully acknowledge his crucial role in the framing of the organization's mission and goals. Thanks also to Harvey Sachs, for his expert editorship of our unfolding “Articles and Essays” section (which will feature a new article each month) and to Christopher Hailey for leaping into the void to provide the first such article.
Please contact us with your thoughts, your news, your contributions—and, yes, your corrections. Though all who have contributed have made every effort to be accurate—as has our extremely able web site administrator, Olga Bezrukova—we expect that some things have slipped through, and we are eager to make them right. We look forward to hearing from you.
Finally, we encourage you to add your name to our mailing list so that we may include you in our monthly notices.
Thank you for visiting.
Bob Elias President The OREL Foundation