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Nancy Toff: “Georges Barrère and the French Musical Tradition in America”

Monday, November 19, 2012 at 2:30 pm
PONCHO Hall, 710 East Roy Street, Seattle, WA

Georges Barrère (1876-1944) was the most prominent early exemplar of the Paris Conservatoire woodwind tradition in the United States and set a new standard for American woodwind playing. Barrère’s biographer, Nancy Toff, will describe Barrère’s training in Paris, his early musical career in the French capital, when he founded a pioneering chamber music society and played in the Colonne Orchestra and Paris Opera, and forged partnerships with such composers as André Caplet, Albert Roussel, and Edgard Varèse.

Georges Barrère came to the United States in 1905 to become first flutist of the New York Symphony, and he taught for thirty-nine years at Juilliard, where his students included William Kincaid, Meredith Willson, Frances Blaisdell, Samuel Baron, and Bernard Goldberg. Barrère played a pivotal role in the universal adoption of the silver flute in the United States. As a soloist, recitalist, and member of numerous chamber ensembles, especially the Barrere Ensemble of Wind Instruments and the Barrère-Salzedo-Britt trio, Georges Barrère inspired and premiered major additions to the flute's solo and chamber repertoire, most notably Charles Tomlinson Griffes's Poem, Edgard Varèse's Density 21.5, and Roussel’s Trio for flute, cello, and harp and Divertissement for winds and piano.

Nancy Toff is the author of The Development of the Modern Flute (1979), The Flute Book (third edition, 2012), and Monarch of the Flute: The Life of Georges Barrère (2005) and was curator of the exhibition Georges Barrère and the Flute in America at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, for which she wrote the catalog (1994). For her work on Barrère she has received the Dena Epstein Award for Archival and Library Research in American Music from the Music Library Association and grants from the Sinfonia Foundation and the American Musicological Society. She is a past president of the New York Flute Club and vice president and executive editor at Oxford University Press. She is the recipient of the 2012 National Flute Association National Service Award.

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This event took take place Monday, November 19, 2012 at 2:30 pm PONCHO Hall, 710 East Roy Street, Seattle, WA