Graeme Steele Johnson’s “forgotten sounds” project featured on the Washington Post

While doing research on Charles Martin Loeffler's “Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano,” for a program note, the clarinetist, arranger, and writer Graeme Steele Johnson found references to an unknown octet by the same composer. Though we don't hear much about Loeffler these days, he was hailed as “the Dean of American composers” at the time of his death in 1935.

Graeme found no recordings or score, realizing that the piece had been unheard, unperformed, and unpublished for more than 125 years (it had only received two performances, in 1897). He ultimately tracked the manuscript down to the archives of the Library of Congress and spent a year editing it, which was full of erasures and corrections. It was “an adventure in musical archaeology.”

“It kind of goes with this lost-and-found theme,” Graeme says in this wonderful feature, for which Graeme talked to Michael Brodeur, the classical music critic from the Washington Post., ahead of a performance of the piece on May 22 at the Library of Congress. “With hope that Loeffler’s octet and all of the other wonderful, deserving music that has somehow slipped through the cracks will follow Schubert into the musical pantheon.”

The album, Forgotten Sounds, featuring the premiere recording of Graeme's edition of the octet, is available on June 7, 2024.

Read the full piece on The Washington Post.