Edgar Kelley: Complete Piano Works

Albany Records is proud to present the first disc ever devoted to the music of the great American composer, Edgar Stillman Kelley. Kelley grew up among the pioneers from New England and New York who founded Sparta, Wisconsin. He was a direct descendant of the Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford. Sparta was no ordinary frontier village. Its Yankee settlers were lovers of music and literature and as a boy Kelley took every opportunity to steep himself in both. His mother was a writer and musician and his father was a writer and newspaper editor. While drawn to both writing and painting, Kelley decided early on to become a composer. He studied at home first with a young tutor from Germany, who had just arrived from Leipzig, and then in Chicago, where he remained for two years. He then went to Germany, where he studied with the best teachers of the day and was exposed to the music of Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz and Chopin. In 1880, he returned to America and San Francisco, where he took a job as an Organist. He composed all the time. He married a singer, who helped him promote his music. He also taught at Western College in Oxford, Ohio. He went to New York where he became a friend of Victor Herbert and even taught a semester at Yale, where he conducted the New Haven Symphony. The history of music in America is filled with musicians like Edgar Stillman Kelley. Like so many of his American contemporaries, Kelley professed to be nothing more than entertaining. He succeeds so very well as this disc devoted to his music proves. An edition of the piano music of Edgar Stillman Kelley, edited by Brian Kovach has recently been published by Mel Bay Publications.