| dc.description.abstract | Alessandro Liberati (1847–1927) lived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when music for solo cornet was one of the most popular musical outlets in America. He and many performers of this instrument were virtuosos and traveled the world performing beautiful melodies and stylistic acrobatics on the instrument. They were the stars of their day and were often also conductors who led their own bands. Scholarly literature has only been written about a select few of these cornet soloists and band leaders. Names like Herbert L. Clarke (1867–1945), Jean Baptiste Arban (1825–1889), and John Phillip Sousa (1854–1932), are far more commonplace and receive more attention and performance. This leads to trumpet players playing their music and not the music of any of the other cornetists and band leaders of the past. Significant cornet music and band arrangements are overlooked, simply because trumpet teachers and performers do not know of the other cornetists and their music.
In this dissertation, I address the life and works of virtuoso cornetist Alessandro Liberati to bring forth new evidence that Liberati deserves greater attention as an important cornetist and band leader, a musician on par with his contemporaries. Liberati was an active soloist, band leader, and notable composer in Italy, Canada, and the United States. Liberati’s generous output of compositions for both solo cornet and band is compiled in the appendix of this study. I rely on biographies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, method books, historical band books, newspaper articles, scholarly articles, and historical recordings of Liberati from Gold Moulded Records (1902). In addition, I consulted Liberati’s musical scores and other archival documents housed in his collection at the Library of Congress. These sources show his wide influence as a cornetist, band leader, and composer. To this end, I suggest that Alessandro Liberati was just as successful as his contemporaries, well-liked by the public, sought after in his time, and deserves the same attention and performance today as his more well-known contemporaries. | en_US |
