European-American Players

Daniel Bonade

Gaston Hamelin

Augustin Duques

Gustave Langenus

Louis DeSantis

Robert Lindeman

Victor Polacek

Simion Bellison

Gino Cioffi

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
John Adams

John Adams' thought is prophetic. It took at least three generations for the United States of America to develop to the point where music and art could be considered a vocation. Before the turn of the 20th century American orchestras were mostly composed of European musicians. Americans did not have the time or resources to devote to the arts and there were no schools or teachers to compete on the level of the Europeans.

The European Clarinetists represented above are a few of the most influential musicians to come to America at the turn of the 20th century.

These conditions set the stage for European musicians to come to the United States to fill the void, to create schools such as Curtis and what is now Juilliard, and to teach and raise the level of young American musicians.

The Philadelphia Orchestra became the finest American ensemble in the first half of the 20th Century. Through the talents of conductor Leopold Stokowski (England) and Principal Oboist Marcel Tabuteau (France), the orchestra developed a quality that became known as the "Philadelphia Sound". In the era of 78rpm recording, Stokowski was the first conductor to become intensely interested in the recording process and insisted on the use of microphones in each section instead of one or two capturing the sound of the entire orchestra. The result is a more homogenous sound within the ensemble between the strings, woodwind and bress sections.