“It’s not every day that you hear a Seattle premiere over 125 years after the piece was written. This October, Emerald City Music audiences will be among the first in living memory to hear Charles Martin Loeffler’s rediscovered Octet for clarinets, strings and harp, a piece that was left unpublished, unrecorded and unheard since 1897.

Ironically, it was during another period of silence that I stumbled upon Loeffler’s long-dormant Octet.

“When performance opportunities dried up in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I turned to writing program notes for music festivals that had yet to cancel their concerts. After spotting a mention of an Octet by Loeffler while researching another piece of his, I got curious to hear it and searched for a recording. Then, for sheet music. Then, for any record of the piece beyond the list of works that had alerted me to its existence. Gradually, I came to realize that not only had the piece never been recorded, but it had never been published or subsequently heard at all after two initial performances in 1897.

“I ultimately tracked down the manuscript in the archives of The Library of Congress in the spring of 2020, but since the Library was shuttered it wasn’t until January 2021 that I was able to examine the artifact. I spent the next year reconstructing the score, sifting through 75 pages of heavily-revised music handwritten by Loeffler over a century ago—it felt like musical archeology!

“Unearthing this “new old music” from the ashes of history has reminded me that our modern sense of the canon is based only on that narrow sliver of music we know today—the music that survived. For me, the most interesting potential of this revival is not about dusting off a bygone era, but about what it means for music today. The untold story and forgotten beauty of Loeffler’s Octet invite us to reconsider why it is we know what we know today, to paint a more complete picture of musical history, and to imagine a more colorful musical future.” 

- Graeme Steele Johnson

‍photo credit: Carlin Ma