Talk:John Blackwood McEwen

Viola concerto
1901? That would predate Forsyth&rsquo;s, which I gathered was the first "substantial" viola concerto by a British composer. McEwen&rsquo;s lasts about a half-hour - timing from the recording of this work (I assume it is the same one) that&rsquo;s coming out in November on Hyperion Records - so "substantial" we have, "British" we have, Forsyth I gather is from about 1903, so I am missing something :) Schissel | Sound the Note! 15:00, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Early Recording(s) of Solway Symphony?
Does anyone have solid knowledge of whether The Gramophone Company, or its later parent EMI, or any non-UK company that used the HMV trade mark, recorded McEwen's Solway Symphony?

The CD booklet that accompanies the Chandos 1995 recording states: "the Symphony had the distinction of becoming the first British Symphony to be recorded by the fledgling HMV." The same or very similar words appear all over the web. I do not know whether the Chandos booklet was the original source.

I can find no evidence in older documents to support the statement, and the very large number of references in the musical and general press between 1923 and 1938 to the 1923/24 recording by The Aeolian Company's on its Vocalion label[1], together with failure to find a single mention of an HMV recording, suggests that no HMV recording existed. This inference is consistent with an article in The Gramophone of July 1932 (by which time electric recording had replaced acoustic) that says: "About ten years ago the Vocalion Company brought out a symphony by Sir J. B. McEwen called the Solway Symphony ... and it thoroughly deserves to be re-recorded."[2] Another article in 1938 harks back to the Vocalion recording but mentions no other. And it was the Vocalion recording that was re-issued on LP by Pearl (catalogue no. Opal 808).

There are other statements in the same paragraph of the CD booklet that undermine the reader's confidence in it. "The fledgling HMV"? One can hardly imagine that the symphony would be recorded before its first public performance, which was in October 1922, nor that two companies would record it at the same time, so we are looking at post-1923. In 1923 The Gramophone Company was quarter of a century old -- hardly "fledgling." The paragraph also says that Solway was "the only McEwen orchestral work to reach a public." Oh, come on! What about Grey Galloway? The BBC web site says that it was performed in eight Prom Concerts from 1917 to 1929, so presumably it was performed a elsewhere besides.

In summary: there is a lot of evidence that the HMV statement is wrong, but it is all indirect. Does anyone have sure evidence, such as old HMV catalogues?

[1] The Aeolian Orchestra under Cuthbert Whitemore. The first two movements were issued in 1923 as J.0404l and J.04042 (Gramophone, August 1923) and the complete symphony is in the Aeolian Vocalion catalogue of September 1924 as D-02131, D-02132 and D-02133 (12").

[2] The recording quality of the Vocalion release is reported to be poor (eg Gramophone on Vocalion, August 1923, Musicweb International on the Pearl re-issue).

Wyresider (talk) 13:19, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

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Phantom Family?
On 4 January 2013, User:Musicofscotland added a paragraph:
 * "He was married at the time of his death to Catharine, and survived by children John (composer) and Annabel, grand-children John (author), Jacques Hetu (composer), Sofia Ruiz (violin), Joseph (composer) and Alastair McEwen. Great grand-children of some notoriety include Stephane Tetrault of Montreal (cello) and Emju McEwen of London (violin)."

He cites Glasgow University Press 1999, but gives no indication of what publication!

On 13 January 2013, User:86.1.75.235 added a query/challenge/rebuttal:
 * "The National Probate Calendar has John married to Hedwig Ethel nee Cole."

The second statement is not strictly correct: the Probate Calendar records grant of probate to "Hedwig Ethel McEwen, widow" with no mention of her maiden name (which was indeed Cole), ergo the contributor had more sources than he cited (and they were correct).

The combined text of Musicofscotland + 86.1.75.235 is obviously unsatisfactory, yet it has been copied widely around the web verbatim (even by Chandos Records, whom many will take as authoritative although they are sometimes a little careless of detail and accuracy).

I have edited the text to indicate the two options more clearly (17/10/17), but that is unsatisfactory. The wrong version should be established as wrong, and either deleted or (perhaps better, in view of the currency of both) shown to be wrong. I have tried to find and follow the "Catharine + children" path, and got nowhere at all. So ...

... can a knowledgeable and/or Holmesian contributor help?

Here's what I have, beyond what is in the 17/10/17 edit:
 * John and Heldig were at 25 Abercorn Place in the 1911 census, in various electoral registers from 1918 to 1939, and at both their deaths in 1948;
 * McEwen had a half-sister named Catherine (born 1874); this is probably irrelevant, as he was one of at least ten (half-)sibs and Catherine was a common name;
 * If Wikipedia is correct that Jacques Hétu the composer was born in Trois-Rivières on 8 August 1938, then the baptismal records give his parents as Jean Hétu and Fernande Laurendeau -- which is hard to square with either of them being a child of John Blackwood McEwen.

Was the "Catharine" family a case of confused identity? or even a hoax? Or had John been playing away from home? (The same Chandos that told [or Wiki-copied] us that he was married to Catherine with issue, had previously told us that his marriage was childless and hinted to be unhappy.)

I'm inclined to the view that the whole "Catherine" angle is bunkum, but ... EVIDENCE! Wyresider (talk) 17:25, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

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Further to the above (a day later) ... does anyone know if a violinist called Emju McEwen ever existed?

I have tried to find some reference. Googling "Emju McEwen" produced only one hit (apart from dozens of verbatim copies of the Wiki text, at various stages of minor edits), and that was the Linkedin entry of a director of Youth Services in Michigan. No McEwen, Emju or otherwise, appears in the artist list of Presto Classical, probably the UK's largest independent retailer in this genre. Neither The Times digital archive nor britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk found anyone named Emju in a search from 1970 onward -- if she was an international performer, she might have got a mention. Finally, a search of ancestry.com for anyone with forename Emju yielded only: some early nineteenth-century newspaper articles and a circa 1835 German book in gothic print (probable OCR errors, but I didn't follow up), a definite OCR error for an Emma Herman in a school year book, an OCR error for nothing like Emju in a Milwaukee directory, an OCR error for an entry in the 1921 Berlin phone book, and an Emju Rowley indexed for the wrong page in the 1962 London electoral register (no-one called Rowley on the page), so I couldn't check, but as all the ancestry hits were on OCRs, that may also have been an OCR error.

The search was essentially negative, ie not finding things, and the target was too recent for ancestry to have much BMD coverage or any census coverage, but even so -- if something exists, how much can you not find it? Wyresider (talk) 20:32, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Please allow me to congratulate you on your herculean labours on this topic. I have blitzed the additions by MusicofScotland because they lack citations that would enable anyone to check the statements against WP:V. I note that MusicofScotland has edited only this one article, and I suspect that this is either a well-intentioned error or one of those attempts one reads about to sneak fake info into WP as a prank. Either way, in the absence of any verifiable support for the statements I think it is right to apply Wikipedia's standards and stick to the info from reliable sources. I have also removed a lot of interesting, enthusiastic but uncited prose by other editors and replaced it (to largely similar effect) with info from and, cited to, reliable sources.  Tim riley  talk    13:39, 18 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Tim. I wondered if it might be a hoax (even Grove has had them), although someone following up a mistaken identity without checking was perhaps more likely, but I did not have the knowledge (or confidence) to go in with a scalpel. Wyresider (talk) 23:06, 9 December 2017 (UTC)