(Charles Martin Loeffler - Late Romantic era Americana)

I think I wrote about this before - the vast amount of virtually unknown music by American (or Americanized) Composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries - sometimes with works recorded once, if at all, and gone unnoticed for decades.

You can add the name Charles Martin Loeffler to the list, even though he did achieve an amount of notoriety during his lifetime, he is almost completely unknown today and, with the exception of his most famous piece "A Pagan Poem", practically all the recordings made of his other works in the 1930s and 40s have not been reissued.

So there is a void - one void among a literal field of others.

This particular recording, Music For Four Stringed Instruments was recorded for RCA Victor in 1938, three years after Loeffler's death. It features the Coolidge String Quartet who were, for years responsible for many first performances of American composers and founded under the auspices of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a wealthy benefactor who was responsible for championing and promoting the cause of "Modern American Music" during the early part of the 20th Century.

And here is one of them.