Grant Johannesen’s Labor of Love: Introducing the Music of Helen Taylor
by Ron Simpson
Utah songwriter advocate and general manager, Tantara Records
The seventh voice mail message was from recording engineer and colleague Jon Holloman.
“Just thought you’d like to know that Grant Johannesen is in town to make a few more reference recordings of Helen Taylor scores he’s found. We’ll be at the Assembly Hall on Temple Square starting at one on Friday. Drop by if you can.”
Grant Johannesen. Helen Taylor. Hmm. If I were a Russian novelist like Dostoevsky (hah!), I’d pause to disclose my cast of characters about now. Such a lineup would suggest an alternative donor-supported way in which music-art-can sometimes be created, sheltered from the unforgiving world of market demand and supply.
Grant Johannesen: one of the world’s great pianists, and a native of Salt Lake City. He is considered to be the first important American pianist to emerge after World War II. Still concertizing, he has recently moved from New York to Florida. His most recent Utah appearance was with Keith Lockhart and the Utah Symphony in March, 2001.
Helen Taylor: Johannesen’s late wife, who began studying at the McCune School in Salt Lake under Tracy Y. Cannon, and subsequently pursued composition at Juilliard. A talented and inventive pianist, she paid her way in New York playing and improvising as the rehearsal pianist in the studio of legendary choreographer Martha Graham. Helen Taylor died young and tragically.
Robert Cundick: composer and organist emeritus, Temple Square, whose current passion is bringing to light serious music of artistic merit which has its roots in Utah, or in Mormon culture. Cundick is an energetic, pro-active member of the board of the Heritage Endowment.
Sloan and Anna Marie Hales: donors who have created The Heritage Endowment, the mission of which is remarkably similar to Cundick’s vision. The Heritage Endowment is administered in the School of Music at Brigham Young University by director David M. Randall. Heritage Endowment recordings are marketed by agreement with Tantara Records, an enterprise center at BYU.
Roger Miller: musicologist, University of Utah, and a Heritage Endowment board member. Miller has researched the life of Helen Taylor and written about her music.
Jon Holloman: audio engineer, supervises the recording of broadcasts of the Utah Symphony under contract with KBYU. Holloman is also the director of the Division of Arts Production at BYU.
Ralph Laycock: professor emeritus, BYU, served many years as director of bands, and then as director of orchestras at BYU.
And so, on Friday, I arrange my schedule to catch a bit of the Grant Johannesen session on Temple Square. Getting inside the locked Assembly Hall proves not easy, and when I finally manage it, it’s in the middle of a take. Johannesen, wearing a yellow V-neck sweater, looks just like his pictures. Tall, elegant, confident, he commands great presence. I can’t imagine him being as old as my sense of rudimentary arithmetic suggests he must be.
He finishes the movement, and begins discussing it with Jon, who has installed a portable digital setup on the stage, close to the piano. I climb the stairs, and approach Grant, nodding a quick smile to Jon at the same time.
“Grant, I’m Ron Simpson, Tantara Records. The voice on the phone.”
“Ron! Good to meet you-at last.” As we shake hands, he continues.
“We’re just talking about the tempo of Helen’s third movement. How did it feel to you?” Instantly he has drawn me in, made me a welcome colleague.
Helen Taylor came from a devout Mormon family and showed early musical brilliance. After her promising start in Utah, she followed her dream to New York. About then she met fellow Utahn Grant Johannesen, also a young pianist and composer. Grant had been noticed by Paul Hindemith and was invited to become his student, but as Grant and Helen fell in love and married, they decided he would be the pianist and Helen the composer.
As Grant’s career took off and he was more and more on the road, Helen returned to Salt Lake with her infant son and lived with her family. She became a presence in the musical life around Salt Lake City. During this time, she continued composing, completing her Symphony, and adding Sonata for Two Flutes, Uncaccompanied to her list of finished compositions.
In 1950, returning from a concert in Vernal on an itinerary that wasn’t much different from the Utah Arts Council grant-funded tours of today, a cow strayed onto the road and Helen Taylor was killed instantly. Everyone else in the car escaped injury.
And so, years later, as Grant Johannesen began to unearth the neglected scores of Helen Taylor, a network of interested family and friends brought them to the attention of Robert Cundick and the Heritage Series, who gradually undertook the project of recording her body of work. For Johannesen it was a labor of love. As Roger Miller has written, Grant and Helen were a great American love story. They met, fell in love, and shared an amazing dream, only to have it snatched away in one disastrous instant.
Helen’s symphony was premiered by Bryce Rytting and the Utah Valley Symphony in 1999, and then, as questions of voicing and range began to be noticed in the young composer’s score, it was subsequently turned over to Ralph Laycock for extensive editing and eventual recording by a studio orchestra assembled under Laycock’s baton. Meanwhile, as the scope of the Helen Taylor project grew, Robert Cundick found a generous additional donor to help with unforseen costs.
The Heritage Series has just released Discovering Helen Taylor, featuring not only Grant Johannesen and Laycock’s orchestra, but also violinist Kelly Parkinson and flutists Sally Humphreys and Jane Lyman. The music is interesting and vibrant: a strong example of American music at mid-century, when, we should add, composers were almost invariably men. Definitely for Grant Johannesen, but also for all the rest of us, discovering Helen Taylor and getting caught up in her light has been a career highlight, a labor of love.
2001 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
