Clifton Worsley: Valse Boston "Vertige"

Not much is known about the pianist and composer Pere Astort i Ribas, better known – or maybe less unknown – by the alias Clifton Worsley. Despite being one of the most famous musicians in the city of Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century, it is next to impossible to find any mention of him in any history of Catalan music. Great efforts will uncover just a few encyclopaedic references to him, in spite of his importance: a distinguished Barcelonian who found success in the United States with compositions he wrote himself, inspired by the popular music from the other side of the Atlantic. A jazz pioneer from Catalonia? A musical visionary who was able to predict the fashionable trends in Barcelona’s most sophisticated dance halls during the first third of the 20th century? Or just a composer of popular pieces who, without at all realising, wrote waltzes comparable to the music of the first jazz schools? Perhaps.

There is one thing about Pere Astort that we know for certain: he died in Barcelona on 13 March 1925. However, there is some disagreement as to his beginnings. According to some sources – Ramon Civit, for example – he was born in the Catalan capital on the day of La Mercè, its annual festival, on 24 September 1873. According to others – Lluís Brugués in the 2009 essay La música a la ciutat de Girona (1888-1985) [Music in the city of Girona (1888/1985)] – he was born in the city of the river Onyar. Whether he came into this world through the head and heart of Catalonia or the city of a thousand sieges, the majority of his biographers agree in saying that Pere Astort was trained as a musician in the choir school at La Mercè church in Barcelona and, later, he studied piano.

Before adopting the alias Clifton Worsley, Astort had started to become known as a shop assistant at Can Guàrdia, the popular sheet music shop and publisher, which later took the name Casa Beethoven. Ramon Civit, a musicologist and teacher at the Taller de Músics music school – and one of the top Worsley experts – explains that the young Astort met Mercè Gresa (sister-in-law of Rafael Guàrdia i Granell, founder of the sheet music business) at the shop on La Rambla de Sant Josep. The young pianist married Gresa in 1895, and, over time, became one of the most well-regarded employees in the eyes of the select clientele that went to the shop. Lluís Permanyer, a Barcelona historian, recreated the ambience of Casa Beethoven at the end of the 19th century in a 1987 article for La Vanguardia. Citing Anna Maria Guàrdia and an article by the musicologist Francisco Hostench from Liceo magazine, Permanyer talked about the visits to Can Guàrdia made by Isaac Albéniz, Felip Pedrell, the maestro Millet and, especially, Jacint Verdaguer: “make them fly”, Permanyer says the poet declared when he read his verses to some of the greats of Catalan music. At one end of the shop there was (and still is) an upright piano, where the shop assistant Astort sat down to play for a bit.


Biblioteca Nacional de España
The back cover to a piece by Astort, with his portrait in the centre.

Legend has it that one day Charles Danton, an American musician, stopped by Can Guàrdia while Astort was playing the piano. Danton was gobsmacked by the style of one of the compositions the pianist was playing. When he found out that the waltz had been written by the man himself, he told him that the work sounded like one of the typical waltzes that were in fashion in Boston, where he was from. He then recommended that Astort change his name to something more American-sounding, suggesting that he call himself Clifton Worsley. In 1899, Astort, or Worsley as he was now known, published his first “Boston waltz” with his brother-in-law’s publishing house, which he named after the American city as a tribute to the man who discovered him. Ramon Civit explains that in that same year, the Banda de Barcelona played the waltz in Parc de la Ciutadella during a typical summertime evening event.

Worsley was presented as “the creator of the Boston waltz”. “Despite the fact that this type of waltz – slightly slower than the Viennese waltz – already existed, the young Barcelona composer unquestionably contributed to modernising it, both in terms of its form as well as its harmony”, he points out.

Worsley ended up writing around 200 compositions.

from
https://www.barcelona.cat/bcnmetropol...

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