JAN JOSEPH CHIAPUSSO (GEMOU, JAVA, DUTCH
EAST INDIES, 2 FEBRUARY 1890 – LAWRENCE, KANSAS, U.S., 21 AUGUST 1969)
Jan Joseph Chiapusso was born in Gemou, near
Semarang, in Java in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. His parents were
Dutch, but the last name Chiapusso is of Italian origin. When he was six months
old, his parents relocated to the city of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
He entered the Cologne Conservatory in 1907,
graduating in 1911. He had further training with Frederic Lamond and Raoul
Pugno.
He arrived in the United States in 1916, where he
gave concerts and was Professor of Piano (1916–1917) at Shorter College in
Rome, Georgia. He taught at the Bush Conservatory of Music in Chicago 1921–31,
interrupting this in 1927 to tour Europe as a performer. On return to the
United States he taught at the University of Chicago 1932–34, and from 1934 at
the University of Kansas, retiring in 1960. He then returned to concertising,
giving lecture tours he called “Tone Picture Recitals”. In these talks he would
illustrate the influence of the gamelan and other types of Javanese music on
European composers, drawing on his own experiences and his family’s knowledge.
While Chiapusso was at the Bush Conservatory, he
taught Rosalyn Tureck from 1929 to 1931, and was the first of her teachers to
recognise her special gifts for playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He
also introduced her to the sounds of Indonesian, Asian and African instruments.
Chiapusso himself was a fervent advocate of Bach’s
music, and wrote a book called Bach’s World, published by Indiana University
Press in 1968, the year before he died.
He died in 1969, in Lawrence, Kansas, aged 79. His
wife (the former Beulah C. Hollingsworth, a soprano and music instructor, whom
he married in 1934) predeceased him, and he had no children.
He also published his own piano arrangements of some
Bach organ and solo cello works.
TRACKLIST
6133 AMPICO CHOPIN – Etude, Op. 25, No. 5, e
6162 AMPICO LISZT – Transcendental Etude, No. 8,
c: Wilde Jagd (Wild Hunt)
6170 AMPICO CHOPIN – Waltz, Op. 69, No. 2, b
6461 AMPICO CHOPIN – Etude, Op. 25, No. 10, b
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