Episode Eight
Romulus Franceschini
This episode of the Relache Chronicles celebrates the life and music of Romulus Franceschini. For more information visit The Relache Chronicles website.
Romulus Franceschini at the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music
While I was still in college at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, I got a job at the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music. The collection was housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia. Libraries have always meant a lot to me. I had worked in the library at Settlement Music School for a couple of years before. My mother was a librarian. She passed away in 2022 at 96 (the same age as the queen who passed a short time later). Back when my mom attended Hood College, the available careers for women were librarian, secretary and teacher. Her career required a master’s degree in library science. This was a time when few women went to college and even fewer earned master’s degrees.
Laurel Wyckoff working at the Fleisher Collection, 1978
The Fleisher Collection is the world’s largest lending library of orchestral performance material. I loved going into this majestic building every day to work. Built in 1927 on Logan Square and designed by Julian Abele, this stunning Beaux-Arts building is a true Philadelphia landmark.
The Free Library of Philadelphia as seen from Logan Circle
Romulus Franceschini had been working there as an editor and curator for many years when I arrived. He took me under his wing and showed me the circulation system and reproduction machines that made prints similar to blueprints. Sets with a conductor’s score and individual parts were free for performance by orchestras all over the country to use unless they were not yet in the public domain. If they were still under copyright, then we charged orchestras for the sets and paid the publishers.
After I had been there for a few months, Rom came to me and asked if he could borrow my piccolo for a concert coming up at the Old Pine Street Church by the new Relâche Ensemble. I said, “Yes of course, but next time I go with it!” That is how I joined Relâche.
The concert took place on Sunday, October 15, 1978. The Relâche Ensemble performed “White Spirituals” by, Romulus Franceschini along with “Aeolian Harp - The Banshee” Henry Cowell and “Stripsody” by Cathy Berberian. Most memorable to me was a performance of “Entr’Acte”: René Clair’s Dadaist film masterpiece, with a live performance of the score by Erik Satie. The film includes cameos by Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray. The film was designed to be screened between two acts of Francis Picabia’s 1924 opera Relâche. This is how the ensemble got its name.
Old Pine Street Church, Philadelphia (built 1768)
Romulus Franceschini was a composer, arranger, music editor and assistant curator of the Fleisher Collection. Raised in the vibrant Italian American community in South Philly, Romulus absorbed the rich classical music that was ever present in Philadelphia, while absorbing the equally rich jazz inflected music of the mid-twentieth century. He studied cello and French Horn and served in a U.S. Army Band in occupied Japan. Later he studied composition and theory with Vincent Persichetti and composition with Stefan Wolpe and Morton Feldman in New York City. Romulus made numerous arrangements for jazz musicians in Philadelphia, including Calvin Massey and John Coltrane. He also arranged and conducted for saxophonist Archie Shepp on his Attica Blues album on Impulse Records and Shepp’s landmark work “Cry of My People”.
As an editor at the Fleisher Collection, he was prominent in analyzing the draft and extracting the instrumental parts of Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony, working in collaboration with conductor Leopold Stokowski, who premiered the symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1964. He composed music for chamber ensembles, voices, and soloists. Romulus often said, “I’m an eclectic composer.” His “eclecticism” was immensely valuable to the growth and maturity of the Relache Ensemble, for whom he served as a guiding force for all things musical. Romulus passed away in 1994.