Tuesday, June 01, 1999

A record record collector

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Lawrenceburg music lover amasses 16,000 classical recordings, a most unusual collection

BY JANELLE GELFAND
The Cincinnati Enquirer

“I need only a few more to make it complete,” says Edward Wheeler. His “most wanted” list is cataloged by country on his Web site: http://members.aol.com/EAWarchive | ZOOM |

        It was 1945. Edward Wheeler was a young GI recovering in an army hospital in Missouri from wounds he received on a battlefield in Germany. He was depressed and frustrated; his wounds refused to heal. Then he discovered the music room.

        “I went into the music room and picked up Claude Debussy's La Mer and I put it on (the record player),” says Mr. Wheeler, 74.

        “The whole platoon got chewed up pretty badly. It was quite a traumatic experience to go through all that,” he says. “Then to sit down and hear that kind of music — it was marvelous. It took me away from reality. I was so enamored with it, that I wanted to get more. And the more I got, the more I wanted. My life has been just getting music.”

        Mr. Wheeler, a retired engineer living in Lawrenceburg, has amassed more than 16,000 recordings. The walls of his sun-filled music room are lined with racks of some 4,000 cassette tapes, 4,000 CDs and more than 8,000 albums — many of them rare. He collects mostly symphonies, piano concertos and violin concertos — his favorites — making his one of the most unusual music collections in the world.

        Not considering historical or collector's value, it's worth at least $125,000, he estimates. Actual worth is hard to gauge because many albums are out of print; many tapes were sent to him by the composers themselves.

        Now, after two strokes, he is worried about what ultimately will become of his lifetime collection.

Needs 800 more
        His dream is to donate his prized possessions to an organization — on the condition that the collection remain intact. He'd like to find a radio station that will play the music over the air on a regular basis “so people like myself who are interested get to hear it for nothing,” he says.

        But first, his mission is to “finish” his library with works that, to his knowledge, have never been commercially recorded.

        “I need only a few more to make it complete — 800,” he says, not skipping a beat. His “most wanted” list is cataloged by country on his Web site: http://members.aol.com/EAWarchive

        “There is one American composer I've been trying to get for ages: the symphonies of John Alden Carpenter,” he says. “There is a lot of American music we don't know at all,” he adds, ticking off George Chadwick, Norman Dello Joio and George Antheil.

        “I thought, if I went on the 'Net, I could get to everybody in the world. There must be someone who knows something,” he says.

Obscure composers
        Mr. Wheeler keeps a log of his collection and communicates on the Internet with other collectors from early morning until late at night. He chats by e-mail with composers, musicians and descendants of deceased composers in Europe, Asia and Russia, and even had a contact in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, until recent NATO bombings.

        He has listened to every album, and enjoys recounting details of an obscure composer's life. His favorite? It's Russian ballet music by Farid Yarrulin, a Tatar who was killed in World War II at the age of 28.

        He puts on the music, a lush cross between Puccini and Rimsky-Korsakov, which uses the exotic pentatonic (five-tone) scale.

        “He'll spend all day up here, not know what time it is and forget to eat,” says Joanne, his wife of 32 years. In the region around Hidden Valley Lake, where they moved last year to be near their daughter, they spend hours sifting through vinyls at garage sales.

        No disc is duplicated. Mr. Wheeler tries to find recordings from each composer's country of origin.

        He has the complete works of Bela Bartok on Hungaraton, now out of print, and the complete orchestral works of Rumanian composer/violinist Georges Enesco (on Electrecord). He is also the owner of 1,600 rare Melodiya (Russian) LPs.

        His collection is both thorough and eclectic. “Do you like Deems Taylor?” he asks, holding up a record. Mr. Taylor, once a famous New York music critic (1885-1966), was also a composer, and Mr. Wheeler admires his orchestral piece, Through the Looking Glass.

        His favorite symphonist is American composer Howard Hanson. He's mystified as to why orchestras never play his Symphony No. 2, Romantic. He has all of Mr. Hanson's pioneering recordings with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra.

        But his greatest treasure is still Debussy's symphonic poem, La Mer.

        “If I had it all to do over again, I'd scotch engineering, and become a musician,” he says.

        Instead, he became a lifelong admirer of classical music.

        “I'm really irrelevant to it. What's here is so much more than I am. It's a life's work,” he says.

       

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