Telling Stories: One Room at a Time

Henri Temianka Archives Multimedia Room

Henri Temianka (1906 - 1992) was a violinist and conductor who founded the Paganini Quartet and the California Chamber Symphony. Born in Scotland to Polish parents, he moved as a young child with his family to Holland. He studied violin in Rotterdam with Carel Blitz from 1915 to 1923; with Willy Hess in Berlin from 1923 to 1924; with Jules Boucherit in Paris from 1924 to 1926; and with violinist Carl Flesch and composer Artur Rodziński in Philadelphia from 1927 to 1930. In 1935, he won third prize in the first Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition in Warsaw, Poland. Temianka toured Europe and North America extensively until the outbreak of World War II.
After successfully campaigning for the release of his parents from a concentration camp in Gurs, France, he married sculptor Emma May Cowden (1922 - 2014) in 1943. The couple had two children, Daniel (b. 1948) and David (1957 - 2016).
Temianka's Carnegie Hall debut occurred in 1945. The following year, he founded the Paganini Quartet, so named because its original members played on instruments made by Antonio Stradivari (1644 - 1737) that had once been owned by composer Niccolo Paganini (1782 - 1840). The ensemble won acclaim for a 1947 recording of Beethoven's "Rasumovsky" String Quartets No. 7 - 9, Opus 59. The Paganini Quartet, of which Temianka was the only constant member, performed concerts around the world until 1966.
Temianka also initiated a concert series for young audiences in Los Angeles that became, in 1961, the California Chamber Symphony. In its first years, the series was called "Let's Talk Music," reflecting the fact that Temianka broke taboo by speaking to his audience from the stage. That has since become a tradition popular in concert halls around the world.Additionally, he taught music at the University of California, Santa Barbara and California State University at Long Beach. He published a memoir, Facing the Music, in 1973. He also wrote many articles about playing and teaching strings that were published in a variety of periodicals. Honors and awards bestowed upon Henri Temianka include Officier des Arts et des Lettres from France in 1979 and an honorary doctorate from Pepperdine University in 1986.

Due to the generosity of Henri’s son, Dr. Daniel Temianka, and Daniel's wife, Chapman University Trustee Zeinab Dabbah M.D., J.D. '12, the  legacy of Henri Temianka remains strong at Chapman University through the support of music education, music history, and exciting and informative orchestral performances. Most recently, the 2020-21 academic year marked the inauguration of the Temianka Quartet at Chapman University’s Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music in the College of Performing Arts (CoPA).
 A prodigious correspondent, Henri Temianka maintained important relationships with the musicians, artists, writers, scientists, and political leaders of the 20th century. He preserved most of the letters he received, dating from 1911. His son, Daniel Temianka, has organized, protected, and interpreted these letters and other items in the Henri Temianka Archives, held by the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections & Archives at the Leatherby Libraries. The archive includes over 3,000 letters, program flyers, photographs, ephemera, and memorabilia of Henri Temianka’s career. The archive contains Temianka's childhood violin; additionally, the archive's oldest item is a violino piccolo from around 1810. Permanent exhibits of materials from the archive are on display in the Henri Temianka Archives Multimedia Room and on the Temianka Dabbah Mezzanine in the Marybelle and Sebastian P. Musco Center for the Arts. The documents preserved in this collection serve as important primary materials for researchers and scholars to add to the tapestry of music  history. You can learn more in the finding aid for the archive.

Along with permanent exhibits of photographs and other documents from the Henri Temianka Archives, the Multimedia Room, as its name suggests, offers students technology to listen to and watch multimedia, including high-end speakers embedded in the walls, and large high-definition television. Situated in the middle of the M. Douglas Library of Music on the third floor of the Leatherby Libraries in Room 322, the Henri Temianka Archives Multimedia Room is a particularly inspiring place for students of Music and other Performing Arts to study. Leatherby Libraries student employee Jimmy Elinski literally did flips in the air in his excitement over the Henri Temianka Archives Multimedia Room.
 
 

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