Composers Datebook

Synopsis On today’s date in 1975, the Kansas City Lyric Theater opened its 18th season with the world premiere of a new opera by Jack Beeson, Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines . As if to prove that everything is “up-to-date” in Kansas City, even before this world premiere, this Missouri company could boast a long tradition of staging contemporary operas by American composers. Captain Jinks was th...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1958, just nine days after his death, a funeral service was held for British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams at Westminster Abbey, where his ashes were laid to rest. Now, many famous people are buried at Westminster Abbey, but an actual funeral service there, especially for someone not of the royal family, is pretty rare. In fact, Vaughan Williams was the first commoner...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1930, in Kingsway Hall in London, British composer Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 5, the last in this popular series. Two of the previous marches had been dedicated to organist friends of the composer, and so when organist Percy Hull asked Elgar for a new work for the 1930 Hereford Festival, the Pomp and Circumstance...

Synopsis The Milwaukee Symphony was one of the first American orchestras to offer recordings of their live performances as digital downloads — and along with Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner, occasionally offered more contemporary fare, as well. For example, on today’s date in 2005, Andreas Delfs led the Milwaukee Symphony in the world premiere performance of an orchestral work they had commissioned...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1925, Vincent Youman’s musical No, No Nanette opened on Broadway after a trial run in Detroit and additional preview stagings in Chicago and London. Tunes from No, No Nanette even reached the Soviet Union, although occasionally something was lost in the translation. For example, in Russia, the musical’s popular foxtrot, Tea for Two , was called the Tahiti Trot . Late in...

Synopsis Today’s date in 1912 marked the birthday of Cuban composer, choral director, and educator Gisela Hernández. She began her musical studies at the Santa Cecilia School in her hometown of Cárdenas, and in 1924 moved to Havana, where she finished her studies four years later at the National Conservatory. She won Cuba’s National Composition Award in 1940, and in 1944 continued her studies in t...

Synopsis On this date in 1973, Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in music by Mozart, Brahms and American composer, Roy Harris. The program was nothing out of the ordinary, but the concert took place in Beijing and marked the first time an American orchestra had performed in Communist China. The orchestra was invited to China following the famous visit of President and Mrs. Nixon...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1967, Aaron Copland’s final orchestra work, Inscape, was premiered by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Copland said the work’s title, Inscape , was borrowed from 19th-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Its compositional technique was borrowed from the serial or 12-tone models of Arnold Schoenberg and th...

Synopsis For decades many of the 20th century’s greatest composers routinely visited Venice’s famous canals and churches during a biennial music festival that showcased brand-new works by the likes of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Britten and others. French composer Darius Milhaud describes sharing space with several of his composer-colleagues in a cramped Festival “green room.” “It was a normal sight to...

Synopsis In 1886, a Czech patron of the arts, Josef Hlavka, had a chapel built at his summer residence at Lužany in Bohemia and asked his composer friend Antonín Dvořák to write a mass to dedicate it. As a devout Catholic, Dvořák was happy to oblige. Since the chapel was quite small, he wrote his Mass in D Major for just a quartet of soloists, a small choir, and organ, and led the premiere perform...

Synopsis American composer Henry Cowell lived from 1897 to 1965 and wrote thousands of musical works in a wide variety of styles. As a young boy, he lived near San Francisco’s Chinatown, so Asian influences are as likely to crop up in his music as European models. And among his aggressively experimental works are piano pieces that employ what he called “tone clusters” — chords played with a fist o...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1949, British composer Gerald Finzi conducted the premiere performance of his Clarinet Concerto at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. During his lifetime, Finzi never achieved the fame of some other 20th-century British composers. British tenor Mark Padmore wrote an article, “The Quiet Man of British Music,” which included these lines: “I want to make a case for tak...

Synopsis Today's date in 1934 marked the birthday of British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. His name is spelled D-A-V-I-E-S, so most Americans tend to pronounce it “Day-VEES,” even though “Davis” is the common British pronunciation. Once, when he was in the U.S., a British journalist called a Las Vegas hotel where the composer was staying and asked to speak to Peter Maxwell Davis. The receptionist...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1573, Queen Elizabeth the First celebrated her 40th birthday. According to some musicologists, the music-loving monarch received as a birthday gift a Latin motet for 40 voices by Thomas Tallis, Spem in Alium , which translates as Hope in All Things . Elisabeth was certainly fond of Tallis, awarding him special gifts and privileges —despite his remaining a steadfast Roma...

Synopsis Consider, if you will, the poor timpanist. At most symphony concerts, they sit quietly — waiting for the moment when a dramatic exclamation point is required from the kettledrums. While the violinists rarely get a break, the timpanist must sit patiently for most of the evening, biding their time, waiting for the precise moments to strike. On rare occasions, however, the timpanist is the c...

Synopsis In 1941, as the German army was overrunning Russia, the Soviet government evacuated important artists to remote places of safety. Composer Sergei Prokofiev, for example, found himself in the little town of Nalchik, nestled in the foothills of the northern Caucasus Mountains about 1000 miles away from the front. He was intrigued by the region’s folk music, and, taking a break from a big pr...

Synopsis For ballet lovers, the opening of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake conjures up tutus, but for old-time movie buffs, this same music triggers memories of many black-and-white films of the 1930s. Back then, the eerie opening measures of Swan Lake served as the “main title” music for dozens of old Universal Studios thrillers, including the famous 1931 film of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula , sta...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1806, Ludwig van Beethoven offered his publisher Breitkopf and Härtel three new string quartets — works we know today as the three Razumovsky Quartets , that were eventually issued as Beethoven’s Opus 59. In Beethoven’s day, Vienna was swarming with Russian, Polish and Hungarian aristocrats with a taste for music. Among them was Count Andreas Kyrilovich Razumovsky, the...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1948, at a Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, the London Symphony gave the premiere performance of the Serenade in G Major by British composer Ernest John Moeran. He was born in 1894 in London, but Ireland became his adopted home and musical inspiration during the last decades of his life. Moeran was fascinated by folksongs, and his method of collecting them was to...

Synopsis These days, when modern music is on the program, a sizeable chunk of the concert hall audience might start nervously looking for the nearest exit — but that wasn’t always the case. On today’s date in 1882, 21-year old American composer and pianist Edward MacDowell took the stage in Zurich, Switzerland, to perform his Modern Suite for piano at the 19th annual conference of the General Soci...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1919, British composer Edward Elgar finished a work he labeled jokingly as his Opus 1001 — a 50-second Smoking Cantata , intended, according to the manuscript score, as “an edifying, allegorical, improving, expostulatory, educational, persuasive, hortatory, instructive, dictatorial, magisterial, inadautory work.” The score was completed at the Hertfordshire home of a we...

Synopsis Today we note the birth and death anniversaries of two American composers of the 20th century. On today’s date in 1915, American composer David Diamond was born in Rochester, New York. In 1940, Dmitri Mitropoulos, then the music director of the Minneapolis Symphony commissioned one of his best-known works. He had specifically asked Diamond for an upbeat piece of music. “Write me a happy w...

Synopsis Today’s date in 1931 marks the birthday of the first notable Native American composer of concert music. His name was Louis Ballard, and he was born in Devil’s Promenade in Oklahoma. His father was Cherokee, and his mother Quapaw. As a young boy he attended — but managed not to be irreparably damaged by — one of the notorious boarding schools where Native American students were taught to f...

Synopsis Unless you’re just mad about 18th century history, it’s unlikely you know off the top of your head who the winners and losers were in the War of the Spanish Succession. Suffice it to say, on today’s date in 1713, to celebrate the successful resolution of that conflict, a festive choral Te Deum was performed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. It was written by ambitious 28-year old German...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1971, jazz great Louis Armstrong died in New York City at 69. He was born in New Orleans, and for years, all the standard reference books listed his birthday as the Fourth of July, 1900. Well, it turned out that wonderfully symbolic date was cooked up by his manager Joe Glaser. Armstrong wasn’t sure when he was born, so the Fourth of July seemed as good a date as any, a...