Composers Datebook

Synopsis On today’s date in 1992, lovers of the tango had good reason to be sad. Argentinean composer and bandoneón virtuoso Astor Piazzolla had died in Buenos Aires at the age of 71. The bandoneón is a close relation of the accordion, and for it Piazzolla composed new music inspired by the tango, an Argentinian dance form that originated in working-class dancehalls. While still a teenager, he had...

Synopsis Weather permitting, there’s a good chance you’ll be attending an outdoor symphonic concert tonight that will close with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with a volley of booming cannon shots, church bells, and dazzling fireworks. It’s become an American tradition to perform the 1812 Overture on July 4, even though it has nothing to do with the 1776 War of Independence — or America’s...

Synopsis Country Gardens is the best-known work of Australian-born American composer, arranger, and pianist Percy Grainger. Its score bears this note: “Birthday-gift, Mother, July 3, 1918.” His mother Rose was responsible for his excellent early musical training. In 1918, he arranged a folk tune given to him in 1908 by Cecil Sharp, a major figure in the folklore revival in England. He titled this...

Synopsis In German, “Gluck” means “luck,” and today’s date marks the birthday of a German composer named Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose good fortune it was to be credited with reforming the vocally ornate but dramatically static form of Baroque opera. In the 18th century, opera was the biggest and most high-profile of all musical forms, and Gluck wrote 49 of them during his 67 years of life. Lik...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1937, a two-piano suite by French composer Darius Milhaud had its premiere. It was titled Scaramouche , after a stock character in the Italian commedia dell arte, and the music’s upbeat, carefree mood made it an instant hit. For his part, Milhaud was in an apprehensive mood. When he and his wife Madeleine had visited the 1937 Paris International Exposition, they saw pre...

Synopsis In 1971, American film composer Bernard Herrmann confessed, “the only thing I ever did that was foolhardy was to write an opera.” The opera was based on the 19th century novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Herrmann began work on it in April of 1943, and didn't finish until today's date in 1951 — at 3:45 p.m., as he noted in its score. In those years, Herrmann was juggling three caree...

Synopsis Today’s date in 1914 marks the birthday of famous Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík. He was the son of a very musical father, namely the violin virtuoso Jan Kubelík, known as the Czech Paganini. Kubelík studied violin, composition, and conducting at the Prague Conservatory, and was an excellent pianist to boot — good enough to accompany his father on several concert tours. At the age of 19,...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1745, 73-year-old French composer Antoine Forqueray died in Mantes-la-Jolie outside Paris, where he had lived after his retirement as a court musician to King Louis XIV of France. Forqueray was a virtuoso on the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, but nowadays only played by specialists in old music. At the tender age of 10,...

Synopsis The name George Templeton Strong crops up frequently in both the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War and Ric Burns’ history of New York City. That George Templeton Strong was a lawyer and music lover who lived from 1820-1875, whose diary entries offer a detailed picture of daily life in New York City. But there’s another member of the family we’d like to tell you about — the son of the...

Synopsis It was Mozart who wrote the first great piano concertos, with Beethoven, Brahms and others following suit in the 19th century. Closer to our own time, the tradition continues, with new contributions appearing each year. On today’s date in 1986, American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s piano concerto received its premiere by the Detroit Symphony with Marc-Andre Hamelin the soloist. “My pia...

Synopsis In the Guiness Book of Music Facts and Feats, the record for Most Prolific Composer goes to Georg Philip Telemann, who died on today’s date in 1767 at 86. And longevity gave an edge to productivity: Telemann outlived his prolific contemporary, J.S. Bach, by 21 years, and outlived Handel by 12. But even considering the extra years he lived, Telemann’s output is staggering. Of Bach’s cantat...

Synopsis In wartime London, on today’s date in 1943, a Promenade Concert featured the first performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5. The composer conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Queen’s Hall, the traditional home of the annual summertime Proms concerts, had been destroyed by German bombers two years earlier. The Proms concerts had moved into a new and larger venue, the R...

Synopsis In 2008, the National Convention of the American Guild of Organists was held in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and for the occasion a Minnesota Organ Book was commissioned. The idea was that six Minnesota composers should each write a short piece for organ plus one solo instrument, all suitable for use at a Sunday service. One of the composers selected was Carol Barnett, who thought to herself...

Synopsis There is an ancient curse, popularly attributed to the Chinese, “May you live in interesting times!” French composer Étienne-Nicolas Mehul, who was born on this date in 1763, certainly lived and worked in an interesting time, politically and musically speaking. His creative life spanned both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and since Mehul live and worked in Paris, he foun...

Synopsis Today is the birthday of versatile Argentinean-born American composer, arranger and jazz pianist, Boris Claudio “Lalo” Schifrin, who was born in Buenos Aires on today’s date in 1932. From his background, you’d guess Schifrin was destined for a concert career. His father was a violinist in the orchestra of Argentina’s premiere opera house, the Teatro Colon. As a boy, he studied with Enriqu...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1948 at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel there was a press demonstration of a new kind of phonograph record. Edward Wallerstein of Columbia Records stood between a big stack of heavy, shellac, 78-rpm albums, the standard for recorded music in those days, and a noticeably slimmer stack of vinyl discs, a new format which Wallerstein had dubbed “LPs” – “long playing” recor...

Synopsis Today’s date marks the 1953 New York premiere of a musical movie that flopped when it debuted but has since become a cult classic — and for two good reasons. First, the movie’s script — written by Dr. Seuss — was about a little boy named Bart who didn’t enjoy practicing the piano and who was worried that his widowed mom might marry his dreaded piano teacher. The film, The 5,000 Fingers of...

Synopsis Violin soloists have it easy: there are thousands of violin concertos they can choose from, starting in the Baroque era of Bach and Vivaldi, and continuing right up to the present day, with new violin concertos available from composers from John Adams to Ellen Taaffe Zwlich. Oboe concertos? Not so much. There are some fine oboe concertos out there, but they just aren’t being written as of...

Synopsis The “Three B’s” are traditionally Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, of course — but today we’re offering Boccherini, Brahms and Berio. 20th-century Italian composer Luciano Berio, noted for his avant-garde scores, was asked to orchestrate the F minor Clarinet Sonata by Johannes Brahms — in 1986, for a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert featuring clarinetist Michele Zukofsky. Berio admired Brahms,...

Synopsis If you’re a baby boomer who played in a high school or college band, you’ll probably remember the Divertimento for Band by American composer Vincent Persichetti, which premiered on today’s date in 1950, with the composer conducting the Goldman Band. Persichetti didn’t envision his Divertimento as a band work, per se. At the start, it was just some woodwind figures accentuated by brass and...

Synopsis Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen on today’s date in 1843. He is credited with putting Norway on the map, musically speaking, drawing inspiration from the folk music of his native land. What you might not know is that two famous French composers were fans. Grieg was about 19 years older than Claude Debussy and about 32 years older than Maurice Ravel, but both knew and adm...

Synopsis A now-obscure Englishman named Charles Caleb Colton is credited with the famous adage that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” On today’s date in 1985, Concerto for Oboe, Clarinet and Strings, a new work by American composer John Harbison premiered in Sarasota, Florida, that imitated the form and gestures of the Baroque Concerto Grossos written by Bach or Handel. Harbison descr...

Synopsis It was on today’s date in 2003 that a new violin concerto by composer Shulamit Ran premiered at Carnegie Hall — but it would be just as appropriate for us to run this episode of Composer’s Datebook on Mother’s Day — as Ran explained: “Thoughts of my mother, Berta Ran, whose strength of spirit has been a profoundly significant guiding light throughout my life, have embedded themselves in v...

Synopsis In Cockney rhyming slang, being “Brahms and Liszt” means being tipsy. But in the latter 19th century, “Brahms and Liszt” signified opposite schools of contemporary music. Oddly enough, it was the younger Brahms, who represented the more conservative, traditionally structured side of the spectrum, while the older Liszt, represented a freer, less structured style, dubbed “the music of the f...