Composers Datebook

Today’s date marks the birthdate in 1928 of Italian composer Ennio Morricone, famous for more than 400 scores he wrote for films and TV.

If you’re a fan, you already know that he wrote the music for a series of spaghetti western movies like the 1964 classic A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood as a taciturn, sun-burnt, cigar-chomping gunman.

If you’re an oboist, you’ve probably played Morricone’s haunting Gabriel’s Oboe at weddings or funerals. It's a melody originally heard in his soundtrack to the1986 film The Mission.

But in a 2006 interview for Dazed magazine, Morricone revealed some things even his fans might not have known: He collected bars of hotel soap as a hobby. And if he hadn’t become a composer, he would have liked to have been a professional chess player.

He also offered a bit of wise advice when asked about scores that were not successes: “A long time ago, I really loved a film that I was working on and I became too involved. That was kind of unbalanced. It made me realize that you can’t love things too much if you want them to work.”

Ennio Morricone (1928 - 2020) Gabriel’s Oboe, fr “The Mission”; Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; Ennio Morricone, cond. Sony 57872

On today’s date in 1967, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new piece, November Steps, by Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, a work commissioned by the orchestra as part of its 125th-anniversary celebrations. In addition to the usual instruments of the Western symphony orchestra, Takemitsu included in his score two traditional Japanese instruments: the shakuhachi flute and the biwa, a kind of Japanese lute.

Eight years after the Takemitsu premiere, an organization called Music from Japan was founded to help make other Japanese contemporary music feel “at home” in America. Music from Japan has presented about 400 works across the U.S. and premiered over 40 new works, many of them specially commissioned.

On today’s date in 2000, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Music from Japan presented a gala concert at Carnegie Hall, which included the premiere of a new orchestral work by talented young Japanese composer Karen Tanaka, one of the rising stars of her generation. Among Tanaka’s recorded works is Night Bird, a piece for two decidedly Western instruments: saxophone and piano.

Toru Takemitsu (1930 - 1996) November Steps; Katsuya Yokoyama, shakuhachi; Kunshi Isuruta, biwa; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Bernard Haitink, cond. Philips 426 667

Karen Tanaka (b. 1961) Night Bird; Claude Delangle, saxophone BIS 890

On today’s date in 1830, 11-year-old piano virtuoso Clara Wieck took the stage of the Leipzig Gewandhaus for her first solo recital. Her father was a piano teacher, who had groomed Clara for a solo career since infancy.

This was the age of the great composer-pianists Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin, and little Clara also wrote original works for her performances. Her set of four Polonaises was published the following year. Her career as a composer and performer would eventually span five decades, and, like her father, she became one of the most famous piano teachers of her time.

Nowadays, composer-performers are more common in the world of jazz than classical music, although there are exceptions. One of them is Judith Lang Zaimont, who, like Clara Schumann, developed a triple career as composer, performer and teacher.

“Composing is the central fact of my life,” Zaimont says. “My music seeks to appeal both to the heart (the ‘Ahh!’ response) and to the head (the ‘Aha!’ response). When this mix is just right, I can sense it — and reactions from audiences can be positive, too.”

Clara Schumman (1819 – 1896) Four Polonaises; Josef de Beenhouwer, piano CPO 999 758

Judith Lang Zaimont (b. 1945) September, fr Calendar Collection; Judith Lang Zaimont, piano Four Tay 4001

The Nov. 7, 1950, issue of Look magazine included a record review of a new LP of music by avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse. “Varèse is unlike anything else in music,” the review suggested, “and well worth knowing.”

A young Californian named Frank Zappa, just short of his 10th birthday, was fascinated by the Look magazine photo of Varèse accompanying the review, which made the composer look a little like a mad scientist in vintage horror films. The young Zappa felt compelled to hunt down the record and begin composing music himself. For his 15th birthday, Zappa chose to spend a $5 gift from his parents on a long-distance phone call to Varèse, who Zappa correctly guessed must live in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Today, Frank Zappa is best remembered as the head of the iconoclastic rock band of the ‘60s and ‘70s the Mothers of Invention, but in 1983, Zappa also conducted works of Varèse at a San Francisco concert honoring the composer’s centenary, and always acknowledged Varèse as a major influence. One of Zappa’s final projects, recorded in 1993, the last year of his life, was an orchestral tribute to Varèse.

Edgar Varèse (1883 - 1965) Ionisation; New York Philharmonic; Pierre Boulez, cond. Sony 45844

Frank Zappa (1940 – 1993) Dog Breath Variations; Cincinnati Conservatory Wind Symphony; Eugene Corporon, cond. Mark 1116

The American composer Florence Price wrote three symphonies in all. Her Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1933 and marked the first time a composition by an African-American woman was played by a major American orchestra. The score for her second symphony is lost. Her third symphony, commissioned by the WPA Federal Music Project, was premiered on today’s date in 1940 by the Detroit Civic Orchestra.

Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. At age 14, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the Ivy League racial prejudice of that time.

After teaching in the South, Price moved to Chicago in 1927, where she became acquainted with the writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the African-American arts scene, who both helped promote Price's music.

Price died in 1953. After decades of neglect, early 21st century performances and recordings of her works have helped revive interest in her life and career.

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) Symphony No. 3; Women’s Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, cond. Koch 7518-2

Into the Woods, a new musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, opened on Broadway on today’s date in 1987, and brought to the stage characters from the world of fairy-tales: Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and not one, but TWO Prince Charmings.

But in Lapine and Sondheim’s fairy tale, bad things happen to good people who make morally questionable decisions in their quest to “live happily ever after.”

At the time, Sondheim said, “All fairy tales are parables about steps to maturity. The final step is when you become responsible for the people around you, when you feel connected to the rest of the world.”

The New York Times review noted that this fairy tale’s quest was “the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past.” Granting the musical was “potent stuff,” some complained there was simply too much of it, with multiple plot lines resulting in a complicated story hampering Sondheim’s lyrical gifts from really taking off on their own.

Even so, since its 1987 premiere, Into the Woods has gone on to become one of the most performed and popular of all Sondheim’s musicals.

Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930) Into the Woods; original Broadway cast members RCA 60752

Today we honor one of America’s greatest patrons of chamber music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who died on this date in 1953.

Born in 1864, Elizabeth was the daughter of a wealthy wholesale grocer. She put her inheritance to good use. In 1924, she proposed to the Library of Congress that an auditorium be constructed in Washington, D.C., that would be dedicated to the performance of chamber music. A year later it was built, and Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress still stands today.

Not content with just a superb venue for chamber music, Coolidge diligently commissioned new works to be played there. The list of important chamber pieces her foundation commissioned is impressive, and includes Bartok and Schoenberg string quartets, the original chamber versions of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Stravinsky’s Apollo ballets, and modern works by American composers as diverse as Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, George Crumb and John Corigliano.

Coolidge was an amateur composer and accomplished pianist. Her passion for music and enthusiasm for the creation of new works was all the more remarkable considering that tragically she battled deafness from her mid-30s.

Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971) Apollo ballet; Stockholm Chamber Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond. Sony Classical 46667

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 2002, the American Composers Orchestra presented new works inspired by the Hebrew Psalms. The program included the premiere of a new work by the American composer David Lang entitled How to Pray.

In his program note, Lang wrote: “[The] Psalms are so central to religious experience [because] they are a comprehensive catalogue of how to talk to the Almighty... Of course, it's like reading one side of a correspondence... I am not a religious person. I don't know how to pray. I do, however, know some of the times and places and formulas that are supposed to help make prayer possible. Sometimes I find myself sending those messages out. And then I wait, secretly hoping that I will recognize the response.”

The minimalist-style, patterned repetition in Lang’s How to Pray, reminded some listeners of a “mandala”—those intricate graphic patterns intended to be an aid to meditation for Hindu or Buddhist believers.

Stravinsky fans with sharp ears might also recognize the running piano line from the beginning of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, which Lang borrows and weaves into the pattern of How to Pray as both a tribute and inspiration.

David Lang (b. 1957) How to Pray; Real Quiet ensemble; Gil Rose, cond. Naxos 8.559615

On today’s date in 1979, a new play by Peter Schaffer titled Amadeus opened at the National Theatre in London.

Schaffer’s play tells the story of Mozart’s final years in Vienna, including some posthumous gossip that it was the petty jealousy and back-stabbing intrigue of Mozart’s Italian contemporary Antonio Salieri that hastened Wolfgang’s untimely demise. There was even a Romantic legend that Salieri had actually poisoned Mozart, a legend Shaffer gave a psychological spin.

Music historians were quick to attack Shaffer’s play as wildly inaccurate and downright unfair to poor old Salieri, who, they said, was not all that bad a fellow. Accurate or not, Schaffer’s play was a big hit, and five years later was made into a wildly successful film. That movie version of Amadeus prompted millions of new classical music fans to snap up any recordings of Mozart’s Requiem they could find.

And what about the music historians? They couldn’t even find comfort in the old public relations adage, “There’s no such thing as bad press as long as they spell your name right!” They felt even the movie’s title was bogus. Mozart never signed his middle name “Amadeus,” preferring the French version, “Amadé.”

Wolfgang Mozart (1756 – 1791) Requiem; La Chapelle Royale and Orchestre des Champs Elysees; Philippe Herreweghe, cond. Harmonia Mundi 901620

In France, today is “la Fete de la Toussaint” – All Saints’ Day – observed as both a sacred and secular national holiday, a time to visit cemeteries and put flowers on the graves of relatives. In 1947, when memories of the dead of World War II were still fresh, French Radio broadcast three premieres at a special concert from the Salle Gaveau in Paris.

First on the program was the French premiere of Hungarian composer Lazlo Lajhta’s somber In Memoriam. This had been the first new orchestral work to be performed in Budapest when concert life had resumed after the war.

Second was the world premiere of the Sixth Symphony by Polish composer Alexandre Tansman, who, being Jewish, found refuge in France in 1938, then, during the German occupation, had fled to the United States. In 1946, Tansman returned to Europe in time for the premiere of his symphony, also titled In Memoriam, at this concert.

The third work on the program was another world premiere: a newly completed Requiem Mass by French composer Maurice Duruflé, originally commissioned as an orchestral work in 1941 during the German occupation of France, which morphed into a choral Requiem Mass by the time of the liberation.

Maurice Duruflé (1902 - 1986) – Requiem (Westminster Choir; Joseph Flummerfelt, cond.) Avie 46