Composers Datebook

Today’s date marks a “good news, bad news” anniversary in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. On today’s date in 1717, Bach was appointed as the new Capellmeister at the Princely Court of Leopold of Coethen. Since the young prince was an avid music-lover and offered Bach a much higher salary, that counts as the “good news.”

The “bad news” relates to Bach’s previous employer, namely the Duke of Weimar, who was not exactly pleased that Bach had accepted the new job. Court intrigue complicated the matter, and the Prince’s “poaching” of Bach might have been perceived as just another indirect slap at the Duke maneuvered by a long-standing feud between the two noblemen. 

The upshot was that Bach was put on the Prince’s payroll effective in August of 1717, but the Duke didn’t accept Bach’s resignation until five months later, and then only after throwing Bach in jail for almost a month to teach him a lesson, as the court secretary put it, “for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal.”

In an age when Dukes and Princes could do as they pleased, it seems giving two weeks notice was a tad more complicated than it is today!

J. S. Bach (1685 - 1750) — Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 (Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; David Shifrin, cond.) Delos 3185

Once, when someone asked JFK what his favorite song might be, the waggish president responded: “Well, ‘Hail to the Chief’ has a nice ring to it.”

As most people know, “Hail to the Chief” is the tune traditionally played to announce presidential arrivals at public events. What most people don't know is that the composer of the tune was British: one James Sanderson, an early 19th century violinist and the conductor of the Surrey Theatre in London.

In 1810, Sanderson published his incidental music for a stage adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s romantic poem “The Lady of the Lake.” One hit tune from the show, "Wreaths for the Chieftain," made its way to America, and, given a new text and a title, “Hail to the Chief,” was first sung in Boston in 1815, at a memorial service on Washington’s Birthday.  

It was on today’s date in 1828, however, that the U.S. Marine Band first performed the song for a LIVING President, John Quincy Adams. Subsequent First Ladies Julia Tyler and Sara Polk continued the tradition, asking the Marine Band to play “Hail to the Chief” to announce the arrival of Presidential spouses, and that tradition continues to this day.

James Sanderson (17??-18??) Hail to the Chief Manchester Cornet Band Vox Box 5088

James Sanderson (17??-18??) Hail to the Chief Chestnut Brass Company Newport Classics 85548

The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is held every four years in Fort Worth, Texas, and for each competition, a new test piece for solo piano is commissioned that each contestant is required to interpret.

The 1985 test piece, “Fantasia on an Ostinato” by American composer John Corigliano, was first performed on today’s date. It was inspired by a famous repetitive passage in the slow, second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, as Corigliano explained:

“Beethoven’s near-minimalistic use of his material and my own desire to write a piece in which the performer is responsible for decisions concerning the durations of repeated patterns, led to my first experiment in so-called minimalist techniques.

“I approached this task with mixed feelings … for while I admire [minimalism’s] emphasis on attractive textures and its occasional ability to achieve a hypnotic quality (not unlike some late Beethoven), I do not care for its excessive repetition, its lack of architecture and its overall emotional sterility.

“In my ‘Fantasia on an Ostinato’ I attempted to combine the attractive aspects of minimalism with convincing structure and emotional expression … [climaxing] in a return of the obsessive Beethoven rhythm and, finally, the appearance of the Beethoven theme itself.”

John Corigliano (b. 1938) — Fantasia on an Ostinato (Nina Tichman, p.) Naxos 8.559306

On today’s date in 1980, at 8:32 a.m. Pacific Time, Mount St. Helens erupted, its north face collapsing in a massive rock avalanche. Pressurized gasses from the volcano flattened 150 miles of forest, and killed every living thing within a ten-mile radius.

A mushroom-shaped column of ash rose thousands of feet skyward, and day was turned to night as grey ash fell over eastern Washington state.

It was an awe-inspiring spectacle witnessed by the American composer, Alan Hovhaness, who, in 1983, wrote his Symphony No. 50, a work subtitled “Mt. St. Helens.”

“Since 1972,” said Hovhaness, “I have lived between the young, volcanic Cascades and the oceanic Olympic range with rain forests, and find inspiration from the tremendous energy of these powerful, youthful, rugged mountains.”

As a Washington resident, and as the composer of the “Mysterious Mountain” Symphony, his Symphony No. 2 from 1955, Hovhaness was a natural choice for such a commission. In explaining the title of that earlier “mountain” symphony, Hovhaness wrote:

“Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God… symbolic places between the mundane and spiritual world.”

Alan Hovhaness (1911 – 2000) Symphony No. 50 (Mount St. Helens) Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, cond. Delos 3137

Joan Tower is one of America’s most famous–and quotable–composers. She once asked audiences to imagine Beethoven as a composer-in-residence with a modern American orchestra: “If Beethoven walked in here right now,” said Tower, “I think we’d ALL be a bit shocked. He’d probably look very scruffy and be an obnoxious pain-in-the-butt. Orchestras would NEVER ask him back.”

Tower can be equally blunt about her own music. Among her most frequently performed works is the series pieces entitled “Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman.” Of these, Tower remarked, perhaps with tongue firmly in cheek: “Maybe the title is better than the music.”

On today’s date in 1991, Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony gave the premiere performance of Joan Tower’s “Concerto for Orchestra.”

“It’s my WORST title,” Tower declared. “I really didn’t want people to think of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, but it IS a concerto in the sense that it features different parts of the orchestra.”

This work was a joint commission from the St. Louis Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony. Reviewing the Chicago performance, music critic John von Rhein wrote: “Tower's talent for flinging bold, dramatic sounds over a large orchestral palette is much on display.”

Joan Tower (b. 1938) Concerto for Orchestra Colorado Symphony; Marin Alsop, cond. Koch 7469

OK – say you were paid to listen to and promote hundreds of new classical recordings every month and travel the world to broker new deals for a major record company.

The question is, “What would you do in your spare time?”

Well, if you’re a composer, the answer is easy: write your OWN music, of course.

Sean Hickey’s “day job” is being the Senior Vice-President for Sales and Business Development at Naxos of America, but who also finds time to create his own chamber and orchestral works.

On today’s date in 2007, for example, his Clarinet Concerto received its premiere performance at Symphony Space in New York City, with David Gould as soloist with the Metro Chamber Orchestra. It’s gone on to be his most-performed orchestra work, and, in keeping with Hickey’s globe-trotting, has been recorded in the Russian Federation by another virtuoso clarinetist, Alexander Fiterstein with the St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony.

The work also incorporates fragments of folk tunes from Scotland as part of the creative mix.

Why Scottish themes? “They have a timeless quality of most great folk music, “says Hickey. “In the concerto’s cadenza, a fiddle tune leads headlong into a rapturous close.”

Sean Hickey — Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (Alexander Fiterstein, cl; St. Petersburg Academic Symphony; Vladimir Lande, cond.)
Delos 3448

On today’s date in 1916, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” a new work by the Spanish composer, Manuel de Falla, received its first performance. The first night’s audience didn’t know quite what to make of it—was it a piano concerto or a tone poem? Whatever it was, they didn’t like it much, apparently, but there was at least one musician in the audience who did: the young Polish piano virtuoso, Artur Rubinstein.

“I had the opportunity to hear the first performance,” wrote Rubinstein in his autobiography, “I fell in love with this work and offered to play it at the last symphony concert of the season. Being constantly on tour, I learned it by reading the score on trains. At the rehearsal I played it by heart. De Falla and the conductor, Arbos, were pleased, but again the public did not respond—the work was too complicated for them, and it ended in a dead pianissimo. Nevertheless, Arbos and I were applauded warmly”

But Rubinstein knew just what was required to direct some of that applause back to the composer. “I played de Falla’s ‘Fire Dance’ as an encore,” recalled Rubinstein,” which produced the usual ovation.”

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Ritual Fire Dance Artur Rubinstein, piano; Philadelphia Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy, cond. RCA/BMG 63070

An invitation-only audience attended a historic Bruckner concert in Munich on today’s date in 1932. On the first half of the program, Siegmund von Hausegger conducted Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9, using the posthumous edition prepared by Bruckner’s pupil, Ferdinand Löwe, which contained many edits and alterations. For the second half, Bruckner’s Ninth was performed again — this time as the composer had written it, following the Bruckner’s unpublished manuscript score.

During his lifetime and after his death, Bruckner’s most devoted pupils, Löwe and the Schalk brothers, Josef and Franz, cut and altered his scores to better match the expectations of contemporary audiences, trying to make Bruckner sound more like Wagner — flashier and more dramatic.

The 1932 Munich concert began a five-year debate whether the original or altered Bruckner was preferable. Then in 1937, Germany’s Nazi government announced it would fund a new Bruckner edition based on the composer’s original manuscripts. Like everything else in Nazi Germany, symphonies were viewed through racially tinted lenses. Löwe had Jewish ancestry, and so what began as a musicological project to honor the Austrian composer’s original intentions was appropriated by the Nazis as a crusade to “liberate” Bruckner from what they called “non-Ayran” tampering.

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): Symphony No. 9; Minnesota Orchestra; Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, cond.; Reference 81

For public radio listeners born long after the Golden Age of American Radio in the 1930s and 1940s, the variety of music broadcast on the COMMERCIAL radio stations back then seems hard to believe.

For example, on today’s date in 1938, the NBC radio network broadcast the premiere of a new symphony by the eminent American composer, Howard Hanson.

But Hanson’s Symphony was, in fact, commissioned by the rival CBS network, whose house orchestra commissioned and performed hundreds of works by American composers. The reason? On the staff of CBS was the young composer and conductor Bernard Herrmann, who later became famous for his Alfred Hitchcock film scores. In 1934, Herrmann had been hired to write background music for CBS radio shows, and eventually became the chief conductor of the CBS Radio Symphony.

The CBS Radio Symphony had premiered the opening three movements of Hanson’s Symphony on their network in the fall of 1937, but on today’s date the following year, the rival NBC Symphony broadcast the first complete performance of the whole work, conducted by Hanson himself.

Howard Hanson (1896-1981) Symphony No. 3 Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, cond. Delos 3092

If you were in London in the year 1792, and picked up the Times for today’s date, you would have been able to read this announcement: “Mr. Salomon most respectfully acquaints the nobility and gentry that his sixth Concert will be at Hanover Square on the 23rd.”

Johann Peter Salomon was the impresario who arranged for Haydn to visit London to present his latest music, and among the works promised for March 23rd was a new symphony, the work we know today as Haydn’s “Surprise Symphony”

This nickname comes from the sudden loud, timpani stroke in the work’s second movement—and the story soon went ‘round that Haydn had wanted to wake up any snoozing members of the audience.

It was a good story, but somebody finally asked Haydn himself if it were true. “No,” Haydn replied. “Rather it was my wish to surprise the public with something new, so as not to be outdone by my pupil Iganz Pleyel, who was engaged in London for a concert series just before mine. My new symphony was well received, but enthusiasm reached its highest point with the unexpected timpani stroke. Even Pleyel complimented me on the idea.”

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) Symphony No. 94 in G (Surprise) Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips 442 614