Composers Datebook

“Pssst… Hey buddy–wanna buy a bridge?… No? Well, how about a Clarinet Concerto, then?”

As most of us know, the Brooklyn Bridge is not for sale, but this New York icon has reputedly been sold to many unsuspecting visitors. After its opening in 1883, Harper's Monthly wrote, "The wise man will not cross the bridge in five minutes, nor in twenty, [but] will linger to get the good of the splendid view about him." The American composer Michael Daugherty did just that, and came up with a concerto for clarinet and wind ensemble that premiered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then, on today’s date, in 2005 was performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

“Like the four cables of webs of wire and steel that hold the Brooklyn Bridge together,” says Daugherty, “my ode to this cultural icon [in] four movements: East (Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights); South (Statue of Liberty); West (Wall Street and the lower Manhattan skyline); and North (Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center). In the final movement, I imagine Artie Shaw, the great jazz swing clarinetist of the 1940s, performing in the once glorious Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of the Rockefeller Center.”

It’s a play that both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein wanted to make into an opera, but the playwright always said, “No.”

We’re talking about “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, a nostalgic but bitter-sweet look at life and love and death in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, set in the early 1900, complete with white picket fences, boy meets girl, and a drugstore soda counter.

It wasn’t until decades after Wilder’s death in 1975 that the executor of the Wilder estate, after a long search for just the right composer for an ”Our Town” opera, settled on Ned Rorem, and a libretto crafted by the poet J.D. McClatchy, who also happened to be an authority on Wilder’s works.

Rorem was in his 80s when the opera premiered on today’s date in 2006 at the Opera Theater at the Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana.

The New York Times thought the resulting opera a success, writing “’Our Town’ opens with a hymn, and Mr. Rorem retained and refracted the familiar melody, turning pat modulations slightly bitter, as if the music were heard through a lens of nostalgia that turned it sepia. This nostalgia proved a hallmark of the score.”

The American composer Daniel Robert "Danny" Elfman is best known for writing the opening theme of The Simpsons and for scoring movies directed by his friend Tim Burton.

But on today’s date in 2005, Elfman had, for him, a rather unusual experience—namely, hearing some of his music played live at Carnegie Hall when the American Composers Orchestra gave the premiere of “Serenada Schizophrana,” his first-ever foray into composing a symphonic concert work.

In notes for a subsequent recording of the piece, Elfman said:

“I’ve always had visuals to drive my orchestral music… As I’d never done anything like this before, figuring out how to begin was daunting. I began several dozen short improvisational compositions… Slowly, some of them began to develop themselves until finally I had six separate movements … I more or less let the movements take themselves wherever they wanted to go in a kind of musical stream of consciousness (which, with the way my brain works, was not a very smooth stream).”

Hearing the work at Carnegie Hall, Elfman concluded, was (quote), “a thrilling and surreal experience.”

In recounting the life story of many composers, it’s a familiar and perhaps Romantic cliché that their work will be—as a matter of course—NOT appreciated by their contemporaries, and that the composer in question will have to toil for years in obscurity before his or her music is appreciated by performers and audiences.

In reality, we’re happy to report, that isn’t always the case.

Consider, for example, the American composer Lowell Liebermann, who was born in New York on today’s date in 1961. At the age of sixteen, the premiere of his Piano Sonata No. 1 at Carnegie Hall resulted in a number of prizes and awards. By his thirties, Liebermann was being commissioned and championed by some of the leading performers of our time.

For James Galway, Liebermann composed a Flute Concerto and Liebermann’s two-act opera “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was the first work that the Monte Carlo Opera commissioned from an American composer. In 1998, Liebermann was appointed composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony, and that orchestra premiered his Symphony No. 2 in February of the year 2000, and, in a symbolic Millennium gesture, simulcast their performance new-fangled World Wide Web.

Henry Cowell was one of the most prolific of all 20th century American composers. Some of his works are aggressively experimental in nature, while others tap into folk traditions and world music. The range and variety are quite remarkable. Cowell wrote so many works, in fact, that even the composer himself often had trouble keeping track of all he had written.

Take this genial little Woodwind Quintet, for example. It was written in the early 1930s for the great French flute virtuoso Georges Barrère, who commissioned and premiered many new works involving his instrument. In 1934, Barrère even made a recording of this suite for New Music Quarterly, a publishing venture bankrolled by none other than the retired insurance executive and part-time composer Charles Ives.

After that recording, Cowell went on producing new works, and the manuscript of his Woodwind Quintet remained with Barrère, who apparently just filed it away. The music didn’t surface again until 1947, when it was discovered among the late flutists’s collection of scores.

On today’s date in 1948, Cowell’s Woodwind Suite received its first concert performance at Columbia University in New York City, and quickly established itself as one of Cowell’s most popular compositions.

In 1724, February 20th fell on a Sunday, and at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig “Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe,” or, in English: “Jesus gathered the twelve to Himself,” a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach was performed as part of the Sunday service.

Meanwhile, on February 20th in London that same year, audiences at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket heard the premiere of “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” or, “Julius Caesar in Egypt,” a new Italian opera by George Frideric Handel.

How interesting to find Bach in church and Handel in the theater, on the very same date—but NOT, is it turns out, on the same DAY.

In 1724, Bach’s Germany kept track of time under the Gregorian calendar, but in Handel’s England, the older Julian calendar was still used, and so Handel’s calendar would say February 20th was a Thursday, while Bach’s would say was it was a Sunday. It wasn’t until 1752 that England adopted the same calendar that Germany used–the Gregorian one we still use today.

In the 18th century, apparently, you didn’t need Albert Einstein to remind you that time is a very RELATIVE concept!

On today’s date in 1923, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius conducted the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 6 in Helsinki. He had begun work on it some five years earlier, and at that time described his vision for the symphony as follows:

“The Sixth Symphony is wild and passionate in character. Gloomy with pastoral contrasts. Probably in four movements with a finale, which will build to a gloomy, wild romp of the orchestra in which the main theme disappears.”

Well, that may have been the original idea, but the final product turned out quite different, and the late musicologist Michael Steinberg offered a more spot-on description: “The Sibelius Sixth is transparent, pastoral, lyrical, and notably even-tempered—a sanctuary fashioned out of music.”

In the pecking order of popularity, the Second and Fifth of Sibelius’s seven symphonies rank at the top, with the Sixth probably the least-often heard in concert. But the always perceptive Mr. Steinberg, wrote: “To this day the Sixth remains the least known (or understood) of the seven symphonies, and yet for those who make its full acquaintance, the Sixth may become the most cherished of them all.”

Some things are best left to the imagination—at least that’s what the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz came to think regarding opera. Berlioz didn’t have the best of luck getting his operas staged during his lifetime, and, on the few occasions he did, the resulting performance fell far short of his ideal. Increasingly Berlioz turned to what might be called the “Theater of the Imagination,” composing concert works that were, for all intents and purposes, operas minus the staging and costumes.

One of these, which Berlioz called “a dramatic legend,” premiered in 1846, was entitled “The Damnation of Faust.” It was based on the famous Faust plays of the German poet Goethe. Like many of Berlioz’s works, “The Damnation of Faust” proved an artistic success—but a box office failure—at its premiere as an unstaged concert piece at the Opera Comique in Paris.

Some five decades later, on today’s date in 1893, “Damnation of Faust” was revived as a fully staged opera at the Monte Carlo Opera. It proved such a success that in short order it was staged in Milan, Moscow, and Liverpool, and even reached the shores of America, courtesy of the French Opera in New Orleans.

Today’s date marks the birthday of the American composer, choral conductor, and educator Betty Jackson King. She was born in Chicago in 1928, where she earned her M.A. in composition at the Roosevelt University. Her Master’s thesis was an opera, entitled “Saul of Tarsus,” whose libretto was written by her father, the Reverend Frederick D. Jackson.

Betty Jackson King is perhaps best known for her sacred and choral works, especially her arrangements of spirituals, and, according to her family, her musical career reflected her deep religious faith. “Over my head, I hear music in the air, so there must be a God somewhere,” was her oft-stated creed.

But King also wrote secular works, including a ballet for children, chamber works, art songs, and solo pieces for piano and organ. She was an active teacher and choral conductor in her native Chicago before moving to Wildwood, New Jersey, where she taught, conducted, and composed for the rest of her life.

A few years before Betty Jackson King’s death in 1994, soprano Kathleen Battle performed and recorded "Ride-Up in The Chariot,” one of Jackson’s spiritual arrangements, at a gala televised Carnegie Hall concert of spirituals conducted by James Levine.

On today’s date in 1929, a chamber trio by Aaron Copland entitled “Vitebsk” premiered at Town Hall in New York City. Copland said it was based on a Jewish folk tune from a Russian village called Vitebsk that he had once heard used in a play.

Two string players from the famous Belgian Pro Arte Quartet and the great German pianist Walter Gieseking were booked for the premiere. Despite the distinguished performers, the performance came off as something of a slap-stick comedy.

According to one of Copland’s friends, present that night, the heavy-set cellist accidentally knocked over the violinist’s music stand when he came on stage, and while bending over to retrieve his music knocked over his own stand, strewing music all over the stage. Then, just as he began Copland’s piece, his cello string snapped with a loud, comically timed twang.

Years after the 1929 premiere, when Copland visited the Soviet Union, Russian audiences expressed amazement that any American composer would choose to name a piece after Vitebsk, which, rather than a quaint Russian village like the one evoked in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” was in fact a large industrial complex resembling Pittsburgh or Cleveland.