Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1975, the Oakland, California, Youth Orchestra gave the first performance of a symphony by a Bay area resident, American composer Lou Harrison. Harrison began sketches for this symphonic score back in 1942 and tinkered with it off and off until the day of its premiere performance, even stapling in 15 additional measures to the young players’ parts at their final dress rehearsal.

The commission for Harrison’s Fourth Symphony, subtitled “The Elegiac,” came from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and in part was written as a tribute to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky, two of the 20th century’s greatest new music patrons. But the intensely personal tone of this elegiac symphony was prompted by the death of Harrison’s mother, which was followed by the death of his close friend, the iconoclastic American composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch.

The symphony’s first movement is titled “Tears of the Angel Israfel”—the angel of music in Islamic lore—and the score also bears two inscriptions: The first reads “Epicurus said of death: where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not; therefore, death is nothing to us.” The second inscription is a quote from Horace: “Bitter sorrows will grow milder with music.”

On today’s date in 1998, two brand-new Christmas carols debuted in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the “Welcome Christmas” choral concert of VocalEssence conducted by Philip Brunelle.

The two carols, “Sweet Noel” by Joan Griffith and “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn” by Richard Voorhaar, were the prize-winning submissions entered in a contest arranged by the Plymouth Music Series and the American Composers Forum. The idea was to inspire contemporary composers to create new carols that—who knows?—might turn out to be classics over time.

As Brunelle put it, “The Christmas carols that we love to sing and hear have a timelessness about them wrapped in their music and words. Out of submissions from all across the USA, [we] selected two that we felt captured this feeling.”

Since 1998, the “Welcome Christmas” Carol Contest has continued as an annual tradition, and hundreds of worthy carols have been submitted. Each year, two are selected and premiered in December by Brunelle’s choral ensemble. These “Welcome Christmas” concerts are recorded by American Public Media for both regional broadcast and national distribution.

On today’s date in 1998, at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Orchestra, led by Eiji Oue, premiered a new symphony by the American composer Libby Larsen. This was her Symphony No. 4, a work scored for strings alone.

Larsen explained her decision to do without winds, brass, and percussion as follows: “This Symphony is both homage to strings and an essay about them. Strings, the core of the symphony orchestra, are supremely lyrical and supremely emotional. Yet, throughout the 20th century, perhaps marked by the performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, orchestral compositions have tended to become more and more rhythmic and percussive and less lyrical.”

Larsen goes on to make this interesting observation: “In each century since the 1600s, the orchestra has added a new choir of sound to its ensemble: the Baroque orchestra consisted chiefly of strings; woodwinds were added during the 1700s; brass during the 1800s. The 20th century has added the percussion section.”

Larsen said her new symphony was an attempt to capture something of the melody and inflections of 20th century American English, as it is spoken and sung, through orchestral strings alone.

On today’s date in 1693, a new opera based on an old legend had its premiere performance at the Académie de la Musique in Paris. The new opera was by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The old legend was that of Medea, the sorceress who murdered her own children to avenge her abandonment by their father, the Greek hero, Jason.

Charpentier’s “Médée” (to give his opera its French title) was well received by its first audiences. The most celebrated French soprano of her day sang the title role, but one contemporary critic, impressed by Charpentier’s achievement, wrote, “The emotions are so vivid, that even if the role were only spoken, the opera would not fail to make a great impression.”

In the three centuries following Charpentier’s opera, many other musicians have taken up the Medea legend as well. In 1980, the American composer Jacob Druckman took themes from three famous Medea operas and worked these into a three-movement orchestral suite entitled “Prisms,” with Charpentier’s version of “Medea” having pride of place and quoted in the first movement of Druckman’s score.

Parents are not supposed to have favorite children. By analogy, maybe composers aren’t supposed to love some of their pieces more than others—but they often do.

In the case of the Czech composer, Antonín Dvořák, his little Sonatina for Violin and Piano was one of his proudest creations. He wrote it for two of his older children, 15-year-old Otilie and her ten-year-old brother Antonin Junior.

The Sonatina was composed in 1893, while Dvořák and his family were living in America. In the fall of that year, Dvořák had paid a visit to the Czech community in St. Paul, Minnesota, and while there had visited Minnehaha Falls, a local tourist attraction. After viewing the picturesque little waterfall, Dvořák jotted down a musical idea, a bit of rippling water music that found its way into the Sonatina’s slow movement.

The Sonatina was finished in New York City on today’s date in 1893—less than two weeks before the premiere of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Despite the tremendous success of that symphony, Dvořák liked to say his proudest premiere was when his children played the Sonatina for him in the family parlor.

For the last 30 years of his life, Aaron Copland lived in ranch-style house built in the 1940s on Washington Street in Cortlandt Manor, New York. After his death in 1990, the house became a National Historical Landmark, and also the site of a residency program for composers. In 2017, one of them was Juri Seo, a composer and pianist based in New Jersey.

Now, there was a lot of snow in Cortlandt Manor that year, and maybe that had something to do with it, but the chamber work Juri Seo worked on there was titled “String Quartet - Infinite Season.” As she explains:

“After each snow, golden sunlight hinted at the spring’s coming warmth. The turbulent fluctuation of the weather made me acutely aware of the passage of time. The seasons seemed to alternate by the day, yet the certainty of spring never faltered … This was my solace: the seasons, with their infinite gradations of difference, will return again, and the birds and insects will carry on, cycle after cycle, an infinite rebirth.”

This new work was written for the Argus Quartet, who gave its premiere performance on today’s date in 2017 at Princeton University.

On today’s date in 1956, “Candide,” a 20th century musical based on an 18th century satire by the French writer Voltaire, opened on Broadway in New York City.

The libretto was by the successful playwright Lillian Hellman. The song lyrics were crafted by Richard Wilbur, one of America’s finest poets. The stage direction was by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a legendary name in British theater. The music was by Leonard Bernstein.

Maybe it was a case of too much of a good thing: “Candide” closed after just two months. Some said the show’s satire went over the heads of the audience, others that the poor box office was due to the lack of a big Broadway star in the original cast.

Early in 1957, shortly before the initial run of “Candide” closed, Bernstein conducted its overture at Carnegie Hall as part of a New York Philharmonic concert—and that bit of the show, at least, became an instant and lasting success.

Bernstein tinkered with the rest of “Candide” right up to his death in 1990, generating several performing versions of his problematic musical. With the benefit of hindsight, many critics now regard “Candide” as Bernstein’s masterpiece.

On today’s date in the year 2000, the Boston Symphony gave the premiere performance of the Second Symphony of the American composer John Corigliano. For strings alone, the symphony was a reworking a string quartet that Corigliano had composed for the farewell tour of the Cleveland Quartet in 1996.

The symphony was very well received, and the following year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music. “I am more than shocked... I don't know what to say,” commented Corigliano upon receiving the news. “It's one of the great surprises of my life.”

Perhaps doubly surprising, since, as a young man, Corigliano pretty much ruled out writing even ONE symphony, let alone two. “My thought then,” says Corigliano, “was that there were so many great symphonies [already]. I could satisfy only my ego by writing yet another. Only the death of countless friends from AIDS prompted me to write my Symphony No. 1 ... a world-scale tragedy, I felt, needed a comparably epic form.

“Then the Boston [asked] that I write a second symphony to honor the l00th anniversary of their justly famous Symphony Hall. At first I declined, stating my earlier reservations, but they were quite insistent.”

Utah came to the stage of Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, musically speaking, on this date in 1989, when the Orchestra of St. Luke’s premiered a “Utah Symphony” by American composer John Duffy. His Symphony No. 1 was commissioned by Gibbs Smith, the president of the Utah Chapter of the Sierra Club to draw attention to the endangered and pristine wilderness lands of that state.

John Duffy knew this region firsthand. “I began sketching the symphony while hiking through southeastern Utah in the spring of 1988,” wrote Duffy. “The landscape astounded me: Dramatic contrasts of light and shadow... violent changes in weather... expansive vistas. Here in the ancient Indian ruins, canyons, cathedral-like Mesas, and fantastical slabs of rock is a spiritual presence and aesthetic wonder of pure, majestic, humbling wilderness.”

John Duffy is perhaps best known for writing the score to the 9-hour PBS documentary series Heritage: Civilization and the Jews. He was born in the Bronx and studied with Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell.

In addition to composing over 300 works, in 1974, Duffy founded Meet the Composer, an organization dedicated to the creation, performance, and recording of music by American composers.

On today’s date in 1843, a composer dubbed “The Chopin of America” was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His name was Manuel Gregorio Tavárez, born to a French father and Puerto Rican mother. He began his musical studies in San Juan but at the age of 15 moved to France to study at the Paris Conservatory with two leading French composers of the day, Daniel Auber and Eugen D'Albert.

While in Paris, Tavárez suffered a stroke that paralyzed his left hand and affected his hearing. He returned to Puerto Rico, overcame those problems and after giving several recitals in San Juan, became a piano teacher.

As a composer, Tavárez developed an original dance form called Danza–similar to the waltz, but tinged with Afro-Cuban rhythms from the Caribbean and the wistful melancholy of European Romantic composers.

Tavárez gave his works evocative titles like “La Sensitiva” (The Sensitive one), “La Ausencia” (Absense), “Un Recuerdito” (A little remembrance) and “Pobre Corazón” (Poor heart), but the title of his most famous Danza, written in 1870, was simply a woman’s name: “Margarita.”

Like Chopin, Tavárez lived only 39 years. He died in 1883.