Composers Datebook

November 17, 1878, marked a milestone in the career of the 37-year old Czech composer Antonin Dvorak. For the first time Dvorak engaged and conducted the orchestra of the Provisional Theater in Prague in a concert entirely of his own works, including the premiere performance of a new Serenade for Winds.

Earlier that year, Dvorak heard a performance of a Mozart wind serenade in Vienna, and was so taken by the sound of Mozart’s double-reeds and horns that he wrote a similar work of his own in just two weeks.

Dvorak added to the open-air feel of Mozart’s 18th century wind serenade some lively 19th century Czech dance rhythms. But he also chose the key of D minor, reserved by Mozart for some of his most serious works. That enables Dvorak’s Serenade to seem both somber and upbeat, infused with musical shadows AND sunlight.

The new Serenade was well received in Prague and also in Vienna, where one its biggest fans was Johannes Brahms, who wrote: ``A more lovely, refreshing impression of real, rich and charming creative talent you can't imagine,” wrote Brahms, “I think it must be a pleasure for the wind players!''

On today’s date in 1904, the Washington Post’s headline read, “Hiawatha Tonight: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Masterpiece to be sung at Convention Center.”

The 29-year old British composer himself, on his first visit to America, was to conduct the 200 members of the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington DC, accompanied by the Marine Band orchestra.

So who was this British composer and what had he done to inspire an American chorus to name itself after him?

Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 to an African father from Sierra Leone and an English mother. Showing remarkable musical talent, he studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and rapidly established himself as a major choral composer with a trilogy of oratorios, all based on Longfellow’s epic poem “Hiawatha,” that became wildly popular in England, but the 1904 concert in Washington DC was the first time all three had been performed on the same concert.

The Coleridge-Taylor Society of Washington DC was America’s first African-American concert choir. Attending the Washington performance were many members of the Federal government and distinguished members of both black and white society.

In 1974, St. Petersburg was still called “Leningrad” and still very much a part of what we now call the “former Soviet Union.” Back then, the most famous living Soviet composer was Dmitri Shostakovich, whose health was rapidly failing from the cancer that would claim his life the following year.

On today’s date in 1974, Shostakovich’s final string quartet, his Fifteenth, was given its premiere performance by the Taneyev Quartet. The work was supposed to have been premiered by the Beethoven Quartet, but their cellist died unexpectedly, and, mindful of his own mortality, Shostakovich was reluctant to postpone the scheduled premiere. After all, he himself might not be around by the time the Beethoven Quartet found a replacement cellist.

When his String Quartet No. 1 had premiered in 1938, Shostakovich had described that work as “joyful, merry, lyrical” and “spring-like.” His Fifteenth Quartet, on the other hand, is obviously a “winter-work,” written by someone who knows he may never see another spring.

If Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies represent the “public” side of a Soviet composer, his fifteen string quartets might be described as chronicling his “private” inner world of hopes, fears, and dreams.

On today’s date in 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation began daily radio transmissions from London, at first offering just news and weather–the latter read twice, in case anyone wanted to take notes. The following month, on December 23rd, 1922, they broadcast their first orchestral concert.

Over time, the BBC became affectionately nicknamed “the Beeb,” or, less affectionately “Auntie,” due to the upper-middle class, slightly patronizing tone of its music announcers in the 1940s and 50s.

That said, Auntie has proven to be very hip in one aspect: the BBC has been a major commissioner of and advocate for new music by a wide range of composers–and not just British ones. In 2007, for example, the BBC Symphony premiered the “Doctor Atomic Symphony” by the American composer John Adams live on-air at a BBC Proms Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

And it’s not just famous, big-name composers who get an airing on the Beeb either. Each year BBC Radio 3 host a competition for teenage composers. Winners participate in a mentored program and have one of their orchestral works developed, rehearsed, and performed at the BBC Proms.

While for Puerto Ricans, the Bomba and the Plena are more familiar representatives of their proud dance tradition, the musical form known as Danza holds a special place in their hearts.

Danza originated in southern Puerto Rico in the early 19th century, originally similar to the waltz, but over time it absorbed Afro-Cuban influences. Manuel Gregorio Tavárez, a 19th century Puerto Rican composer raised the danza to a cultivated artform, and accordingly Tavárez was dubbed “The Chopin of America.”

A 21st century Puerto Rican composer named Dan Román paid tribute to Tavárez and other earlier Danza masters in a piece for cello and piano that he called “Retrospectos” or “Retrospectives.” This new work premiered on today’s date in 2007 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, played by the Montserrat Duo, who had commissioned the piece.

“Each movement of my piece uses a different aspect of the Danza,” says Román. “Each movement also explores a particular composer from among the most significant authors of the genre. However, the source material is always treated as series of analytical objects that become manipulated to nearly the point of abstraction.”

These days, at symphony concerts when a new piece of music is about to be played, it’s not uncommon to overhear someone mutter, “Why do they have to program this new stuff, when there’s so much Brahms and Tchaikovsky we’d rather hear?”

Well, on today’s date in 1881, the 40th season of the New York Philharmonic Society’s concerts opened with a pair of brand-new works: first the New York premiere of the “Tragic” Overture by Johannes Brahms, and after that, the world premiere performance of the Second Piano Concerto by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The soloist in the Tchaikovsky was a certain Madame Madeleine Schiller.

Here’s what The New York Times had to say the following morning: “The return of Madame Schiller to the stage is a welcome event... the only regret being that her efforts had not been devoted to a more interesting work, for, apart from the novelty, it cannot be said that the Tchaikovsky concerto possessed any great merit. There are older works, of which one never tires and which, interpreted by Madame Schiller ... would always be welcomed.”

Ah, some things never change!

In his autobiographical sketch, “A Mingled Chime,” the late British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham offered this assessment of the British composer Dame Ethel Smyth: “Ethel Smyth is without question the most remarkable of her sex that I have been privileged to know,” and wrote he admired her “fiery energy and unrelenting fixity of purpose.”

Born in 1858, Smyth became a composer against her family’s wishes, and it took dogged determination to get her large-scale choral and operatic works performed in an era when most in the music business did not take female composers seriously. That was before they met Dame Ethel, who convinced legendary conductors like Arthur Nikisch, Bruno Walter, and Sir Thomas, who realized her music had merit.

Smyth’s opera “The Wreckers” had its premiere performance in Leipzig on today’s date in 1906, and was championed in England by Sir Thomas Beecham, who thought it her masterpiece. “It remains,” wrote Beecham in 1944, the year of Smyth’s death, “one of the three or four English operas of real musical merit and vitality written in the past forty years.”

Today’s date marks the birthdate in 1928 of the 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 a 1986 film titled “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, 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.”

On today’s date in 1967, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new piece entitled “November Steps” by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, a work commissioned by the Philharmonic 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 some 400 works across the U.S. and premiered over 40 new works, many of them specially commissioned.

On today’s date in the year 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 the talented young Japanese composer Karen Tanaka, one of the rising stars of her generation. Among Tanaka’s recorded works is a piece entitled “Night Bird” for two decidedly Western instruments: saxophone and piano.

On today’s date in 1830, an 11-year old piano virtuoso named 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 own performances. Clara’s Op. 1, a set of four Polonaises, was published the following year. Clara’s 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,” says Zaimont. “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.”